Mens Underwear Had a Revolution

It Just Started With a Bicycle

Almost nobody thinks of mens underwear as having a real history, but it does - and the origin story is far less glamorous than anything happening in a lingerie boutique. It starts with a Chicago sporting goods company, a genuinely painful problem involving 19th-century cobblestone streets, and a chain of accidental inventions that eventually produced the boxer, the brief, and everything in between. None of it was designed with seduction in mind. All of it, eventually, became exactly that.

Invented for Bicycles, Not Bedrooms

In 1874, a Chicago sporting goods company called Sharp and Smith produced the first jockstrap, designed specifically for bicycle messengers - nicknamed "bike jockeys" at the time - who were being genuinely battered by the brutal, unpaved cobblestone streets of the era. The garment's inventor, C. F. Bennett, gave it a supportive front pouch and an elastic waistband, solving a real, physically painful occupational hazard rather than chasing any aesthetic goal. In 1897, Bennett's company patented the design as the "Bike Jockey Strap" and began mass production; the name eventually shortened to simply "jockstrap." By the First World War, the U.S. Army was issuing one to every enlisted man, and by the mid-20th century it had become standard equipment across contact sports, eventually selling in the hundreds of millions of units worldwide.

Boxing Gave Us the Boxer

In 1925, Jacob Golomb - founder of the boxing equipment brand Everlast - began modifying the leather-waistbanded trunks worn in the ring, replacing the stiff leather with a new elastic waistband. This is literally where "boxer shorts" get their name: they were, quite directly, boxing shorts before they were casual underwear. The style struggled initially, offering less support than the older, more established alternatives, and didn't become a genuine mainstream staple for several more decades.

The Brief Is Named After Jockeys, Not Horse Racing

In 1935, designer Arthur Kneibler at Chicago's Cooper, Inc. took direct inspiration from the jockstrap's snug, supportive front panel and combined it with a Y-front opening and a legless, close-fitting cut - creating what we now call briefs. Because the design so visibly echoed the jockstrap, the first briefs were marketed as "Jockey shorts," which is the entire, slightly odd reason the now-famous underwear brand Jockey carries that name - nothing to do with horse racing at all, everything to do with 19th-century cyclists.

From Locker Room to Runway

By the 1980s, the jockstrap's practical popularity among athletes had genuinely declined, edged out by compression shorts and boxer briefs that offered comparable support with far more coverage. But the garment found an entirely new life in gay male culture and fashion photography, becoming a recognized symbol of athleticism and confidence well beyond any locker room. Calvin Klein's underwear advertising campaigns of the 1990s and 2000s - featuring minimal coverage on visibly athletic bodies - did more than any single event to move men's underwear from purely functional to openly desirable, a shift that eventually opened the door to the pattern, color, and fit variety men's underwear enjoys today.

Function First, Always

What's genuinely striking across this entire history is how consistently men's underwear innovation started with a specific, unglamorous physical problem - road vibration, boxing impact, athletic support - and only became aspirational decades after the fact. The lesson holds up remarkably well today: the best men's underwear still starts with genuine fit and support, and looks good as a direct consequence of working properly, not the other way around.