Plenty of undies have a fly. Hardly anyone uses it, because it's a slit down the front you have to dig around to find. So you pull the waistband down instead. I'd bet you did it this morning.

The fly on Debriefs sits right where your hand already goes. Unzip, reach straight down through the top, and you're sorted. No hunting for the gap, no dragging the waistband under everything, no hitching it back up after. It's quicker than going over the top, so it's the one you'll actually use.

★★★★★Customer review

"They are so comfy and the horizontal slot makes taking a pee easy as!"

A vertical fly has to pick a side, so somebody's always reaching across the wrong way. An opening across the top doesn't care which hand you use. Lefties, righties, the bloke who switches depending on which hand is holding the beer. Same fly.

★★★★★Customer review

"I am confident lefties will appreciate the horizontal fly."

One of the first samples

I'll admit it looks a bit odd the first time you see it. When I handed the early samples round to mates and family, the pocket jokes came thick and fast. Then they wore them for a week, and funnily enough nobody brought up the pocket again.

★★★★★Customer review

"I was a little skeptical about the horizontal fly but it makes complete sense once you put them on!"

★★★★★Customer review

"I've actually become a big fan of the fly design. I couldn't imagine using undies with a 'side-opening door' anymore."

Moving the opening to the top meant we could double the fabric across the whole pouch. Two layers stretch less, so everything stays where it should. The pouch holds its shape wash after wash, and nobody gets a view they didn't ask for.

And because the pouch isn't pinned to the waistband, it has a bit of give. It settles to fit you, whatever you're working with. I'd love to tell you I planned that part. I didn't. It came free with turning the fly around, and it's still one of my favourite things about them.

Centre seam

Debriefs dart

The easy way to give a pouch its shape is to sew two pieces of fabric together straight down the centre. Plenty of brands do it. It works, but it leaves a ridge of stitching along the most sensitive real estate you own. And it rubs from breakfast to bedtime.

If you're one of the many blokes who lost the hood as a baby, you'll know the feeling. A seam there is about as welcome as sand in your swimmers.

So we used what's called a dart, which is a fancy sewing word for a fold. The fabric at the bottom of the pouch folds over itself, and that fold curves it into a dome. That gives the pouch its shape without a seam anywhere near the front. It sits flat and soft, and there's nothing there to rub. It's harder to make that way, and I wasn't budging on it.

None of this would matter if the fabric was rubbish, so we didn't cut corners there either. Debriefs are made from LENZING MicroModal, a plant-based fibre made from beech trees, and it's 3x softer than cotton. It breathes, it pulls sweat away from your skin instead of holding onto it, and it stays soft wash after wash.

Cotton soaks up sweat like a sponge and dries rough, which is why your old undies feel like cardboard by February. Bamboo starts out soft but stretches and loses its shape. MicroModal does neither.

I first wore it while I was living in America in 2016. When I came home, I couldn't find it anywhere in Australia, so I brought it over myself. Then it took 18 months and more than 20 rounds of samples to get the pair right.

I could tell you all this until I'm blue in the face, but I'm hardly unbiased. Debriefs has 1,522 published customer reviews. Plenty of them bring up the fly without being asked.

Man of Many, DMARGE, GQ and Penthouse have all written about us too.

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