The Body Confidence Moment That Changes Everything

There's a specific moment Ad Butler has watched happen over and over again in his customers. He calls it "the body confidence realisation," and it almost always arrives in a man's late twenties.

It doesn't matter what triggers it — a solid relationship, surviving a few breakups, simply getting tired of caring what strangers think. One day, a guy just wakes up and goes: wait, actually no one is looking. And if they are, it's because they like me.

Butler, who founded the Australian swimwear brand Sluggers, says this is precisely where his American customer finds him. Not the very young, very fit guy who's never had hang-ups — but the man in his late twenties who has quietly been wanting to wear a swim brief for years and finally decides to stop waiting for permission.

The mechanics of that shift, Butler believes, are straightforward: most men are so preoccupied with their own insecurities that they're not scrutinising anyone else. "Your gut is not going to look hotter in a pair of board shorts," he says bluntly. Covering up doesn't create confidence — it just postpones the reckoning.

What he finds most rewarding are the private messages he gets from customers who've made the leap. Men on holiday in Mexico who write: please don't post this, but I'm on the beach in my Sluggers and I feel amazing. Those messages, Butler says, make his day — because they represent something genuinely rare: a man deciding to be himself in public and discovering the world doesn't end.

His advice is disarmingly simple. Think about your height. Pick a cut that suits your proportions. Then take a deep breath and drop your pants. The rest, it turns out, takes care of itself.