How To Wear Underwear

Victoria’s Secret, the largest underwear retailer in the US, has transformed lingerie shopping from a chore into a blockbuster experience. And a visit to a VS store is a lesson in just how far the lingerie market has come in the last decade. According to data provided by Euromonitor, the global underwear market was worth just over $110 billion in 2014.

As we have already established, I love an obscenely expensive set of boob-holders; I treat both of my Agent Provocateur bras with more love and respect than I do most people in my life. Jkjkjk. But also so serious.

The way we buy and wear underwear is a fascinating topic for fashion writing, primarily because it is so personal and so universal. Everyone needs to buy underwear, as the numbers above clearly demonstrate, but if you were bold enough to survey what people have chosen to store their genitals in, you’d have to rely on self-reported rather than hard (lol) evidence.

Luckily we have sales data that shows a few clear patterns:

But as women’s briefs get bigger, men’s are becoming, well, briefer. Boxers (a fitted short) now have the biggest share of the men’s market at nearly 40 percent. And while briefs sales also grew 23 percent in the year ending September 2014, loose boxers declined 14 percent.

Matt pointed this out last month, making an excellent point about the historical factors at work here:

For the first time in decades, in other words, the silhouettes of men’s and women’s underwear, which, during peak thong and peak boxer shorts, were highly divergent, have re-aligned: full, form-fitting, slimming coverage for both sexes. There is probably a cultural anthropologist who can more readily explain the precise causal relation between underwear styles, gender dynamics, and geopolitics, but the last time everybody wore the basically same underwear, Reagan was in office.

Underwear sales have as much to do with cultural values as with as the other factors mentioned in this article: materials, technologies, comfort. I know we’re not supposed to judge books by their covers, but what about judging boobs by their bras?