For most of recorded history, men's underwear had exactly one job: to sit between the body and whatever scratchy thing was worn over it. Nobody was meant to see it. Nobody chose it for how it looked.
That held for roughly two thousand years, and then it stopped holding remarkably fast. Here's how it happened, and how it ends up at lingerie cut for a male frame.
Rome: the subligaculum
The earliest thing that counts as men's underwear in Europe is the Roman subligaculum, a loincloth of linen or wool wrapped and tied at the hip. Labourers, gladiators and athletes wore it, sometimes as the only garment.
Its purpose was protection and cleanliness, in a world with no soap as we'd recognise it and no easy way to wash a wool tunic. It was engineering, not clothing.
The Middle Ages: braies
Medieval European men wore braies: loose linen drawers, tied at the waist with a cord and often at the knee. Over centuries they got shorter and closer to the body as outer clothing got tighter, which is a pattern that repeats through this whole story. Underwear follows whatever is worn over it.
Still no aesthetics. Braies were undyed, because dye was expensive and nobody was going to see them.
The nineteenth century: the union suit
Industrial cotton spinning changed underwear more than any designer did. Cheap, washable fabric in quantity made a fitted undergarment affordable for ordinary people for the first time.
The result was the union suit: a one-piece of buttoned flannel or cotton covering ankles to wrists. Warm, practical and completely without vanity. It stayed standard for decades because central heating did not exist and the alternative was being cold.
1935: the brief that sold out in a morning
The single sharpest break in this history has a date.
In 1934 an executive at the Coopers underwear company saw a postcard from the French Riviera showing a man in a bikini-style swimsuit, and had the idea of making an undergarment with no legs at all. Coopers produced a prototype, style number 1001.
On 19 January 1935, Marshall Field in Chicago put it in a window display. It was a blizzard that day, which made a window full of legless underwear look faintly absurd. The store sold out its 600 packages by noon, moved 12,000 more over the following weeks, and 30,000 within three months.
The name mattered too. Because the design offered support in a way previous underwear hadn't, without the bulk of a jockstrap, it was called the Jockey. The company eventually renamed itself after the product.
What actually changed in 1935 wasn't the garment. It was that a piece of underwear became a thing people queued for.
Boxers, and a long argument
Running alongside: in the 1920s Everlast replaced the leather-belted waistband on boxing trunks with elastic. That shape moved out of the ring and into everyday wear, and men's underwear settled into the brief-versus-boxer argument it has been having ever since.
Neither side won, which is the interesting part. Both survived because they answer different questions, and once there were two options, choosing became normal.
The 1970s: underwear gets looked at
The sexual revolution did to underwear what it did to everything else. Cuts got briefer and closer. Underwear started being chosen for how the body looked in it rather than how it felt under trousers.
It's also when underwear started carrying information. In gay bar culture of the same decade, clothing was already being used to signal things that couldn't be said out loud, which we wrote about in our piece on the hanky code.
Now: underwear as lingerie
The last step is the one still happening. Men's underwear has picked up the whole vocabulary that used to belong exclusively to women's lingerie: lace, sheer mesh, garter straps, open cups, satin.
The part that took longest wasn't the fabric, it was the pattern. For years the only way to get lace was to buy a women's set and accept that it fit badly, because the draft assumes a different ribcage, a different shoulder width and a flat front where a male body needs allowance. That's a pattern problem rather than a size problem, and we go through it properly in women's lingerie for men.
What's changed recently is that garments are being drafted for a male torso from the start. Same lace, different pattern underneath. That is where everything we make sits.
Where the styles actually went
Four things describe most of what's worn now.
Colour stopped being a decision about hiding. Black, white and grey were the default for a century because underwear was invisible. Once it wasn't, the palette opened up, and neon and pastel both arrived for opposite reasons: one to be seen across a dark room, one to signal softness.
Sheer became mainstream. Mesh and fishnet moved out of specialist shops and into ordinary wardrobes. They're also the most practical fabrics in this category, because open knits breathe and forgive a measuring error better than lace does.
Minimalism kept its half of the market. Plain, well-cut, good fabric, nothing else. The two ends of this category are not in competition; most people own both and pick by occasion.
Structure came back. Harnesses, straps and hardware are underwear with architecture, and they're the clearest descendant of the 1970s idea that this is something to be seen in. Our harness guide covers how they fit.
The short version
Underwear was purely functional from Rome to roughly 1935, when the brief turned it into something people chose. Boxers gave them a second option, the 1970s made it something to be looked at, and the current step is lingerie drafted for a male body rather than borrowed from a women's pattern.
Two thousand years of hiding it, ninety of showing it. The second half is by far the more interesting.
If you want the practical rather than the historical version, start with our complete guide to femboy lingerie, or browse lingerie sets and thongs and jockstraps. Everything is made to order in Ukraine and ships free worldwide.