My sister in law passed through Cincinnati last spring. Went digging through my brother’s dresser looking for a t shirt to sleep in and emerged clutching a three pack of his briefs like it was contraband. Fruit of the Loom, retail variety, nothing special about them. She held them up with a laugh, “wait, can I actually wear these?” half kidding and my brother put her out of his misery. “They’re briefs bro, they go on the same way regardless of what’s on the label.” Conversation ended as far as he was concerned. It’s stayed with me since because I’d honestly never thought about why men’s and womens version of the same basic garment are treated like they’re constructed differently when really the honest answer is they’re closer than companies want you to think.
What actually changes when you cross the aisle
If you ask me, which you are because you’re reading this, the difference between men’s and womens underwear is something nobody explains at the store. Because the store wants you to believe those two racks don’t serve the same purpose, even when they kind of do.
A men’s brief is cut for someone who on average carries more length through the torso and less curve through the hip. So the rise will sit differently on a body, as will the leg opening which is more likely to be cut straight across, less of an upside down U shape at the top of the thigh. That’s it. That’s the whole difference.
It’s not engineered space materials, it’s an inch or two of fabric cut slightly differently and depending on who’s wearing it that difference either matters to the core or not at all.
I spent enough time selling underwear to know cloth-wise they’re identical 90% of the time. Same cotton blend, same elastic waistband supplier half the time usually, same factory cutting and sewing both sometimes just cut on a different pattern placed differently on the cloth board and packaged in a contrasting box with other men furrowing their brows into the camera on the front. My sister in law wearing my brothers three pack was wearing nothing mechanically different from what she’d find on the women’s side two aisles down, she was wearing the same shape sewn slightly differently and depending on how her body was built that new shape either worked or it didn’t. In her case it worked. Flat front, no seams digging into her anywhere she didn’t expect it, waistband stayed put and didn’t roll. She wore those three through until she bought her own because they didn’t work, not because she was trying to make some statement or steal his laundry money. She wore them because they worked and frankly couldn’t be bothered to explain to him why his underwear kept disappearing.
The place where that breakdown actually starts is the size math nobody bothers to explain to you. Men’s underwear is sized by waist measurement in inches. Women’s underwear is sized by an entirely different set of criteria depending on cut, sometimes using hip measurement instead of waist, sometimes using a small medium large system with no set inch equivalence between brands. That means a woman buying a men’s small isn’t automatically getting what would traditionally be her size, she’s getting what a men’s small actually is, which may very well run big or small depending on who made it and there’s no cheat sheet on that shelf to help her guess appropriately at the.get. That. Is.
What trips people up, not the underwear itself, but the fucked logic of sizing underneath it.
Why the fit conversation is important
I want to have words with myself, circa 1985, plugging away at a register telling folks as factual information that men’s and women’s underwear were “built completely different.” Dude I knew better than that and was parroting marketing talk rather than explaining what I actually knew about how they were built. It took me far too long and many embarrassed residents explaining that technology to realise the difference was almost entirely rise and leg curve, not some inherent structural difference that meant one couldn’t wear the other. When I sat down and compared pattern pieces, men’s and womens side by side, it wasn’t mysterious at all.
What ultimately determines if men’s briefs are going to work for a woman has zero to do with the label and everything to do with her hip to waist ratio, her comfort level with rise height, and whether she prefers a tighter or looser leg opening than women’s cuts traditionally offer. Straighter built women, through the hip like my sister in law is built, often find mens briefs fit better than women’s because there’s no extra room for their body to fill if they don’t have as much curve in their hip. Womens with more curve tend to prefer the women’s cut because the leg opening on mens, being straight across rather than curved, either runs tight or rides up in ways a women’s curve centered cut simply does not.
None of it has anything to do with gender besides societal expectations that what’s marked womens belongs to women and what’s marked mens does not. It’s about which pattern suits your shape and the labels are selling you a lot less influence over that process than where they place those packages on the shelf. If I were you, and you’re reading this so yes I am, I’d ignore which side of the store you find yourself on when it comes to picking underwear and focus on rise and leg shape because that’s the only thing in that aisle telling you anything helpful. Gender label is just there to make you feel like you’re where you’re supposed to be.
Reg spent thirty years buying for a menswear shop floor in Sheffield before it closed. He writes about clothes built to last, compares every new buy with something he’s owned for twenty years, and has made most of the expensive mistakes already.
