“The average American buys more than one new piece of clothing per week. If that matches your shopping habits, in a span of five years you have purchased more than 320 pieces of clothing.”

Who the fuck is buying multiple pieces of clothing every week? I don’t know anyone that does that. I feel like buys-ridiculous-amounts-of-clothing George is an outlier and shouldn’t be counted.

Price is unfortunately not a reliable proxy for quality. That’s kind of why communities like BuyItForLife exist.

Granted, the marketers are catching up to this and as such they are losing their usefulness, but yeah.

Broadly speaking, consumers should educate themselves about apparel, and then choose to buy apparel that’s better made and will last longer. It’s not just underwear. Jeans are a favorite example of mine. Most jeans right now are in the 9-10oz range, and have 1-4% spandex woven in so they stretch. 50 years ago, most jeans would have been in the 12-14oz range, no spandex. The would shrink in the wash, so you had to be careful, but would also slowly break in and mold to fit you. Jeans with spandex are more comfortable right off the bat, and can be made comfortable even if they’re fairly tight, but as they wear, they’re going to start sagging. And since they’re a lighter weight material, they aren’t going to last as long. The changes are, in large part, driven by the need to ensure that your jeans fit a wider range of body shapes; your fit doesn’t need to be as specific when you use elastic. (That starts wading into the deep end of fitting apparel, but the short version is: patterns can be pretty easily graded to fit people that aren’t overweight, but once you get past a certain amount of body fat, distribution and shapes start varying widely enough that you simply can’t make anything that’s close to universal without making it fit like a poncho.)

There was even a brief period of time where Invista had a partnership with a mill that was making denim, and they were doing 60/40, or 50/50 cotton/nylon denims, and they had fantastic wear capabilities. I haven’t been able to find anything about that particular material in about 15 years, sadly. (Cotton/Kevlar blends are possible to find; those are used for motorcycle jeans. They’re also $60/yard for 30" wide fabric, which is insane.)

Patagonia boxers are made using recycled plastics and they also accept worn out boxers for recycling. Patagonia is the only boxers I have found that are very loose fitting (baggy in fact), silky feeling, yet stretchy, yet moisture-wicking all at once. Nothing like this seems to exist in Europe.

So here’s a debate: synthetic vs cotton

Synthetic boxers can be recycled and can be made from recycled plastics. But every time synthetic clothes get washed they shed microplastics which most sewage treatment centers cannot filter out. You would have to buy a special filter to attach to your washing machine. Researchers in Ghent discovered that the bacteria that loves perspiration also loves synthetic clothes but not cotton. This is why synthetic clothes get stinky fast and thus need more frequent washing than natural fibers.

Cotton production consumes absurd amounts of water (2700 liters of water to produce 1 t-shirt). And when you wash it, hang drying takes /days/ (whereas microfibers hang dry in a couple hours). So people use energy wasting tumble dryers when cleaning cotton. But cotton has the advantage of being biodegradable. You can simply compost/landfill finished cotton as long as it doesn’t have harmful dyes that leech out. There is also a cotton t-shirt that is claimed to wearable 7 times before each wash. IIRC it’s blended with silver for anti-microbial effects.

The environmental debate can go either way depending on which problem you want to focus on, but cotton is clearly lousy performing underwear considering how it retains water and gets soggy. The only natural fiber that performs well for underwear is wool (ideally Marino from what I’ve read). But the prices on that are extortionate. €60+ for one pair of wool boxers, and they’re tight fitting.

Anyway, the OP’s thesis is lost. There is no BifL boxers AFAIK.

There are BifL socks though, called “Darn Tough” which have a lifetime warranty. They have 1 competitor but I forgot the brand. Both use marino wool.

update

Patagonia plans to open a store in Amsterdam.

Not sure if I trust a lot of companies that make more expensive underwear to actually make something that lasts longer. I could put the research in to find something. But the markup between the cheapest things and the “quality” underwear always seems a bit much for me

Here’s the thing about “signaling to the industry with your money”: They will take it and not give you shit.

Pay 30$ or $300 for a drill it’s still made in China from plastic and planned obsolescence.

Underwear is no different.

Soo… What underwear are actually worth buying then? It doesn’t seem like there are too many recommendations.

I’ve had the same underwear for about 10 years. The elastic eventually wears out and you have to sew them to become “fitted”