At this moment, you are wearing something that did not exist for most of human history. The underwear against your skin, whatever its type or brand, is a remarkably recent invention. For thousands of years, men wore their outer garments directly against their bodies, with nothing beneath at all. Skin touched wool, linen, or hide, with no insulating layer, no elastic waistband, nothing.

The few men who did wear something underneath wore items that barely make sense to us today. We are talking about goatskin aprons tied with animal sinew, triangular linen strips wrapped between the legs and knotted at the hip, and padded pouches designed to leave a very specific impression on anyone who looked at you. In at least one case, a protective metal piece was made from the same steel used in armor. So how did we get from bare skin under a tunic to a store aisle with forty different options?

What no one knew at the time was that the road from nothing to underpants would take about seven thousand years, cross every continent, and involve some of the strangest fashion choices in human history. The oldest physical evidence of anything resembling underwear belongs to a man who died more than five thousand years ago in the mountains between Austria and Italy. His name, or at least the name scientists gave him, is Ötzi the Iceman. Two hikers found his frozen body in 1991, preserved in the ice of a glacier in the Tisenjoch pass in the Tyrolean Alps at about 3,200 meters above sea level.

Ötzi wore a complete outfit: a hat of brown bear fur, a grass cloak that served as a prehistoric raincoat, goatskin leggings, and leather shoes stuffed with grass for insulation. Beneath all of that, wrapped between his legs and fastened with a calfskin belt around his waist, was an apron made of narrow strips of sheepskin sewn together with animal sinew. The entire piece measured about 100 centimeters by 33 centimeters. A 2016 study using mitochondrial DNA analysis identified the animals that contributed to Ötzi’s wardrobe.

The results showed his clothes were assembled from at least five different species. His coat was sheep and goat. His hat was bear fur. His shoe laces were cattle hide.

His apron, the closest thing to underwear from the ancient world to survive intact, was sheepskin that had been sewn, resewn, and patched with grass fibers where the seams had torn. This was not a man who threw away his underwear when it wore out. He repaired it in the mountains, perhaps sitting by a fire, threading grass through holes in five-thousand-year-old sheepskin. But Ötzi was not the beginning of the story.

Painted caves and clay figurines found across multiple regions show men wearing aprons, dating to between 5400 and 3500 BCE. These were strips of animal hide or woven plant fiber hung from a belt or cord, covering just enough to protect the groin from whatever a person might encounter during the day. Thorns, insects, and the chafing of running across rough terrain. The purpose was protection, not modesty.

Modesty as a reason for wearing underwear came much later. While prehistoric men wrapped themselves in hides, the ancient Egyptians were doing something far more refined. They had linen. And linen changed everything.

The Egyptian version of the apron was called the shendyt, a skirt-like piece of woven linen that provided more coverage than anything before it. Pharaohs wore it, farmers wore it, and soldiers wore it too. The difference lay in the quality of the weave. A pharaoh’s loincloth was made from the finest, lightest linen available, sometimes so fine it was nearly transparent.

A worker’s was coarser and heavier, often the only garment he wore at all. Then we come to Tutankhamun. When Howard Carter opened King Tut’s tomb in 1922, he found more than five thousand artifacts inside. Gold masks, chariots, furniture, and weapons.

But among all that treasure was something less glittering and far more telling: 145 linen loincloths. One hundred and forty-five pieces of underwear bundled in sets of about a dozen each, ready for the young king to wear in the afterlife. Each was triangular, made from two pieces of woven linen sewn together, with strings at the edges for tying around the hips. The craftsmanship of the royal garments was a step above what ordinary Egyptians wore.

The linen was finer, the stitching tighter, but the basic structure was identical for king and commoner alike. Same shape, same function, same method of wear. The only difference was the density of the weave. What comes next is the part that still surprises most people.

While the Egyptians had been perfecting linen underwear for centuries, the Romans took a completely different approach. Roman men wore a garment called the subligaculum, a linen loincloth passed between the legs and tied at the hips. Some versions were short, resembling modern briefs. Others were longer, similar to what the Egyptians wore.

The word subligaculum translates roughly to “small tie under the clothes. ” Gladiators wore leather versions that could withstand water and the physical brutality of the arena. Athletes competing naked in public games sometimes wore them too. But here is what made the Roman system different.

Not every Roman man wore the subligaculum. For many, the tunic was the complete outfit, top to bottom. Wealthy Romans might wear a subligaculum beneath it, but many ordinary citizens went without. Underwear was optional, not standard.

If you worked in the fields or walked the streets of a provincial town, tunic against bare skin was normal. There was also a class dimension rarely discussed. Slaves in Rome often wore nothing at all or just simple scraps of cloth. The subligaculum, in some contexts, was a marker of social standing.

You wore underwear because you could afford it, and because your work allowed the luxury of an extra layer. For millions across the Roman world, there was no choice in the matter. You wore what you had, and sometimes all you had was a tunic. After the fall of Rome, this pattern, an outer garment touching the body directly with nothing between, remained dominant across most of Europe for a remarkably long time.

Research shows that between these ancient periods and the early Middle Ages, men typically left the pelvic area exposed under their long tunics. This brings us to the medieval period and a garment called braies. Braies were loose linen or wool trousers, originally worn by Celtic and Germanic tribes since antiquity. They reached roughly the knee or mid-calf and were secured with a cord or drawstring through the waist.

Think of them as a cross between modern boxers and pajama pants. Upper-class men wore more fitted, snug braies. Working men wore them wider, looser, and more practical. By the eleventh century, braies had become the standard male undergarment across medieval Europe.

Men wore them under their tunics, and over time, as tunics shortened and fashion changed, braies became visible. That created a problem, because braies were not designed to be seen. They were functional, not attractive. Medieval art gives us a surprisingly clear picture.

Illustrations from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries show men wearing braies during daily activities, bathing, working, and even appearing in public. For working-class men especially, stripping down to braies and an undershirt in hot weather was perfectly normal. It was the male equivalent of rolling up your sleeves, except you rolled up everything. In 2008, something emerged that rewrote part of this timeline.

Archaeologists working at Lienzburg Castle in the Austrian Alps found fragments of four undergarments dating to the fifteenth century. Among them was what appeared to be a small male undergarment, linen shorts that modern eyes would compare to women’s swimwear. The discovery proved that at least some men in the late Middle Ages wore fitted underwear similar to what we know today. Not all men, not everywhere, but the option existed centuries earlier than most historians had thought.

Still, for the vast majority of medieval men, the situation was simpler. Beneath their long tunics, many wore nothing at all. No drawers, no cloth, no undergarment of any kind. Going without underwear was customary for a large portion of the male population, especially in warm climates or poorer communities.

The tunic was all they had. In medieval art, men undressed for work, bathing, or fighting without any apparent shame. Underwear, or its absence, was not a subject of embarrassment. It was just part of life.

The same applied to women. Most medieval women wore a single long shift beneath their clothes and nothing else. Dedicated female underwear, as we understand it, did not become standard until the nineteenth century. For over five hundred years, that shift was the only undergarment.

Then things get truly strange. While most men wore simple drawers or nothing at all, the Renaissance introduced the strangest piece of male underwear in history: the codpiece. It began as a practical solution to an awkward problem. As men’s fashion developed in the fifteenth century, tunics became very short.

So short that the gap in the front of the hose left a man exposed. The original piece was just a triangular scrap of cloth tied to the top of the trousers, designed to cover that gap and preserve some dignity. That lasted about five minutes. By the early sixteenth century, the codpiece had transformed from a simple cover into a protruding, padded, elaborately decorated statement.

Men stuffed it. They shaped it. They made it bigger. They covered it in silk, embroidered it with gold thread, and studded it with real jewels.

The entire point was to draw attention to the very area the piece was originally designed to hide. Henry VIII of England took this further than anyone. His portraits show him wearing a massive, padded codpiece, clearly displayed beneath short tunics designed specifically to show it off. The codpiece was not hidden.

Slits in the front of his outer clothing ensured the piece was at least partially visible. It was a status symbol. The bigger and more ornate your codpiece, the more important you were. Some men even used the codpiece as a pocket, storing coins, handkerchieves, and small personal items.

A padded, jeweled hybrid of underwear and purse, worn at the front of the body for all to see. The codpiece craze was not limited to England. Across Europe, from France to the German states to Italy, men competed to outdo one another. Paintings from the 1520s to the 1560s show codpieces growing larger, more structured, and more decorative.

Spanish nobles wore them with armor, where the piece was made of real metal. Italian courts shaped them into aggressive upward-pointing forms. The entire continent was in an undeclared arms race, except the intended weapons were not weapons at all. By the late sixteenth century, religious leaders began publicly criticizing the codpiece as indecent and vain.

That campaign worked. By 1600, the codpiece had almost vanished from European fashion, replaced by trousers that needed no extra piece to cover everything. But the codpiece left a legacy. It was the first time in Western history that men’s underwear shifted from pure function to fashion, status, and self-expression.

After the codpiece disappeared, European men entered a long, relatively dull period in underwear history. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, most men wore loose drawers made of linen, cotton, or wool, similar to medieval braies, tied at the waist with a cord or tape. They were practical. They were invisible.

No one jeweled them or competed to make them bigger. The pendulum swung from blatant display back to pure function. But while European men wore simple cotton drawers beneath their trousers, the rest of the world had its own answers to the question of underwear. Some lasted far longer than any codpiece.

In Japan, men wore the fundoshi, a traditional undergarment consisting of a long strip of cloth wrapped around the waist and between the legs. The fundoshi’s roots go back at least 1,400 years, to the Kofun period. Archaeologists have found clay figurines from that era, called haniwa, depicting men and sumo wrestlers wearing fundoshi. During the Edo period, from 1603 to 1868, the fundoshi became the standard daily undergarment for men of all social classes.

Farmers wore it, craftsmen wore it, and even samurai wore it under their armor. The etchū style of fundoshi was especially popular among warriors, as the cloth could be used as emergency bandages on the battlefield. Fundoshi were originally made of linen, but from the sixteenth century onward, cotton became more common. Wealthier men sometimes wore silk.

The fundoshi was simple, breathable, and practical for Japan’s hot, humid summers. It was easy to wash and dried quickly. It required no buttons, stitching, or elastic, just a long piece of cloth and the knowledge of how to tie it. Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa shogunate and one of the most important figures in Japanese history, reportedly wore a pale yellow-dyed fundoshi daily and encouraged his retainers to do the same.

The fundoshi remained the standard Japanese undergarment for men until World War II. Western-style underwear arrived with the American occupation after the war, and within a single generation, the fundoshi shifted from daily wear to something worn only at traditional festivals and cultural celebrations. A garment that had been part of daily life for over a thousand years disappeared in less than twenty. On the other side of the world, the Indian subcontinent had its own ancient underwear tradition.

The langot, also known as the kaupinam, is a strip of cloth worn by men, especially wrestlers and yoga practitioners. Like the fundoshi, it is wrapped between the legs and tied at the waist. It has been worn for centuries in South Asia and is still worn today in some rural communities and traditional wrestling schools. Farmers in rice paddies across Sri Lanka and India continue to wear it as both underwear and workwear.

What connects the fundoshi, the langot, the Egyptian shendyt, and the Roman subligaculum is a design principle so simple it barely counts as design. A strip of cloth and a way to tie it. That is all. Across thousands of years and thousands of miles, every civilization that bothered with underwear arrived at nearly the same solution.

The only real differences were in the fabrics available and the amount of cultural meaning attached to them. Back in Europe and America, the nineteenth century brought the most radical change in men’s underwear since the loincloth. The Industrial Revolution did not just transform factories and cities; it changed what men wore against their skin. In 1868, a garment called the union suit was first patented in Utica, New York.

The origin of the name remains uncertain, possibly referring to the union of top and bottom into a single garment, though some connect it to the Union Army. Whatever the name’s origin, the garment was distinctive. A full-body undergarment buttoned up the front, with long sleeves reaching the wrists and trousers reaching the ankles. A buttoned flap in the back allowed for using the toilet without removing the entire garment.

The union suit was originally designed as women’s clothing during the dress reform movement, as an alternative to restrictive corsets and layered undergarments. But men quickly adopted it, and by the late nineteenth century, the union suit was the most common men’s undergarment in America and much of Europe. It was warm. It was practical.

It was mass-produced in new textile mills, and for the first time in history, men could walk into a store and buy ready-made underwear off the shelves. The Haines Company built a huge business on the union suit. Other companies followed. Fruit of the Loom, whose logo already appeared on fabrics and clothing, entered the underwear market around the turn of the century.

Men’s underwear shifted from something made at home or bought from a tailor to a consumer product manufactured in factories and sold in packages on store shelves. This shift from handmade to mass production was as significant as any change in design itself. For the first time, underwear had brands. It had advertising.

It had competition. The union suit contained one notorious design feature that anyone who has seen it in a film will recognize: the back flap, a buttoned cover at the rear that could be opened without removing the whole garment. It solved a practical problem, but it was never elegant. Winter mornings in outhouses, fumbling with buttons in the cold, became one of the defining experiences of nineteenth-century American manhood.

By the early twentieth century, the union suit began to evolve. It split into two pieces, a long-sleeved shirt and separate long pants, which became known as long johns. The name likely comes from boxer John L. Sullivan, who wore tight two-piece underwear inside the ring.

Long johns were popular through both world wars and remained the standard cold-weather undergarment for decades. Then came boxer shorts. In the 1920s, the Everlast boxing equipment company introduced loose shorts modeled on what boxers wore in the ring. The design was simple: an elastic waistband, loose legs ending above the knee, and a fly in the front.

Boxers were cooler and less restrictive than the union suit, but they provided almost no support. They were comfortable for lounging at home. They were good for nothing else. And it was precisely that gap that one man saw when a postcard arrived at his office.

In 1934, Arthur Kneibler, vice president of marketing at Cooper’s, received a postcard from the French Riviera. It showed a man on the beach wearing bikini-style swimwear. Comfortable, legless, and supportive. Kneibler looked at that postcard and had one clear thought.

This design should be underwear. He designed a brief. No legs, a Y-shaped fly in the front, and support comparable to an athletic supporter. To emphasize the support feature, Cooper’s named the product Jockey Shorts.

On January 19, 1935, Jockey briefs debuted at Marshall Field’s in downtown Chicago. The store devoted an entire window display to promote them. A mannequin stood in the window wearing nothing but a pair of briefs. The timing could not have been worse.

A massive blizzard had hit Chicago the night before. Store managers nearly removed the display, fearing a summer product would never sell during a snowstorm. But they left it up. By noon, all 600 pairs in stock had sold.

Over the following weeks, Marshall Field’s sold an additional 12,000 pairs. Within three months, 30,000 pairs of Jockey shorts had been sold in Chicago alone. Cooper’s renamed the entire company Jockey International. A single postcard from a beach reshaped what men wear every day.

After World War II, boxers grew in popularity. Soldiers who wore boxers in the army brought the habit home. By the 1950s, America was split into two camps: briefs loyalists and boxers loyalists. Underwear had become a matter of personal identity, a preference people felt strongly about but rarely discussed publicly.

In 1954, Cooper’s bought its first television commercial, read by Jack Paar on The Tonight Show. Men’s underwear went from something no one talked about to a product sold on national television in prime time. The question kept getting louder. In 1993, a seventeen-year-old girl asked President Bill Clinton on live television whether he wore briefs or boxers.

He answered, “Briefs. ” That moment made national news. The fact that a sitting president’s underwear choice could dominate a news cycle tells you everything about how far underwear had come since the days of wearing nothing. Then, in the early 1990s, a designer named John Varvatos at Calvin Klein had another idea: combine the support of briefs with the coverage of boxers.

The result was boxer briefs, snug underwear reaching mid-thigh that offered the best of both worlds. Calvin Klein marketed them with massive billboards of muscular models in stark white underwear, transforming what had always been a hidden garment into something aspirational, trendy, and extremely visible. Within a few years, boxer briefs had created an entirely new category that still dominates the market today. The irony is hard to ignore.

For thousands of years, the primary purpose of underwear was to be unseen. Calvin Klein made underwear the one thing you were supposed to notice. The waistband visible above jeans, the logo, the billboard. A garment whose definition was concealment became known for being visible.

Think about this shift for a moment. Five thousand years ago, a man in the Alps wore a piece of sheepskin fastened with a leather belt, sewn with whatever he had, and patched with grass fibers when the seams tore. Today, the same basic idea, a piece of cloth between your body and everything else, has become a billion-dollar global industry with luxury brands, advanced fabrics, subscription services, and celebrity endorsements. The real question is not why underwear exists, but why it took so long.

Throughout most of recorded history, the majority of men on earth wore nothing beneath their clothes. Loincloths existed from the beginning, but they were the exception, not the rule. Braies appeared and vanished. The codpiece shone brightly and faded fast.

For centuries on end, the default answer to the question of what men wore under their clothes was nothing. What changed was not the human body. What changed was industry. Mass production made underwear cheap enough for everyone to own.

Cotton mills and textile factories turned this item from a luxury into a staple. And once it was cheap, once every man could own a drawer full of them, underwear moved from optional to expected, from practical to personal, and from invisible to expressive. Seven thousand years of history, and the fundamental question never changed. What do you put between your body and the world?

For most of that time, the answer was nothing. Today, the global underwear market is worth tens of billions of dollars, and the average person owns about fifteen pairs without thinking much about any of them. King Tut was buried with 145 linen loincloths because he was preparing for eternity.

We can barely remember which pairs in our drawers are clean.