Who designs plaid boxer fabric?

Factual Questions
1

So I just bought some new boxers. And besides wanting the world to know that I am now sporting new shorts, I wondered something I have pondered before.

The boxers are all made out of these various plaid fabrics. In the store, there were far more fabric choices than shown on the website. Some were pretty bland, while others had some really bright threads in the patterns. And there didn’t seem to be any consistent pattern to explain which plaids were packaged together - earth tones, pastels, etc. Which made me wonder:

-What is the process by which the specific plaid (or rep) patterns are selected for boxer shorts?
-Does the underwear company have a designer on staff who goes through some process of determining the optimal patterns, and then orders those patterns from the fabric supplier?
-Or does the fabric mill design various plaids.
-Or does the mill just churn out essentially random plaid patterns of a certain grade using whatever thread they had lying around, and simply provide them to the underwear manufacturer?
-And why are so many boxers plaid? Some Scottish lineage of which I’m unaware? (I thought that a real Scotsman…)

I can kind of understand why some guys might select shorts of a particular color, or with little christmas trees or puppy dogs on them. But it is hard to get my mind around any guy who is buying full cut boxers pawing through the bin of shorts, trying to find just the right plaid to satisfy his need for private self expression.

2

More than anyone wants to know about Scottish Plaids.

Wow.

3

Who’da thunk vetbridge would be so quick to provide a link to info on making skirts for little dollies… :dubious:

I’m pretty sure Jockey doesn’t striuctly adhere to traditional clan tartans. :smiley:

4

I can’t find any cites for “how men’s underwear is designed”, but based on what I know about how the clothing industry works in general, I can make some WAGs.

The underwear designers for Jockey almost certainly work with existing swatches of fabric. It’s more expensive to have them design the fabric themselves from scratch, because custom fabric, involving as it does custom design, and sometimes custom dyeing, spinning, and weaving, is always more expensive than making do with what the mills have already produced. Your Neiman Marcus boxers might be made with custom-designed fabric, but I doubt that garden-variety Jockeys are.

The mills themselves have fabric designers who decide what next year’s plaid is going to be.

As for how everybody, both underwear designers and fabric designers, decides which plaids to use, or to make–I have no idea. That would be one of those “artistic” decisions made by the designers themselves, after spending days staring at fabric swatches, or doodling with markers, or roaming around Scotland looking for inspiration. Probably a lot of it depends on the fashion/clothing industry in general, what’s going to be “hot” next year, etc.

As for “why plaid?”, in my experience, it’s women who buy those “little Christmas tree” or “puppies” or “Taz” boxers, as presents for their men. The men themselves tend to grab whatever package looks the most non-committal, in “masculine” colors, i.e. “primary or dark colors”, “not pastel”, and “not tiny print”, which looks feminine.

So if you’re looking for non-humorous boxers in a large print in dark or primary colors, that leaves you with either OpArt/tie-dye/Jackson Pollock-type prints–or plaid. Plaid is a very useful pattern, capable of many variations, so your plaid won’t look exactly like your competitor’s plaid, and it’s easy to do on a loom.

So, why plaid? It’s easy, cheap, and guys like it.

5

Thanks, for the great info DDG.
This year’s plaids, huh?
Glad to know I’m up-to-date!
So, if I happen to be sharing the locker room with a mill fabric designer, he would be able to know exactly how old my boxers were by the pattern? (As if the holes and saggy elastic weren’t enough!)

6

Yep. They’d be sooooo 1998.

:smiley:

Plaid fabrics are a staple of women’s fall fashion lines; check out any September issue of Seventeen magazine. Like magic, poof! they’re all wearing flippy little pleated schoolgirl plaid skirts, no matter what bizarre fashion trends may be appearing on the runways in Paris.

So you know they don’t use last year’s plaid, because it’s so, like, last year. Somebody somewhere sits down at a drawing board and designs This Year’s Plaid, because that’s how our Planned Obsolescence Obsessed With Novelty Capitalist Society works.

7

Yeah, but those skirts are pretty much assured to be seen by more folks than my boxers. And, just going with my gut here, but I’m guessing women reading 17 are just a tad more interested in colors and patterns than the average guy buying full-cut boxers.

Just to clear up a couple of questions I’m sure everyone is dying to know, I checked and it appears as tho jockey brand boxers are not true tartans, at least as defined by vetbridge’s cross-dressing man-doll fetish site.

And of the old boxers I got rid of, several were of a pattern I’d call “Rep” or “Medallion”, rather than plaid, where a single shape is repeated on a solid background. Kind of like a lot of “power ties.” Oddly enough, all of the 6 pair I bought (2 3-packs) are plaid. I’d get a laugh out of the runway fashion shows where THAT seachange was announced!

Also, of the 6 pair I bought, no 2 are the same fabric, suggesting they might intentionally package them that way. Do they think that makes the product more attractive to middle aged underwear buying men? I wonder how many different patterned fabrics they use in all?

I’m glad to see the tremendous interest of folks desirous of accomanying me on this thrilling voyage into my pants!

8

Well, I’m a solid color brief man myself. :stuck_out_tongue:

9

They are action figures. Not dollies.

10

That’s hot. ::fans self

But yeah, I can see them changing up the plaid/stripe/medallion/paisley format and colors by season, to have something new for folks to choose from. I wear men’s loungy pants around the house and I don’t know where they get the plaids, but even for something no one sees I still make a choice for the ones that are more pleasing to my eye.

11

Dunno, but I’ll bet you a nickel they’ve got marketing survey results somewhere that shows that different fabrics in the package makes their product more attractive to middle-aged underwear-buying women. :smiley:

12

You may be on to something there. I have a lot of crazy-ass boxers, mostly due to my wife. I have lime green ones, ones with road signs, ones with dragons, ones with zebra stripes…

Wait, did I just admit I’m middle-aged? Crap!

13

Nope, you’ve only admitted that *your wife * is middle-aged. Nice going. :stuck_out_tongue:

14

Might not be so bad, provide sturm is an old coot!

15

Hmm, actually I think my definition of “middle-aged” has been out of date since the Middle Ages, what with the advancement of medical science and all. So you see, I’m not even halfway to the grave yet, so no middle-aged people here. No sir.

And uh, sweet pea, if you read this, well you know I’m older than you, and, uh, I love you.