Sunspel Boxer Short

The Sunspel boxer short is a pair of loose shorts in white cotton poplin with an open fly and an elasticated waist, the kind any man would recognise. The difference is behind. Most boxers have a seam running down the centre of the seat; Sunspel's have a separate panel set across the back, so that nothing sits where you sit, and the remaining seams are turned and flattened inside.

The design is a souvenir. Sunspel was by then nearly ninety years old, a Nottingham underwear maker founded in 1860 by Thomas Hill, which had moved to a factory in Long Eaton in 1937. In 1947 his great-grandson John Hill went to the United States on honeymoon and came back with American boxer shorts. Hill set out to make something lighter and more comfortable than what British men wore, and had the firm make them, adding the back panel, flattening the seams and using the fine long-staple cotton Sunspel used for its undershirts.

For almost forty years they were a luxury, sold in Harrods, Selfridges and Liberty to the few who knew. Then in 1985 Levi's made an advertisement, 'Launderette', in which the English model Nick Kamen took off his jeans in a launderette, to Marvin Gaye's 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine', and sat in a pair of white boxer shorts. They were Sunspel's. In Britain the boxer went overnight from a niche luxury to the ordinary thing to wear.

The Hill family ran Sunspel until 2005, when Peter Hill sold it to Nicholas Brooke, and the boxers are now made for it by a specialist family firm in Santo Tirso, in northern Portugal, while the T-shirts are still made at Long Eaton. The company says they still follow Hill's specification, with only a few minor improvements. In 2016 Gary Lineker presented Match of the Day in a pair.