Against Black
Black underwear is the colour men buy when they do not want to choose. A warm argument for keeping two or three pairs and retiring the rest.
Why Men Are Frightened of Colour
Black, grey, navy, repeat. How men's clothing lost its colour, which excuses for the black drawer hold up, and why coloured underwear is the place to start.
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Open the top drawer of any man between twenty five and sixty and you will find the same photograph. Black. Grey. Navy. A second, slightly different grey. Near the back, a white multipack that went through the machine with a navy one and is now the colour of weak tea, kept out of guilt.
It is not a drawer. It is a car park.
The strange part is that this is a free choice, made in private, with no consequences. There is no dress code for the inside of a chest of drawers, no colleague who will raise an eyebrow, no photograph. A man who spends actual money on this garment, several times a year, for fifty years, has quietly settled on a palette narrow enough to be a corporate identity, and has never once been asked why.
So let us ask, gently.
Men had colour and gave it back
The history here is genuinely peculiar and worth knowing, because the current arrangement is much younger and much less natural than it feels.
For most of recorded European history, men of any means dressed as brightly as the dye trade allowed. Silk, embroidery, heels, ribbon, colour as a straightforward display of money. Then, over the second half of the eighteenth century, that stopped. The British psychologist John Flügel gave the change its name in 1930, in The Psychology of Clothes, calling it the Great Masculine Renunciation: men, he wrote, abandoned their claim to be considered beautiful and aimed thereafter at being only useful. Out went the heels, the wigs, the silk stockings and the colour. In came dark cloth, and eventually the suit.
Historians have been picking at the tidiness of that story ever since, and they are right to. It was tangled up with revolutionary politics, with the fashion for plain English country dress, and with Enlightenment ideas about usefulness that were never as neat in practice as they are in summary. But the direction of travel is not in dispute. Within about a century, the male half of the population handed back a large part of the visible spectrum and has only ever borrowed it since.
There is a lovely bit of bad timing in the middle of this. In 1856 a teenage chemist called William Perkin, trying to synthesise quinine, accidentally produced mauveine, the first synthetic aniline dye. Bright, saturated colour became cheap and repeatable for the first time in human history, precisely one century after men had collectively decided they did not want any.
Colour has come back several times since. The best documented return is the one the consumer psychologist Ernest Dichter labelled the peacock revolution in 1965, popularised by the Esquire columnist George Frazier a few years later, and stocked by John Stephen, who had been opening shops on Carnaby Street since 1957. For roughly a decade men wore pink, purple, floral and velvet. Then it left again, and by the middle of the seventies the corrective was well underway.
Not a permanent prohibition, then. A loan, repeatedly repaid.
Underwear's colour history is older than the black drawer
Here is the detail that makes the modern drawer look silly rather than traditional.
Look at what men were offered underneath in the 1930s. Woven boxer shorts came in cotton broadcloth, madras, linen, silk and rayon, and the pattern books of the period are full of solid stripes, candy stripes, jacquard stripes, gingham and plain colours. The silky fabrics let manufacturers offer deeper shades: peach, blue, green. This was not avant-garde. It was the catalogue.
White dominated for a long time for reasons about hygiene and the visible proof of cleanliness rather than taste, which is a subject of its own Why Underwear Is White. What the black-grey-navy drawer is not, though, is an inheritance. Your great-grandfather may well have owned a pair of gingham shorts and a striped vest. The uniform arrived much later, and it arrived with the multipack Against the Multipack.
Colour got coded, and there was no middle setting
The real problem is not fear. Nobody has ever actually flinched at a jumper.
The problem is that in menswear, and in men's underwear especially, colour arrives already carrying a meaning, and there are only two meanings available. It is either childish or it is a statement.
Childish is the printed novelty, the cartoon, the three-pack with a slogan on the waistband. Statement is the other end: the neon, the logo band worn deliberately above a jeans waistband, the fashion label whose entire pitch is that you will be seen in it. Both are fine. Both are also about something.
What almost nobody sells a man is a boring red.
That is the gap. A plain rib brief in a solid mid-red, no print, no slogan, no logo, made to the same pattern as the navy one beside it, is not a statement and not a joke. It is a red pair of pants. Women's basics ranges have carried that idea for decades: a plain garment that happens to be a colour. Men's ranges jump straight from the safe three to something with an opinion, leaving a man who simply likes green with nowhere to stand.
Continental brands are considerably better at this, which is one of several reasons a European range looks different on the rail Slip: Why European Briefs Fit Differently. A French or Italian maker will put out a plain slip in ochre or petrol blue with no more ceremony than the white one, because the assumption underneath it is that a man might just like the colour.
The alibis, ranked by how true they are
Men do not say "I am nervous." They say something practical instead. Some of those reasons are genuinely good and some are decoration.
"Dark hides things." Partly true, and less true than assumed. Dark cotton hides most marks well and hides ageing badly, because what dark cotton does over time is fade unevenly and go slightly chalky at the seams. White shows everything and can be boil washed and bleached back, which is why hospitals and hotels have never used navy. The most forgiving colours in daily life are mid tones, which is the exact band most men skip.
One real exception is worth acting on. Grey shows sweat worse than any other colour in existence, particularly in the marl blends that dominate the cheap end. If you run warm, grey is the single worst thing you can put next to your skin The Sweat Article: Moisture-Wicking Fabrics, Explained Properly.
"It goes with everything." Mostly irrelevant, because nothing is being coordinated with anything. But there is one situation where the colour of your underwear is a genuine outfit decision, and black is the wrong answer to it.
Under white or pale trousers, and under a thin white shirt, black is the most visible thing you can wear. It reads through the cloth as a dark block from several metres away. The correct answer is a mid tone close to your own skin, which vanishes completely, and it is the one piece of underwear advice that shows up in photographs VPL, Static and Other Trouser Problems. Anyone who has been in a summer wedding party and seen the pictures afterwards already knows this Under the Suit: What to Wear on Your Wedding Day.
So "it goes with everything" is not merely weak. In the one case where it matters, it is backwards.
"Nobody sees it." True. And it is the strongest argument for colour that exists, which we will come back to.
"It looks smarter." There is nothing smart about a drawer. This is a costume borrowed from the outer wardrobe, where dark genuinely does read as formal, and applied to a garment that has never attended a meeting.
"The plain colours are cheaper." Often true. Black and navy are the base of every multipack because they are the safest inventory a buyer can order, so they get the volume and the discount. That is a fair reason, beyond noting that on a single pair the gap between the safe colour and the interesting one is not a sum anyone should organise a wardrobe around.
The reason nobody says out loud is simpler. A coloured pair implies you chose it, and choosing implies caring. A great many men would rather be caught with a hole in something than be caught having had a thought about their underwear.
Colour and pattern are not the same decision
These get lumped together and they should not be, because one is easy and the other is a trap.
Colour is a single decision that behaves consistently. A solid mid-green is the same mid-green stretched over a thigh as it is on the hanger.
Print is not. A printed pattern on a knitted garment is applied flat and then asked to curve and stretch in several directions at once, which distorts the motif, opens gaps in the ink and puts the design where the fabric happens to end up rather than where the designer drew it. This is why so many printed pairs look sharp in the photograph and slightly wrong on a body. Cheap plastisol prints also sit on top of the knit as a film rather than in it, so they crack, they do not breathe, and they are stiffest exactly where you least want stiffness. The reindeer pair opened on Christmas morning is the purest example of all three faults, and it is still the one printed garment worth defending In Defence of Christmas Pants.
Woven pattern is a different animal and it is the good one. Madras, gingham, a candy stripe, a jacquard: the pattern is in the cloth rather than on it, so it moves with the garment, it does not crack, and it ages by softening instead of flaking madras cotton boxer short.
Start with solid colour. Add woven pattern if you want it. Be sceptical of anything printed.
What to actually buy, in three steps
There is a graded route into this and it takes about a year if you are cautious.
Step one: the dark colours that are not black. Bottle green, burgundy, chocolate, deep petrol. These sit at exactly the same level of darkness as the drawer you already own, they cause no alarm of any kind, and every one is more flattering next to skin than black, which is the least forgiving colour there is against most complexions cotton rib brief.
Step two: the mid tones. Slate blue, olive, rust, mustard, clay, dusty pink. This is the boring red territory the market forgot, and it is where most men discover the thing was never a big deal. It is also the most practical band for marks and wear.
Step three: saturation, if you want it. Proper red, cobalt, sunflower. There is no obligation.
Fabric changes the colour more than the swatch does. The same dye on a cheap flat jersey and on a good rib are not the same colour to look at, because rib has a ridged surface and therefore shadow in it, which gives the shade depth. Mercerised cotton adds a slight sheen and reads brighter mercerised cotton brief. Merino goes gently heathered and mutes everything by a step, which is why merino colours always look calmer than the same numbers in cotton merino wool brief. None of this is on the product page The Fabric Bible: What Your Briefs Are Actually Made Of.
And white is a colour. A clean, well-cut white brief is the most striking thing you can put in the drawer, and the one with the longest history behind it The White Brief: A Cultural History. It also needs the most maintenance, which is the price of the effect.
The one place a man can please himself
Every other garment a man owns has an audience and therefore a constraint. The suit has a room to fit into. The shoes have a floor to survive. The coat has weather, the shirt has a collar someone will see, and even the socks have a moment at the ankle when you cross your legs, which is precisely what makes them interesting Colour, Stripes and Character: The Art of the Interesting Sock.
Underwear has none of that. It is the only item in the wardrobe with no external judge whatsoever. Whatever constraint is operating on it, you installed yourself.
Given complete freedom, an entire population of men has independently chosen the colour scheme of a multi-storey car park. That is not a moral failing and it is not a symptom of anything. It is just a waste of the only free hand anybody gets.
So, a small suggestion: next time you need a pair, buy one in a colour you like rather than a colour you could defend. Not a statement, not a joke, not a gift, and not a print. One plain pair in a colour that would make you mildly pleased to see it on a Tuesday morning in February.
If you hate it, you have lost one pair of pants and learned something about yourself for a very reasonable fee. If you do not hate it, you will buy a second within the month, and the car park will start, quietly, to look like somewhere a person lives.
The fear resolves, most of the time, into a drawer of nothing but black, which is a decision so widespread that it has stopped looking like a decision at all. It deserves an argument of its own Against Black.
Questions people ask
What colour underwear should men wear?
Whatever you like, with one practical exception: under white or pale trousers, and under thin white shirts, wear a mid tone close to your own skin rather than black or white. Black reads through pale cloth as a dark block and is the most visible option there is. Beyond that, mid tones hide daily marks better than black or white, and grey shows sweat worse than any other colour, so avoid grey if you run warm.
Is coloured underwear unprofessional?
No, because nobody is assessing it. Dark colours read as formal in outerwear because there is an audience and a convention; neither applies to a garment worn under trousers. The only professional consideration is whether it shows through your clothing, which is a question about tone against your skin and the weight of your trousers rather than about how serious the colour looks.
Why is most men's underwear black, grey or navy?
Partly inheritance, partly inventory. Men's dress narrowed dramatically between the mid eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a shift usually called the Great Masculine Renunciation, and dark plain cloth became the male default. On the retail side, black and navy are the safest colours for a buyer to order in volume, so they dominate multipacks. Coloured men's underwear is not new: the catalogues of the 1930s were full of stripes, gingham and madras.
Are printed or patterned pants a bad idea?
Printed ones often are, for a mechanical reason. A print applied to a stretch knit distorts as the garment stretches, cracks over time because the ink sits on the fabric rather than in it, and blocks airflow where it sits. Woven patterns are different: madras, gingham, stripes and jacquards are woven into the cloth, so they move with the garment, do not crack, and soften with age. If you want pattern, buy it woven.