Feeling Foxe no longer a Fable for men
Image Credit: Instagram @foxe&fable
Women’s lingerie has been around for decades, in fact modern undergarments designed to be visually appealing have been developed since the late 19th century. Victoria’s Secret is a lingerie business worth $2.10 billion, and magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse have forged entire empires off of conventionally attractive women wearing beautiful lingerie. Now it is men’s turn to foray into the world of lingerie.
Sam Green, the founder and CEO of Foxe & Fable, is trying to change men and women’s attitudes towards guys owning underwear to make themselves feel sexier: “I think women’s fashion has always been a playground for self-expression and for men, more traditionally, it has been more form and function.” The young entrepreneur has created an underwear brand that is the perfect in between of bog-standard boxers and liberating BDSM pieces.
Sam is not your typical underwear designer. Attending Bristol University to study a Bachelor’s in Economics and Management, he went on to become an Assistant Fund Manager in 2016, and then an Associate at Bentall Green Oak in 2019, until July of 2024 when Sam launched Foxe & Fable.
“The idea for the brand came to me four years ago during the first wave of covid lockdowns, when it was all doom and gloomy, everyone was bumming around in their trackies, eating rubbish food, not exercising, not getting out enough”.
The CEO described having an intimate moment with his partner Hannah; who had gone through a period of low confidence and missing feeling sexy so he had bought her a lingerie set, and at this moment when she was wearing her lingerie set Sam was wearing: “the same bog-standard pair of grey briefs that I wear every day. I suddenly felt very underdressed, and a little bit shameful that I wasn’t making the same effort in this moment that we are sharing.”
Following the humbling encounter, Sam decided to Google for men’s lingerie and: “immediately got thrown into this sort of fetishy BDSM world of thong and crotch less pants, or really cheap novelty items that had elephant trunks on them”. I know all the men reading this will know exactly the elephant underwear the Sam is referring to here.
“Nothing matched the elegance and sophistication of lingerie.” Hence, Sam reached out to silk and lace suppliers in the UK as well as a branding agency, and Foxe & Fable was born. The label only has six underwear designs at the moment, but Sam does have ambitions to grow the brand soon.
Below are images of three of the six underwear designs currently available: Lace (top left, bottom right), Silk (bottom left) and the Silk from the Rose collection (top right). The lace boxers (my personal favourite) are an ingenious design of opaque nudity; you can see beneath but not too quickly, or as Sam explained it: “transparency which gives you a flavour of what’s lurking beneath the shorts.” The lace is supplied from France, and has an opulent and delicate feel to it. What is interesting about the lace design is how it has maintained its masculinity whilst using a stereotypically feminine material: “The mission was finding a lace that was masculine…I found a pinstripe lace which has that more masculine feel but the same central edge that you want from lace.”
The silk boxers are a less revealing design yet equally as desirable. Perhaps a more comfortable approach for men who do not wish to show off so much of themselves, the silk boxers are a seductive twist on classic boxers, and the sexuality of the design stems from the feel of the fabric itself.
“I lent into silk, being one of the world’s most luxurious materials. For guys we don’t really have a lot of silk in our armoury of outfits but it is a really magical material. As soon as you put it on it gives this sense of opulence and luxuriousness, and it does make you feel amazing when you wear it.”
What I love about each underwear design is that they are sexy but not vulgar. Often men’s sexy underwear focuses purely on the crotch, and uses gimicky cut-outs and materials to bring a voyeuristic amount of attention to the genitals - I can appreciate the artistry and want of BDSM underwear as a gay man myself, but they have their time and place .What Sam has done beautifully is make underwear which appreciates a man’s body, but does so for the wearer and the viewer, not simply for the viewer. The materials are comfortable and the boxer shape is known by men and therefore not intimidating.
What I did not expect to talk about during my Zoom with Sam were the handful of niche obstacles that he faced when making the luxurious underwear brand. Firstly, trademarking the name. Initially Sam planned to call the brand just ‘Foxe’, however he was unable to thanks to a man in America who had already bought the name, a “trademark troll” as Sam put it.
“It turns out there’s a whole plethora of trademark trolls out there who just buy up various names, so people like me if I want to use Foxe I would have to ring him up and pay him – there’s loads of articles about him, he even tried to trademark Trump TV, and got in some legal battle with Donald himself.”
I believe that Sam is referring to Michael Gleissner, a German national who set up a company called Trump International and wanted to use ‘Trump TV’ for services including production of radio and TV.
Another conundrum that Sam faced was sourcing silk. The silk used in his designs comes from a UK-based supplier, however this does not mean that is is made in the UK.
“I always had the ambition of Foxe & Fable to be a designed in London, made in UK brand…I did not want to be shipping stuff all the way from China over to the UK. Having said that, it turns out that like 99% of the worlds silk originates in China anyway, so even silk produced in the UK has started life in China and gets repackaged in the UK as a ‘made in the UK’ silk”
I must admit that I am a bit of an underwear enthusiast; I love how wearing certain pairs of underwear can completely change my attitude and confidence for a day, and I am particularly excited to watch Foxe & Fable grow. Sam has big ambitions for the brand, and I cannot wait to see him change men’s attitudes towards lingerie for the better: “I’ve got big ambitions for Foxe & Fable. This is very much just the start of it. I have got an iPad full of different designs for lingerie, and it’s bringing out colours, patterns, more materials, looking if we can integrate a sort of velvet so there’s a bit more of a textural element to it – so there’s a whole world of that to go into and explore. I’m really wanting to build out this lingerie, underwear, nightwear, sleepwear, loungewear world.”
