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Mesh vs Sheer Underwear for Men
What's Actually Different
A Norwegian polar explorer, a 1950s girdle chemical, and Louis Vuitton's 2025 runway — the real story of how two thoroughly unglamorous inventions became menswear's most talked-about trend.
What's Actually Different
| Mesh | Sheer | Stripe-hybrid | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Construction | Open, knitted or net weave with visible gaps | Very fine, tightly-knit polyamide/nylon-spandex blend | Alternating sheer and opaque bands knitted into one fabric |
| Transparency | High — you see through the gaps in the weave itself | Semi-transparent — shows silhouette and skin tone, no visible holes | Partial and structured — opaque bands break up the reveal |
| Feel | Textured, slightly raised, "netted" | Smooth, second-skin | Smooth with a subtle ribbed texture |
| Best for | Making a statement — going out, photos, confidence | Everyday wear with a visible edge — the current trend look | Under regular clothes, work-appropriate, first-timers |
| In this edit | Modus Vivendi Abstract Net | TEAMM8 Allure Sheer / Score Sheer | PUMP! Whisper |
Which Style Should You Buy?
New to the look and want something subtle enough for daily wear under regular clothes: PUMP! Whisper — the sheer/opaque stripe is the least obvious of the four. Want the fully-sheer, barely-there look actually driving the current trend: TEAMM8 Allure Sheer. Need something breathable for training: the TEAMM8 Score Sheer Sports Brief. Want the boldest, most visibly net look: Modus Vivendi Abstract Net.
Shop Men's Sheer & Mesh Underwear
TEAMM8, PUMP! and Modus Vivendi — every range in this edit. Free US shipping over $100, next-day available.
"Mesh was invented to survive the Arctic. Sheer was invented to hold in a girdle. Neither fabric had anything to do with sex appeal — until fashion decided otherwise."
Bang&Strike, on the actual historyWhy Is Everyone Suddenly Wearing This?
This isn't a niche look that quietly went mainstream — it's been named, in print, as one of the defining menswear trends of the past two years. The Manual's 2025 runway trend report called out sheer shirts directly: "one of the biggest trends popping up on runways for 2025 are mesh and sheer shirts in men's collections... From see-through, BDSM-inspired pieces paired with leather pants to sheer turtleneck sweaters displayed at Louis Vuitton, the message is clear — the transparency movement is upon us." WWD traced the sheer trend back to the 1970s to show it building to a genuine peak for spring 2025 — this isn't a one-season blip.
- 2019 Harry Styles wears a Gucci see-through mesh blouse to the Met Gala as a co-chair — widely seen as the moment that cracked the door open for mesh in mainstream menswear press.
- 2023 Ncuti Gatwa wears a fully see-through mesh shirt to Vogue World in London.
- 2025 Benson Boone wears a sheer lace top to the iHeartRadio Music Awards; European Fashion Week runways, Louis Vuitton included, push sheer and mesh menswear as a headline trend.
- Mar 2026 Heated Rivalry stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams both wear sheer mesh shirts to the Vanity Fair Oscars Party — Out.com reports fans "went berserk all over social media."
It isn't just menswear, either — Sydney Sweeney and Heidi Klum led a parallel "naked dressing" sheer trend on 2025 red carpets, putting sheer fabric into the wider cultural conversation at the same moment menswear was having its own version of it.
The Surprising History of Mesh Underwear
Here's the twist: mesh fabric has nothing to do with looking good undressed. It was invented to keep people alive in the cold. In 1921, Norwegian officer Henrik Natvig Brun began experimenting with undergarments inspired by brynje — the Viking chainmail made from interlocking iron rings. He swapped metal for fabric, first trying cut-up fishing nets before switching to knitted cotton, reportedly hand-knitting over a thousand string shirts before patenting the design and commercialising it with textile firm J. Jacobsen's Knitwear (later renamed Brynje). The idea: an open weave traps warm air against the skin while letting sweat escape.
The military adopted it fast. Brun presented the design to the Norwegian Officers' Club in 1933 with King Haakon VII in attendance, and it became standard issue for Norwegian forces. By 1943, the British RAF had high-altitude bomber crews wearing string vests made from coarse cotton string, produced by sports company Lillywhites, to survive sub-freezing conditions at altitude. As recounted by textile historian Amelia Arvesen's research into outdoor recreation archives, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reportedly wore Brynje "health shirts" on the first successful Everest summit in 1953. Polypropylene replaced cotton in the 1970s, and the same basic idea resurfaced in 2025 as Nike's "Radical AirFlow" trail running top — the physics never changed, just the marketing.
Britain has its own, entirely separate mesh lineage. Sunspel, founded in 1860 in Nottingham, then the world capital of the lace and hosiery industry, built mesh-like fabrics on repurposed lace-knitting machines from the early 1900s, launching cellular cotton underwear in 1914 designed purely to wick moisture and keep cool. Neither lineage — Norwegian military kit or English hosiery machinery — was ever designed to be seen. It was designed to be practical, and ideally invisible under a uniform.
The Surprising History of Sheer Fabric
Sheer underwear's origin story is even less romantic: it comes from a DuPont chemist trying to fix women's girdles. In 1958, Joseph Shivers was tasked with finding a synthetic replacement for the heavy rubber thread then used in foundation garments. He modified Dacron polyester into a stretchy filament — internally "Fiber K" — that stretched to five times its length and snapped back into shape, unlike rubber. DuPont's branding team renamed it Spandex (an anagram of "expands") and trademarked the fibre as Lycra, publicly introduced in 1962. That same stretch-recovery chemistry, usually blended with nylon or polyamide, is what makes today's fine, semi-transparent, second-skin sheer underwear possible. It was invented to be structural and supportive, not to be seen through.
And it isn't just underwear riding that chemistry. Sheer, mesh and other transparent fabrics — organza, chiffon, tulle — have been named a standout construction trend across recent fashion weeks more broadly, not just on red carpets: forecasters have flagged "peek-a-boo" layering, sheer panels and visible foundation pieces as a growing theme moving into 2026, the same underlying shift in what people are comfortable being seen wearing that's now showing up in underwear drawers.
