Red Underwear on New Year's Eve: What the Tradition Really Is

Red underwear on New Year's Eve is a good-luck custom of Italy and Spain: a new pair of red briefs, ideally received as a gift, is worn to see in January 1 for love, luck or fertility in the year ahead. Across much of Latin America the color is yellow, for prosperity. Where the habit began is not documented.

What the custom asks for

In Italy the rule is simple. Wanted in Rome describes it as putting on red underpants as midnight strikes, for luck in the coming year, alongside lentils, cotechino or zampone and a glass of spumante. The same paper notes one regional exception: in Sardinia, green underwear is the lucky color. A language-learning site adds the conditions most families repeat: the pair should have been given as a present and is worn for the first time on New Year's Eve, and it is supposed to bring luck, health and love. It describes a custom once kept by women that men have since taken up.

The trade notices. The Sardinian daily L'Unione Sarda reports that underwear shops see the demand between Christmas and New Year, from people who wear red to the cenone di San Silvestro, the New Year's Eve dinner, year after year.

Spain keeps the same color and the same gift rule. El Faro de Ceuta, a regional paper, says the red garment "tiene que haber sido regalada," has to have been a gift, for the luck to work, and that the custom is followed mainly by women but also by men. It sits beside, and separate from, the better-known Spanish rite of eating twelve grapes on the stroke of midnight.

Yellow underwear and the Latin American palette

Latin America shifted the color. A 2022 Global Voices survey of regional New Year customs calls yellow the most widespread underwear color in almost the entire region, tied to the sun, new beginnings and money, and names Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Chile, Mexico and Peru. Red, for love and passion, appears in some families in Peru and Argentina. In Argentina and Uruguay, it says, a pink bombacha is much more common than a yellow one. The same survey records the variants: in some versions the garment must be gifted rather than bought, or worn back to front.

Peru is where the yellow pair is most visible. On December 31, 2010, the state news agency Andina reported market tables all over Lima piled with lemon-yellow briefs for buyers who believe yellow on New Year's Eve brings luck. Speaking to NPR in 2016, the Lima-born Radio Ambulante staffer Maria Fe Martinez put the color code plainly: yellow for a lucky year, red for a passionate one, worn by "men and women." The street vendors, she said, arrive on cue: "Right after Christmas, they show up."

The origin stories behind red underwear at New Year

None of the three explanations in circulation holds up as written history.

Augustus and the Saturnalia

The Roman version comes in two forms. The Palermo site Balarm traces the red to the emperor Octavian, worn by both sexes as a wish for prosperity and fertility. The fashion magazine NSS places it in the Saturnalia, the festival held about one or two weeks before the new year, when, it says, people wore bright red. The Saturnalia is real: it opened on December 17 and by the first century BC ran to December 23. What surviving accounts describe, though, is the Romans trading the toga for the synthesis, a colorful dinner garment, and everyone putting on the pilleus, the felt cap of freed slaves. Neither red clothing nor underwear features in the standard summary of the sources. No ancient text tying the emperor to red underwear is cited by anyone who repeats the story.

Witches and the Middle Ages

The Spanish version says red was forbidden in the Middle Ages because it was linked to witchcraft, so the daring wore it hidden, under their clothes. El Faro de Ceuta repeats this with no source. A variant in Italian sources has medieval men wrapping a red cloth around the groin for fertility and against spells. Wanted in Rome offers a gentler theory: a lucky new red garment of some kind, worn out of sight because the Church frowned on it. The weak point is the garment itself. Reviewing the V&A's 2016 exhibition Undressed, the Victorian Web notes that few women wore drawers until the later nineteenth century. A medieval women's tradition of red underpants needs underpants, and in most of Europe women did not yet wear them. Even NSS, which favors the Roman story, concedes that the move to New Year's Eve probably happened in modern times, between the Renaissance and the twentieth century.

The Chinese connection

China does have a documented red underwear custom, but it belongs to a different calendar. In benmingnian, the year of a person's own zodiac animal, which comes round every twelve years, the wearer is thought to face more trouble than usual. China Daily calls red underwear the most popular remedy, with red belts and bracelets as alternatives, and adds that the red items must be bought by someone else or the effect is greatly reduced. The gift rule matches Italy and Spain closely. The often-cited Nian legend, a beast driven off by red and noise, is weaker evidence: the earliest written sources describing it as a creature date only to the early twentieth century. Nobody has shown how a Chinese zodiac custom would have reached Rome or Madrid, so the parallel stays a parallel.

Why red, then

What can be said is narrower. NSS points to the medieval habit of red amulets, coral and red thread, worn against evil spirits and illness, and the New Year pair works the same way: a private, one-night charm under a party dress. Our page on red lingerie covers the color's wider career, and our history of black lingerie the color it competes with on the same night. The Latin American palette of yellow and pink shows how freely the idea travels once the rule is fixed: new, given, worn at midnight.

That rule, more than any origin story, is what keeps the custom alive in shops. In Lima it means vendor tables that, by Martinez's account, go up the week after Christmas.

Last updated November 5, 2026

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