What India Wears Underneath 2026: The Largest Unbranded Category in Indian Fashion

Innerwear is the garment category Indians buy most often and write about least. It is worth something in the order of eleven billion dollars a year, it is bought by essentially everyone, and the company universally described as its market leader — distributed in more than a hundred thousand outlets across more than two thousand seven hundred towns — holds somewhere around five per cent of it. The other ninety-five per cent has no brand on it at all. That structure is not a curiosity of one category. It is the clearest available illustration of how most of Indian apparel actually works, and this report sets out the numbers that show it.

1. A market of ten billion dollars and no brands

India’s innerwear market is put at about US$10.9 billion in 2025, forecast to reach about US$19.8 billion by 2034 at a compound rate of roughly 6.49 per cent.^[9] As with every Indian apparel sub-category, other houses publish other totals on other boundaries,^[12] and the figure is used here as one consistent series rather than as a measured total.

That growth rate is the first thing worth noticing, because it is unremarkable. Innerwear is growing at roughly the same pace as the domestic textile and apparel market as a whole, around seven per cent.^[17][18] It is a replacement category, not a fashion one: purchase is driven by wear-out rather than by trend, which is exactly why it is the cleanest window onto underlying clothing demand available.

2. What the leader actually sells

Page Industries, the exclusive Indian licensee of Jockey, is the reference point for the branded end of this category and is described across trade and credit-rating literature as holding a leading share of the domestic innerwear market.^[6][8]

For FY26 it reported revenue of about ₹52,468 million, up 6.3 per cent, with EBITDA of about ₹11,529 million and profit after tax of about ₹7,638 million. Fourth-quarter sales volume was 54.5 million pieces, up 10.8 per cent year on year.^[2] For the first half of the same year the company reported 115.2 million pieces on revenue of ₹26,704 million, with 56.6 million pieces in the second quarter alone.^[3]

No full-year volume figure appears in either disclosure, and this report does not construct one. The half-year numbers are used throughout instead, because revenue and volume are stated there for the same period in the same document — which is what makes a price per piece meaningful rather than approximate.

115.2 million pieces in six months is a large number in isolation and a small one in context. Against a population of roughly 1.4 billion it is on the order of one garment for every seven people per year — from the brand that leads the category.

3. The share calculation, with the working shown

The share figure is worth deriving in the open, because it crosses currencies and sources and should not be presented as a clean statistic.

FY26 revenue of ₹52,468 million is ₹5,247 crore.^[2] The innerwear market is put at US$10.9 billion.^[9] At ₹80 to the dollar that market is about ₹87,200 crore, giving a share of about 6.0 per cent; at ₹90 it is about ₹98,100 crore, giving about 5.3 per cent. So: roughly 5 to 6 per cent, and single digits at any plausible rate.

This is a bounded estimate rather than a measurement. The two inputs come from different sources with different definitions, and the market figure includes segments the company does not compete in. What survives all of that caveating is the order of magnitude, and the order of magnitude is the finding: the undisputed leader of a mature, universally purchased category holds single-digit share of it.

4. Distribution is not the constraint

The obvious explanation for a small share is that the brand cannot reach people. The disclosure rules that out.

As of its FY24 statement, Jockey was distributed across more than 2,750 cities and towns, through more than 1,05,000 multi-brand outlets, 1,382 exclusive brand stores and more than 1,670 large-format stores, alongside online channels.^[1] Speedo, the group’s other licensed brand, added 1,049 stores and 32 exclusive outlets across 90-plus cities.^[1]

A hundred thousand points of sale is national coverage by any definition. Whatever is holding the branded share to single digits, it is not shelf access, and the same is true of awareness: this is one of the most recognised apparel brands in the country.^[8]

"Share in India is usually a price-tier question wearing the costume of a distribution question. A hundred thousand shelves do not help if the shopper reaches past your price."— Ramola Bachchan, Founder

5. Price is the constraint

Divide revenue by volume for a period where both are published and the constraint becomes visible. H1 FY26 revenue of ₹26,704 million across 115.2 million pieces implies an average realisation of about ₹232 per piece, a derived figure.^[3] Both figures come from the same disclosure for the same six months, so this is an arithmetic result rather than an estimate — though it is still a blended average across two licensed brands and every product line.

Now set that against the household data. The Household Consumption Expenditure Survey puts clothing, bedding and footwear at 6.63 per cent of rural monthly per capita consumption expenditure of ₹4,122, and 5.66 per cent of urban MPCE of ₹6,996, which works out to about ₹273 a month rural and ₹396 urban on everything a person wears.^[15] Those rupee figures are derived by multiplying two separately published MoSPI statistics and are labelled as such throughout this series.

So a single branded innerwear piece costs approximately what the average rural Indian spends on all clothing, bedding and footwear in a month. At that ratio the branded product is not a routine purchase; it is a considered one. And the unbranded alternative is not a compromise the shopper regrets — it is the category as most of the country experiences it.

The adjacent evidence agrees. In Indian value retail the average selling price is around ₹300 to ₹400, according to V-Mart,^[25] which is the band at which non-metro India buys clothing of any kind, and it is a band the branded innerwear leader sits at the top of rather than inside.

6. The year the leader shrank

The two-year picture is more instructive than either year alone. In FY24 the company reported revenue of about ₹45,817 million, a 2.8 per cent decline, attributed to a subdued first half — while fourth-quarter profit after tax rose 38.1 per cent on operational efficiency and favourable input costs, at a 12.4 per cent margin. Q4 FY24 volume was 45.3 million pieces.^[1]

By FY26, revenue had recovered to about ₹52,468 million and Q4 volume to 54.5 million pieces — a gain of roughly a fifth in quarterly volume over two years, against revenue up rather less over the same span.^[2][3] Volume recovered faster than value, which in a replacement category means mix moved down, not up.

That is a useful corrective to the premiumisation narrative that dominates commentary on Indian apparel. In the most universally purchased category in the market, the measurable movement over two years was towards volume at flat-to-lower realisation.

7. Athleisure, and the least reliable numbers here

Athleisure is the adjacent category the same manufacturers sell into, and its published estimates are the weakest data in this report. One house puts India’s athleisure market at about US$13.9 billion in 2025 growing at 5.28 per cent a year; another puts it at about US$18.3 billion in the same year growing at 12.7 per cent.^[10][13] Those are not two views of one number — they differ by roughly a third on size and by more than twofold on growth.

This report therefore makes no claim about the size of Indian athleisure. What the qualitative evidence does support is that the category has moved out of the gym and into general daywear,^[13] which is consistent with the volume-over-value movement in the innerwear numbers: comfort-led, frequently replaced, competing on price.

8. The women’s half of the category

Women’s innerwear and activewear is tracked as its own market in India,^[12] and it behaves differently from the men’s side in one respect that matters: it carries more design variation, more fit-specific purchase and therefore more reason to prefer a brand. That is the part of the category where branded share has the clearest structural argument.

It is also where the published data thins out fastest. There is no government series, the market estimates are single-source, and company disclosure does not break volumes by gender. Anyone quoting a precise women’s innerwear share in India is quoting a model, not a measurement — a limitation worth stating rather than working around.

9. What this says about Indian apparel generally

The innerwear structure generalises, and that is the reason to look at it.

Three facts hold together here: a large, universally purchased category; a branded leader with national distribution and high awareness; and single-digit share. The only variable that explains the combination is price, and specifically the distance between a branded price point and a household clothing budget of ₹273 to ₹396 a month, both derived.^[15]

The same shape recurs across Indian apparel. Denim is the world’s least-penetrated large denim market at roughly half a pair per person per year. Value retail sells at an average of around ₹300 to ₹400 a garment.^[25] Online growth is mostly channel migration rather than new spending.^[23][24] In each case the binding constraint is the price the market can absorb, not the reach or the appeal of the brands competing for it.

The strategic reading is uncomfortable but clean: in most Indian apparel categories, market share is bought by meeting a price, and distribution investment past a certain point buys very little. The innerwear leader has already proved the second half of that sentence at a hundred thousand shelves.

10. Where this data is weakest

Four limits, stated plainly.

The share calculation crosses currencies and sources. It is presented as a range with the arithmetic shown precisely because it should not be quoted as a single percentage.

The average realisation of ₹232 divides H1 FY26 revenue by H1 FY26 volume. Both are published for the same period in the same disclosure, so the arithmetic is sound — but it blends Jockey and Speedo and every product line, and the brand composition of the volume figure is not disclosed. It is a realisation, not a shelf price.

No full-year volume figure is published in either disclosure located. An earlier version of this report used “more than 200 million pieces annually”, a figure that appears in none of the sources cited here; it has been removed rather than re-sourced.

The distribution figures — 1,05,000 outlets, 2,750 towns — are from the FY24 disclosure and are the most recent such breakdown located. They are cited to that year and should not be read as FY26 figures.^[1]

The athleisure estimates are irreconcilable, as section 7 sets out, and no size claim is made from them. There is no official price or volume series for innerwear at all; the Consumer Price Index publishes clothing as a group and does not break it down by garment type.^[16]

11. Frequently Asked Questions

Related research: What India Spends on Clothes 2026 · India and the Jeans Question 2026 · Premiumization of Indian Fashion 2026