A "Subligaculum" (a loincloth type garment) was worn between flesh and armor by the soldiers of ancient Rome. Eventually, men took to wearing "braies" which were baggy, long-legged drawers, commonly made of linen. The braies were held up by tying a cord around the waist. Drawings of the era indicate that braies were sometimes worn as outerwear, during hot weather or while performing strenuous, manual labor.

By the Victorian era, Men's underpinnings had evolved into two pieces: knee length "drawers" made of wool flannel and a wool flannel shirt on top. Similar garments were worn by American men prior to the Civil War, but the invention of the cotton gin changed things. Suddenly, cotton fabrics were mass-produced, and underwear became widely available for purchase. Rather than making it at home.

In 1891, the Northwestern Knitting Company introduced the "union suit," a one-piece full-length undergarment that covered the wearer from neck to ankles and to his wrists, with a "trap door in the back. They're also known as "long johns."

In the early 1900's, improves textile machinery increased underwear production and more companies jumped on the bandwagon. The first advertisement for underwear in the U.S. appeared in a 1911 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. The ad featured oil paintings of a "union suit" by Cooper Underwear Company, known today as Joacky International.

The Kenosha Klosed Krotch "union suit" was the brainchild of Horace Greeley Johnson, a knitting room supervisor at Cooper Underwear. He had been long pondering the problems men faced with wearing a traditional trap-door union suit. They were awkwardly hard to unbutton and even more difficult to re-button. The buttons often came off during laundering as well.

The advent of indoor plumbing and central heating required lighter, less bulky underwear and buttons were becoming too "bumpy and lumpy" underneath the clothing of the day. Johnson came up with a nifty solution: he designed a new type of "union suit" made with two pieces forming an "X" shape, which could be opened simply by parting the fabric when necessary.

In 1915, Bradley, Voorhees and Day began selling a union suit made of lightweight cotton-blend fabric called nainsook. These suits were cut and sewn not knitted and the nainsook felt cool against the skin. They soon introduced a sleeveless model, with three-quarter length legs, that was an immediate hit with businessmen who had to work in hot offices in three piece suites during the hot summer months. Soon the new design ws commonly described by the initials of its inventors: BVD's.

By the 1930's, men were shying away from the union suit. They were turning to the two-piece underwear combos of shirts and drawers. But the folks at Cooper had a new product up their corporate sleeve ­ the men's brief. In 1935, Chicago's Marshall Field department store set up the first display of the "Jockey" brief. The short, featuring a patented "Y" vent sold over 600pair within a few hours of the store's opening.

Another innovation in men's underwear was the elastic waistband, which appeared in the first boxer shorts (resembling the shorts worn by prizefighters). Eventually, elastic was added to briefs as well, doing away with button closures once and for all. WWII brought another new trend ­ colored skivvies. Traditional white undies were to conspicuous in the battlefield when they were hung out to dry, so military boxers and briefs were issued in olive drab.

Since then, the history of underwear has gone in many directions, from the thong, bananahammock to mesh bikini's and are made out of many fabrics and synthetics. Style and fashion will always tell you that the combination of a boxer and a brief in the now available boxerbreif is comfortable and will give you the support that you need and always stay with cotton, they will breathe, and there is nothing worse than chaffing!