Against the Multipack
A multipack turns one fit decision into six identical mistakes and stops you learning anything. The case against it, plus the one time it is the right buy.
The Emergency Pair: A Tribute
In praise of the emergency pair of underwear at the back of the drawer, the one nobody chose, and the drawer arithmetic that makes it unnecessary.
Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you buy through one we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we recommend. More on how this works.
Every drawer has a back, and the back of the drawer is a different country. There is a sock with no partner, retained on the theory that the partner will turn up. There is a swim brief from a holiday in a place you have not been back to. There is a folded thing you cannot identify without unfolding it, and you will not be unfolding it.
Behind all of that, flattened by years of pressure and its own inertia, is the emergency pair.
You did not buy it. That is the first thing to understand. Nobody has ever walked into a shop, considered the range, and selected this. It arrived. It came bundled with three pairs you did like, or it was given to you at Christmas by a person working from a guess, or it was bought at an airport in mild panic at a price that seemed, at the time, insulting.
It is the wrong size or the wrong shape or a colour that occurs nowhere else in your life. It has never been your first choice, or your fourth, and it is the most reliable garment you own.
This is a tribute. It is also, unavoidably, an accusation, but we will come to that.
The four routes of entry
Nobody acquires an emergency pair on purpose, but they arrive in consistent ways.
The multipack surplus. You bought a pack of five and liked three of them. The other two were the sizes the packer had spare or the colours the range could not shift, which is the economics of the multipack made visible in a drawer Against the Multipack. One of the two got worn twice and thrown out. The other is still here.
The gift. Somebody loves you and does not know your size. They went by eye, which is a terrible instrument, and by their sense of what a man like you would want, which is worse. It arrived wrapped, it was received with real gratitude, and it went to the back of the drawer within a fortnight where it has been quietly available ever since In Defence of Christmas Pants.
The airport. A flight cancelled, a bag on a different continent, a shop between two gates selling four things at once. You bought what was there in the closest available size and paid several times what it was worth, which is the standing charge for having no other options.
The hotel. Rarer and more mysterious. A conference, a long stay, a chemist next to the lobby, and a decision made at a point in the evening when decisions were not going well.
Four routes, one destination, and the destination is always the back left corner of the drawer.
Why it survives every cull
You have thrown out better underwear than this. Everyone has. Pairs that fitted, pairs you liked, pairs that wore through in the ordinary way and went into the bin without ceremony.
The emergency pair survives, and for a reason that has nothing to do with sentiment.
It survives because it is never in the way. Culls happen at the front of the drawer, among the pairs you are actually choosing between, and the criteria are comparative: this one has gone at the seat, this one has lost its waistband, this one has been outclassed by the new ones. The emergency pair is not in that comparison. It is not competing for anything. It is not on the pitch.
It also survives because throwing it out requires a reason, and the reason would have to be "I might one day need this and I am choosing not to have it". Nobody makes that call at eight on a Sunday morning holding a bin bag. The pair at the back is preserved by the small, entirely rational cowardice of a man who has run out of underwear before and remembers it.
And here is what makes it genuinely heroic rather than merely present: it does not degrade. It is not worn, so its elastic does not fatigue with use. It sits in the dark at a stable temperature doing the one thing underwear elastic likes best, which is nothing at all. The pairs you love are ageing every week. This one is in cold storage, and in ten years it will still be exactly as wrong as it is today, and exactly as ready.
Tuesday, 07:12
The deployment is always a Tuesday. It can be a Thursday, but it is usually a Tuesday, because Sunday was for laundry and Sunday was busy and Monday was the last clean pair.
The sequence is well documented by anybody who has lived it.
First, the confident reach. You open the drawer with no particular attention, because you have opened it several thousand times and it has never once been a problem.
Second, the recalibration. The hand encounters wood. Sooner than expected, and there is a moment of genuine surprise, as though the drawer has been tampered with.
Third, the survey. You look into the drawer properly, possibly for the first time in months, and take inventory: the sock with no partner, the swim brief, the unidentified folded thing.
Fourth, the assessment of alternatives, which takes four seconds and is a serious business. There is the pair in the wash basket, which is a real option and which we will not discuss further. There is going without, which has consequences for the day and for the trousers. There is the swim brief, which men have genuinely done and which is not recommended for eight hours in an office chair.
Fifth, the acknowledgement. You reach into the back left corner and draw it out, and it unfolds with the stiffness of something that has not moved since the last time, and you hold it up, and you say, out loud, in an empty room, "right".
The emergency pair does not gloat. That is what makes it a public servant rather than a rival. It has waited fourteen months, kept its shape, and it goes on without a word about where you have been.
What one day in it teaches you
Here is where the tribute earns its keep, because a day in the wrong pair is the most efficient education in underwear available to a man, and it is free.
By half past nine you know exactly where its leg openings sit, because they have moved and yours do not. A leg cut too wide rides up the thigh and then stops, having formed a band, and that band announces itself every time you cross a room How a Brief Should Actually Fit.
By eleven you have learned what a waistband does when it is a size out. Too loose and it travels down all morning, requiring a correction you will make so often you stop noticing you are making it. Too tight and it does not travel at all, which sounds better and is not, because it is instead pressing a line into you that you will still be able to see that night.
By two in the afternoon you have discovered the seams. On a good pair you have no idea where the seams are; that is the definition of a good pair. On this one you could draw them from memory, and if it has overlocked seams and a folded leg hem rather than flat seams and a bound edge, you can feel which is which without ever having read a word about construction Anatomy of a Brief: Every Panel, Seam and Stitch Explained.
By four you have formed opinions about fabric you did not previously have. A high synthetic content with no cotton gusset is no moral failing, but eight hours in a warm office will teach you what it does that a cotton rib does not The Fabric Bible: What Your Briefs Are Actually Made Of.
And by the time you get home you have a specification. Not a vague preference, a specification: this leg opening, that waistband width, that fabric, no seam there. Men spend years failing to articulate what they want from underwear because everything they own is broadly fine and fine is invisible. One day in a pair that is wrong tells you more than five years in pairs that are adequate. It also leaves you with a one sentence answer for the next man who asks why you wear briefs, and one sentence is exactly the right length So Someone Asked Why You Wear Briefs.
Write it down. That evening, while it is fresh, note the four things that annoyed you, because those four things are your buying criteria and you will otherwise forget them by Saturday.
The arithmetic, which is the actual problem
Now the accusation.
The emergency pair is not a charming feature of a well lived life. It is a warning light on a dashboard, and it indicates one of two faults.
The first is that you own too few pairs. The formula is simple: take the number of days between your washes, add three, and that is your everyday count. Wash weekly and you need ten. Wash twice a week and you need seven. The three extra cover the day that needs a change, the wash that slips, and the pair in the machine. A man in the emergency pair on a Tuesday morning was short by exactly that margin The Drawer Audit: How Many Briefs You Need and When to Replace Them.
The second is that the wash is not happening on the cycle you think it is. This is more common and less comfortable to admit. The formula assumes the number you claim, not the number you achieve, and a great many men are running a seven pair drawer on a ten day wash cycle and blaming the drawer.
Either way, the fix is arithmetic rather than character. Count what you own. Count the days between washes honestly, using the last month rather than your intentions. If the first number is smaller than the second plus three, buy the difference.
The objection is cost, and it is weaker than it looks. Underwear is the cheapest per wear garment most men own, and buying four more good pairs makes every pair you own last longer, because elastic degrades with use and use is now spread across a bigger fleet The Best Cheap Underwear That Is Not a False Economy. The purchase pays for itself in the lifespan of the rest of the drawer, which is the rare piece of shopping advice that is also true.
While you are at it, put clean pairs at the back rather than the top, and wash the whole rotation cool and out of the tumble dryer, so they age together instead of producing a new emergency pair by attrition How to Wash Underwear Properly.
Retirement with full honours
Which brings us to what should happen to it.
Not the bin, and not while it is still the only thing between you and a genuinely bad Tuesday. You do not decommission the lifeboat before the new one arrives.
The sequence is this. Buy the pairs the arithmetic says you are missing, in a size you have actually measured and a cut you have actually decided on, informed by the specification the emergency pair gave you for free Five Briefs Worth the Money. A plain cotton rib brief in the right size covers most of it. If it taught you that heat was the real enemy, a merino brief answers a different part of the complaint and is worth having two of regardless.
Then wash everything, count the drawer, and confirm the number clears the formula with room to spare.
And then, and only then, take the emergency pair out of the back left corner. It has served without recognition since a Christmas or an airport neither of you remembers clearly. It kept its shape while better pairs wore out in front of it. It never once made you feel bad about your laundry.
Cut it up for rags, or put it in a textile recycling bank, and do it the day the new ones arrive rather than a month later, because a drawer that still contains a fallback will find a way to need one An Apology to Every Pair of Briefs I Have Wronged.
The correct tribute to a garment that exists only because of a failure is to fix the failure. Everything else is just leaving it there.
Questions people ask
How many pairs of underwear should a man own?
Take the number of days between your laundry cycles and add three. If you wash weekly, that is ten everyday pairs; if you wash twice a week, seven. The three extra cover a day that needs a mid-day change, a wash that gets delayed, and the pair in the machine on the day you are counting. Add separately for sport, travel and formalwear, since those are worn and washed on different cycles from your everyday rotation.
Why do I always run out of underwear before laundry day?
Almost always because your drawer is sized for the laundry cycle you intend rather than the one you actually run. Count the real gaps between your last few washes rather than your ideal, then check that against the days-plus-three rule. The other common cause is wearing from the top of the pile, which means the same few pairs get worn and washed constantly while the rest sit unused and the effective size of your drawer is far smaller than its actual size.
Should I throw out underwear that does not fit properly?
Yes, once you have replaced it. Underwear that is the wrong size does not improve with washing, and a poor fit causes riding up, waistband roll and chafing rather than simply being unflattering. The sensible order is to buy correctly sized replacements first, confirm they fit, then dispose of the old pairs, because getting rid of them early is how men end up buying whatever is available at an airport. Worn out cotton makes good rags; otherwise use a textile recycling collection.
Does underwear wear out if you never wear it?
Slowly, and much more slowly than underwear in regular use. Elastic degrades mainly through repeated stretching, heat and washing, so a pair kept folded in a cool drawer holds its recovery far longer than one in weekly rotation. It will eventually stiffen, and any rubber based elastic perishes over many years, but the practical point is that spreading wear across more pairs makes the whole set last longer. Rotate from the back of the drawer rather than the top.
What is the best way to make underwear last longer?
Own more pairs than you need, wash cool, and keep it out of the tumble dryer. Heat is what kills waistband elastic, and a dryer does more damage in a few months than years of wearing will. Beyond that, rotate properly by putting clean pairs at the bottom or back of the drawer so wear spreads evenly, and avoid over-stretching the waistband when putting a pair on, which works the elastic past its recovery point at one fixed spot.