You bought the full-coverage underwear specifically because you wanted your whole butt covered. Reasonable.
You put them on. Whole butt covered. And then you walked around for a while. And somehow, despite having selected the underwear category whose entire stated purpose was FULL COVERAGE, you are once again adjusting your underwear.
So what exactly did “full coverage” mean? Apparently, full coverage at time of departure. Well we think the definition needs work. What are we actually asking for?
During our customer discovery interviews, one woman gave us perhaps the clearest description of what she wanted from full-coverage underwear. Her whole cheek covered. No cheek hanging out. A remarkably specific request for a category called full coverage.
But there’s an important second half to that requirement. She wanted it to stay covered. And that’s where the usual definition of “full coverage” starts to fall apart. Full coverage typically describes how much of your body the garment covers. Which makes sense right up until your body starts moving.
Because you aren’t buying underwear to stand perfectly still in front of a mirror. You’re going to walk and sit down. Bend over and cross your legs. Get in the car. Get out of the car. You’re going to live an entire day without ideally having to think about your underwear. At TuKiss, we call those little interruptions clothing noise. And underwear that keeps asking you to put it back where it started can make quite a lot of noise.
So maybe the more useful definition of full coverage isn’t how much fabric is there when you put your underwear on. Maybe it’s whether that coverage stays where you put it. As it turns out, your underwear has a surprisingly difficult job. Because your pelvis would like your underwear to stay put. And your legs would very much like to go places.
So each time you walk, sit, bend or cross your legs, the shape of your body changes. Your hips flex. Your legs move independently. Fabric stretches. Openings change shape. Tension shifts. And the garment has to accommodate all of that movement somewhere.
Research on garment fit and comfort looks at exactly these interactions. Construction, fabric stretch and recovery, friction, pressure and the ability of a garment to move relative to the body all affect what happens once a person starts moving.
Which explains something you may already know from extensive field research conducted in your own pants: Soft fabric does not guarantee underwear that stays put. Neither does stretchy fabric. And neither does simply adding more fabric to the back.
More coverage and staying covered are also very different problems. Imagine two briefs laid flat on a table. One has a larger back panel. Technically, it offers more coverage. But that tells us almost nothing about what will happen when a human body gets inside it and starts moving.
The question isn’t only how much fabric covers your butt. It’s what happens to that fabric when your legs start moving beneath it. When movement creates tension, the garment has to accommodate it somehow. Fabric can stretch. It can shift against the skin. It can pull from somewhere else. And sometimes it migrates. Which is how a perfectly respectable full-coverage brief becomes considerably less full coverage by lunch.
There is, of course, another way to make underwear stay put. You can make it harder for the underwear to move. That is the logic behind silicone grippers and other treatments used along garment edges. Increase the grip between garment and body and you can resist movement.
Mechanically, that makes sense. But it also raises a fairly obvious question: Why is the garment trying to go somewhere in the first place? Because keeping fabric in place and designing fabric to stay in place are two different problems.
You can add friction. You can add tension. You can squeeze an edge more tightly against the body. Or you can look at the forces causing the garment to migrate and reconsider the construction itself. We became much more interested in that last one.
So we started with the pelvis. When we began designing the TuKiss Full Coverage Brief, the obvious question would have been: How do we make a better full-coverage brief? But that still assumes the familiar shape of underwear is the starting point. So we backed up. Why does the fabric move in the first place?
We wondered what would happen if we designed around the part of the body we actually wanted the garment to stay anchored to? ...the pelvis. And that changed the problem.
Instead of trying to hold the garment in place with more compression or grip, we designed the brief around the pelvis as its structural anchor, with the movement of the legs built into the construction.
That thinking eventually led to the patent-pending construction inside the TuKiss Full Coverage Brief. In plain English: We didn’t try to solve full coverage by putting more fabric over your butt. We reconsidered what was making the fabric leave in the first place. Because if the goal is less clothing noise, making you better at managing your underwear isn't much of a solution. So what does “full coverage” actually mean?
Maybe we’ve been using the term to describe the wrong thing. Because coverage isn’t particularly useful if it only describes a garment while the person wearing it is standing still. But the body moves and the garment has to respond. So if we’re going to call something full coverage, perhaps the coverage should survive the trip.
So the next time you pull on a pair of full-coverage underwear, there’s a better question than: Does this cover my whole butt? Then give it a few hours and ask, Does it still? Because maybe full coverage shouldn’t describe how your underwear looks when you put it on. Maybe it should describe where it is four hours later.
References
Gill, S., & Hayes, S. (2012). Lower body functional ease requirements in the garment pattern. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education, 5(1), 13-23.
McKinney, E., Gill, S., Dorie, A., & Roth, S. (2017). Body-to-pattern relationships in women’s trouser drafting methods: Implications for apparel mass customization. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, 35(1), 16-32.
Fan, J., & Hunter, L. (2009). Physiological comfort of fabrics and garments. Engineering apparel fabrics and garments, 1, 201-250.