Navigate through product attributes

[rrroberto]

I am creating an underwear ecommerce website.

I want the user to see first a list of categories (socks, underpants, etc).

Once he is into a category he should choose the material (wool, cotton, etc)

Finally he gets to the product.

I want to show categories and materials in the same way (so box with pictures in the content area of the website, not filters on side bar)

The easy and obvious way would be to create materials as subcategories.
So:
socks -> cotton socks, wool socks, etc.
underpants -> cotton underpants, wool underpants (ouch!) etc.

BUT this means that I have to create one subcategory for each material for each type of cloth...
This wouldn't be easy to manage.

I would like to define the materials only once, then bind each product to one category and one material.

How can I do this?

Thanks...

Roberto