The Y-Front at Ninety
The Y-front went on sale in a Chicago window in a 1935 blizzard. Ninety years of Coopers, Lyle and Scott, and the fly that turns out to be proper engineering.
Six Briefs That Built the Modern World
From Jockey's 1935 Y-front to Le Slip Français's stock-market debut: six heritage briefs from great houses, all still in production, all still worth buying.
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Most clothing is fashion. A few garments are infrastructure. The briefs below have dressed presidents, painters, footballers and your grandfather, and every one of them is still in production, which means every one of them can dress you. This is the brief's hall of fame.
1. Jockey's Y-front (USA, 1935)
The founding document. Arthur Kneibler, an executive at Wisconsin's Coopers Inc., saw a postcard of a French swimsuit and sketched a piece of underwear modelled on the jockstrap. Hence the name Jockey. The Y-front launched in Chicago in January 1935 and sold out through a snowstorm; within a couple of decades it was the default underwear of the Western male. Ninety years on, the design has barely needed a revision. That's what a solved problem looks like.
Buy the original: Jockey Classic Y-front brief
2. Schiesser's Feinripp (Germany, 1923)
Schiesser has been making underwear on the shores of Lake Constance since 1875, and its finely ribbed cotton brief predates even the Y-front. Germans spent decades teasing it. The affectionate nicknames are legendary, and not all of them printable. Then in 2003 Schiesser reissued its historic patterns as a premium Revival line, naming each model for the era of its birth: Friedhelm, Herbert, Siegfried. The range became an unexpected hit and is still running today. Mock a great design for long enough and it comes back as luxury.
Buy the heritage: Schiesser Revival Friedhelm brief · Schiesser Feinripp brief
3. Gunze's white brief (Japan, 1955)
Gunze, a Japanese textile house older than the light bulb's patent, introduced the white cotton brief to Japan in 1955 and has never stopped making it. The remarkable part comes straight from the company: briefs still account for roughly 15% of its men's underwear sales, half of them white, and that share hasn't moved in five years. Trend pieces come and go while several million Japanese men keep buying the same quietly perfect garment. That is a staple, properly defined.
Buy the icon: Gunze white cotton brief
4. Abanderado's slip (Spain, 1963)
Founded in Mataró, up the coast from Barcelona, Abanderado became the underwear of an entire nation. At its peak it held more than a third of the Spanish market, powered by the greatest slogan in underwear history: "Los hombres usan Abanderado porque las mujeres compran Abanderado." Men wear it because women buy it. The white cotton slip with the open fly is still in the range, unchanged. Some garments stop being products and become folk memory. This is one.
Buy the legend: Abanderado classic cotton slip
5. Zorba's slip (Brazil, 1964)
Brazil's answer, born in the bossa nova years. The Zorba cotton slip grew so ubiquitous that the brand at one point accounted for around a third of all Brazilian underwear sales, and it still tops brand-recall surveys in São Paulo. You'll find it in more than fifteen thousand shops from the Amazon to the Argentine border. Proof, if you needed it, that the brief thrives in the heat. A Summer in Italy: What to Pack (Spoiler: Slips)
Buy the classic: Zorba cotton slip
6. Le Slip Français (France, 2011)
The youngest name here, and proof the story isn't finished. Guillaume Gibault founded Le Slip Français in 2011 on a friend's bet that some things simply cannot be sold on a good story, the slip being the obvious example. Gibault took the bet and added a condition of his own, which was that the thing would be sewn in France. The company reported turnover above 21 million euros for 2025, and listed on Euronext Growth in Paris with impeccable Gallic timing on Bastille Day 2026. A nation that had drifted towards boxers put its actual money behind the slip. If one garment captures where this blog thinks the world is heading, it's this one.
Buy the future classic: Le Slip Français slip
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Six houses, five countries, one shape. Start your collection with any of them, or get the lie of the land first with the field guide. Brief, Slip, Tanga, Jock: A Field Guide to Supportive Underwear