There are more men’s underwear styles today than ever before. The types of underwear for men are so varied that you could wear a different cut of underwear each day of the week for months. Every style of underwear lends itself to different uses and occasions. Use this guide to update your drawers with multiple styles best-suited for you.
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Bikini |
Boxer |
Boxer Brief |
| Certain types of underwear are described as bikini underwear and designed for men and women. For men, bikini briefs are undergarments that are smaller and more revealing than men's regular briefs. Men's bikini briefs can be low- or high-side that are usually lower than true waist, often at hips, and usually have no access pouch or flap, legs bands at tops of thighs. | Boxers are loose-fitting underwear with no support and more breathability than any other undergarment. Many boxer shorts have an open fly allowing the user an exit route with maximum ease. Boxer short styles are varied, spanning from the underwear you may associate with your Grandfather, to trendier, slimmer ones. | Boxer briefs are also called "trunks" in the United Kingdom and Australia. A variant that reaches to the knee or near it is marketed by Jockey as "midway briefs". Another kind are boxer briefs that have shorter leg sections than the standard type named trunk briefs, also known as, at least in the USA, trunks. Boxer briefs may also be spelled as one word. |
History |
History |
History |
| By the 1960s, the bikini swimsuit influenced panty styles and coincided with the cut of the new lower rise jeans and pants. In the seventies, with the emergence of skintight jeans, thong versions of the panty became mainstream, since the open, stringed back eliminated any tell-tale panty lines across the rear and hips. By the 1980s the design of the French-cut panty pushed the waistband back up to the natural waistline and the rise of the leg openings was nearly as high (French Cut panties come up to the waist, has a high cut leg, and usually are full in the rear). As with the bra and other type of lingerie, manufacturers of the last quarter of the century marketed panty styles that were designed primarily for their sexual allure. From this decade sexualization and eroticization of the male body was on the rise. The male body was celebrated through advertising campaigns for brands such as Calvin Klein, particularly by photographers Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts. Male bodies and men's undergarments were commodified and packaged for mass consumption, and swimwear and sportswear were influenced by sports photography and fitness. Over time, swimwear evolved from weighty wool to high-tech skin-tight garments, eventually cross-breeding with sportswear, underwear and exercise wear, resulting in the interchangeable fashions of the 1990s. | In 1925, Jacob Golomb, founder of Everlast, designed elastic-waist trunks to replace the leather-belted trunks then worn by boxers. These trunks, now known as "boxer trunks", immediately became famous, but were later eclipsed by the popular Jockey-style briefs beginning in the late 1930s. Around 1947, boxer shorts started to gain in popularity again. The two styles, briefs and boxer shorts, had varying ratios of sales for the following forty years, with strong regional and generational preferences. | Boxer briefs are commonly thought to have been pioneered by designer John Varvatos during his 1990–1995 stint at Calvin Klein as head of menswear design. However, the style was available much earlier, as designed by Giorgio Armani and as worn by Richard Gere in the 1980 film American Gigolo. Made famous by a series of 1992 print ads featuring Mark "Marky Mark" Wahlberg, they have been called "one of the greatest apparel revolutions of the century". Of their creation Varvatos said in 2010, "We just cut off a pair of long johns and thought, this could be cool..." |
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Boxer Short |
Brief |
Jockstrap |
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| Boxer shorts (also known as loose boxers or as simply boxers) are a type of undergarment typically worn by men. The term has been used in English since 1944 for all-around-elastic shorts, so named after the shorts worn by boxers, for whom unhindered leg movement ("footwork") is very important. Boxers come in a variety of styles and design but are characterized by their loose fit. |
Briefs are a type of short, form-fitting underwear and swimwear, as opposed to styles where material extends down the thighs. Briefs have various different styles, usually with a waistband attached to fabric that runs along the pelvis to the crotch and buttocks, and are worn by both men and women. Swim briefs are a variation used as swimwear. |
A jockstrap (also known as a jock, strap, cup, supporter, or athletic supporter) is an undergarment for protecting the testes and penis during contact sports, or other vigorous physical activity. A jockstrap consists of a waistband (usually elastic) with a support pouch for the genitalia and two elastic straps affixed to the base of the pouch and to the left and right sides of the waistband at the hip. The pouch, in some varieties, may be fitted with a pocket to hold an abdominal guard (impact resistant cup, box) to protect the testicles and the penis from injury. | ||
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History |
History |
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| In 1985, in the U.S. men's briefs were more popular than boxer shorts, with four times as many briefs sold compared to boxers. Around that time many of the men who preferred boxers were older men who became accustomed to wearing them during their time in the U.S. military, and best selling color of boxers was white. Around that time boxers were beginning to become popular among young men, who wore boxers with varying colors and prints. Boxer shorts got a fashion boost in 1985 when English model and musician Nick Kamen stripped to white Sunspel boxers in a 1950s style "Launderette" in a Levi's commercial. Since the 1990s, some men also opt for boxer briefs as a compromise between the two. As of 2006, one American manufacturer reported that woven boxer shorts made up 15-20 per cent of men's underwear sales, but had been declining in popularity compared to boxer briefs since 2003. |
In the 1960s, fashion underwear was introduced in the United States, and, after a period of decline, became more prominent in the 1970s as the belief that wearing fashionable underwear was less masculine declined. By the 1980s, fashion briefs became more popular in the United States; in 1985 they made up 25% of the men's underwear market, whilst they had almost no share circa 1980. The Underoos and Funpals fashion brief brands for children were introduced around that time. According to Hanes marketing director John Wigodsky, women purchased fashion briefs for their husbands for aesthetic reasons, and therefore fashion briefs became more popular with men. During the 90's to early 2000's the popularity of briefs declined. Boxer shorts were widely portrayed as the casual and masculine choice. However, more recently, as men's fashion has trended in favor of more tailored clothing, form-fitting underwear such as briefs have come back into style, including newer styles like trunk briefs (short boxer briefs). |
The jockstrap was invented in 1874 by C. F. Bennett of a Chicago sporting goods company, Sharp & Smith, to provide comfort and support for bicycle jockeys working the cobblestone streets of Boston. In 1897 Bennett's newly formed Bike Web Company patented and began mass-producing the Bike Jockey Strap.[5] The Bike Web Company later became known as the Bike Company. Bike, until 2003, was a stand-alone company. In that year, the company and its trademarks were purchased by Russell Athletic. Russell Athletic continued to produce jockstraps using the Bike brand and logos until 2017 when they retired the brand. Russell had become a Fruit-of-the-Loom subsidiary, and Fruit-of-the-Loom is owned by and part of Berkshire Hathaway. The jockstrap was also influential in early 20th-century medicine with the invention of the Heidelberg Electric Belt, a low-voltage electric powered jockstrap that claimed to cure kidney disorders, insomnia, erectile dysfunction, and other ailments. Today, jockstraps are still worn mostly by adolescent and adult men for sports, weightlifting, medical purposes, and for recovery from injury or surgery for such conditions as hematocele, inguinal hernia, hydrocele, or spermatocele. Jockstraps have also become popular as a form of lingerie for men, particularly among gay and bisexual men |
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Thong |
Trunk |
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The thong is a garment generally used as either underwear or as a swimsuit in some countries. It may also be worn for traditional ceremonies or competitions. Viewed from the front, the thong typically resembles a bikini bottom, but at the back the material is reduced to a minimum. Thongs are almost always designed to cover the genitals, anus and perineum and leave part or most of the buttocks uncovered. The back of the garment typically consists of a thin waistband and a thin strip of material, designed to be worn between the buttocks, that connects the middle of the waistband with the bottom front of the garment. It is also used as a descriptive term in other types of garment, such as a bodysuit, bodystocking, leotard or one-piece swimsuit in the context "thong backed". |
Trunk cut is a hybrid of brief and boxer brief without the heap of fabric. Trunk has shorter legs and a square cut silhouette - pretty similar to swimming trunks. Trunks are a great choice for men with slimmer thighs or a lean body type. They're generally made with a smaller waistband and less fabric. |
History |
History |
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In the 1990s, the thong began to gain wider acceptance and popularity in the United States as underwear (and, to a lesser extent, as swimwear), especially with women, but also men. In the US and Europe, the wearing of thongs by men was once mainly limited to the dance belt, the posing pouch for bodybuilders and the realm of male strippers. Men's thongs are now more widely available and commonly worn as day-to-day underwear or swimwear, with major retailers such as Kmart and popular fashion brands such as Calvin Klein selling men's thongs. Thongs are not marketed as strongly to men as they are to women; however, in Europe, thongs have been commonplace for many more years both as underwear and swimwear. In the 2000s, some people wore thongs with low-cut hipsters and deliberately exposed them over the top of their trousers, producing an effect popularly known as a whale tail. This led to many thong designs intended to be worn in this manner, which were adorned with jewels and motifs on the back. In the early-2000s, thongs made up 31% of the women's underwear market. However, in the late-2000s, the exposure of a thong above one's trousers became less popular and the trend turned to the wearing of lower-riding thongs that hardly show above trousers, except when bending or twisting. |
In 1925, Jacob Golomb, founder of Everlast, designed elastic-waist trunks to replace the leather-belted trunks then worn by boxers. These trunks, now known as "boxer trunks", immediately became famous, but were later eclipsed by the popular Jockey-style briefs beginning in the late 1930s. Around 1947, boxer shorts started to gain in popularity again. The two styles, briefs and boxer shorts, had varying ratios of sales for the following forty years, with strong regional and generational preferences. |
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