A Short History of Pants

Pants, Trousers, Breeches, Britches, Slacks, Shorts, Jeans or Drawers: in one form or another these rather whimsical two-legged togs are easily the most essential garments in the male wardrobe, and the sine qua non of all social life in the Western world. While men have been known to achieve success and happiness as shirt-sleeve executives, hatless college presidents and barefooted philosophers, no man has ever managed to get very far in our society without pants. On a good day, he'd be lucky to make it to the corner mailbox.

Important as pants are, their origins are as murky as those of Stonehenge, mumblety-peg and the wheel. Even the Bible offers no dependable clues. According to the Geneva text used by our Puritan forefathers, Adam and Eve "sewed figge tree leaves together, and made themselves breeches," while the King James version contends that they made "aprons," or "things to gird about."

In the light of later developments, both readings appear correct. The Persians, Syrians, Phrygians and other Middle Easterners wore pants, while the Egyptians and Greeks favored aprons and "things to gird about." Though it's strongly suspected that the Romans wore some sort of briefs beneath their tunics, nothing showed below the hemline until the imperial legions first encountered the "breeched barbarians" of the north, who wore ankle-length trousers of hides or wool bound to their legs against the severity of their climate.

The shivering Roman troops stationed at northern outposts soon began turning up for guard duty in tight-fitting woolen pants that hugged the leg from hip to knee, much as milady's modern snuggies. Despite their fondness for these cozy garments, the Romans were apparently at a loss as to what to call them. The Irish had already named theirs brigis, dervied from braec, which meant "speckled trout," and was descriptive of the small-checked pattern that characterized their early woolens. The Romans Latinized brigis into brages, thence to braccae, and so on down through the years, till man found himself wearing "breeches."

Similarly, the words "drawers" and "trousers" derive from trews, trouses, trouzes and trooze, which, according to the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, were adapted from the French trousser, meaning "to pack, bundle up, tuck, tie up, girth." The Britannica admits that the origin of trousser is doubtful, and adds that the English word "trousers" was first applied to "the leg garments of the Irish." For which reason, many scholars suspecting that all names for trousers stem from the Gaelic triubhas, and that the French notion of packing, bundling up, tucking and tying actually originated on the Ould Sod. In fact, the oldest pants ever found were a pair of Irish trews recovered from a bog in County Sligo. How they came to be there, and who lost them, are secrets known only to the leprechauns. But on the basis of such presentable evidence, Ireland can well support her claim to being the ancient seat of all Western culture.

The Franks, Gauls, Goths, Picts, Jutes, Danes, Swedes and other hardy northern types all wore trousers that were cut on the general pattern of vacuum-cleaner bags, and foreshadowed the popularity of knickerbockers earlier this century. The Saxons wore theirs tight to the leg, and wrapped their calves in gold bindings with tassels at the knee. This was high style for the period, and led to a vogue for cross-gartering that persisted among the peasantry as late as the Sixteenth Century.

Except for military use, upper-class Romans were inclined to consider pants the mark of a barbarian, and sought to discourage their growing popularity by prohibiting the wearing of any sort of breeches (continued on page 104)

Short History of Pants

(continued from page 101)

"under threat of banishment and expropriation of goods." Rome fell, however, and pants remained.

In the centuries that followed, a kind of pan-European mode evolved, based on the old Roman tunic and a combination of breeches and hose. The Ninth Century writer, Eigenhart, reports that the Emperor Charlemagne's attire consisted simply of a shirt, drawers, tunic, stockings, leg-bandages, shoes and a sword-belt. But Charlemagne was far from a natty dresser, even for his time, and considered the inflow of Byzantine silks and finery essentially un-Frankish, an invitation to foppishness, and a threat to the Empire.

Though his son, Louis the Pious, wore gold-embroidered hose and encouraged a certain elegance among the nobility, it was Charles the Bald who first entered into active relations with the Byzantine Court, and thus opened the door to a kind of creeping dandyism which burgeoned during the periods of Charles the Fat, Charles the Simple, Louis the Stammerer and other leading spirits of the Dark Ages.

When feudalism was in flower, English pants were called "brechs," "breeks" and "hosen," and were denounced as evidence of worldly pride in Franciscan friars, who sometimes wore them to ankle length when chill winds blew "in harde weder." The secular accent was on long cloaks and fancy tunics, however, and it wasn't until plate armor began to replace chain mail in the Fourteenth Century that breeches and hose emerged from under medieval wraps, and the Golden Age of Pants was born.

Form-fitting breastplates and leg casings resulted in a shortening of the tunic and a display of skin-tight breeches and hose that captivated the young and caused the older generation to react with indignation and alarm. The St. Denis Chronicle of 1370 attributes the loss of the Battle of Crecy by the French to the Almighty's wrath at the brevity of their tunics, which were "so short as scarcely to reach their buttocks." The editor complains that a Frenchman bending over "reveals his breeks and what is inside them to those standing behind; and by the same token these garments are so tight that help is essential both for dressing and undressing, and when taken off it looks like skinning."

The picture becomes even more vivid when one considers that the current rage was for parti-colored hose, with each leg halved or quartered into various shades of red, yellow, green and black. To make matters worse, the doublet eventually shrank to the waist, and breeches and hose were joined in a one-piece garment that resembled our modern stretch-tights. Obviously something had to be done in the interests of common decency, and in the following century the Church responded with an order that the conspicuous fly-flaps had to be covered with a pouch, which the English called a "codpiece." This was but a garbled approximation of gaudipisse – a name the ever-resourceful French had concocted from equal parts of gaudir ("to make merry") and pisser ("to make water").

Never in the history of dress has there been such a miscarriage of modesty. In the process of hiding the fly-flaps, the codpiece merely created a new center of interest, which soon became a sort of Early Renaissance prestige symbol. To quote one commentator, the codpiece was padded and puffed until it was "as big as a baby's head," and "was finally decorated with bows to attract attention." Indeed, "so little opprobrium attached to this accessory of masculine costume that it served as a pocket in which a gentleman kept his pocket handkerchief and purse and even oranges, which he would pull out before the ladies' eyes and hand to them."

"As for my breeches, my great-aunt Laurentia long ago told me they were designed solely for the codpiece," Panurge declares in the third book of Gargantua and Pantagruel. "I believe this as implicitly as I believe gay old Galen, when . . . he tells us the head was designed for the eyes."

Rabelais, who wrote a chapter "Concerning the Supremacy of the Codpiece as Armored Protection," describes therein the anxious concern of My Lord of Merville's wife:

Her lord, bound for the wars, was fully armed,

Yet she observed his codpiece stood exposed.

"Protect what I love best, lest it be harmed,"

She wept, "I would not have it indisposed."

The good lady, "seeing that he was covering the staff of love and bundle of marriage with merely coat-of-mail . . . considered he took but scant care of them. Meditating at length thereon she decided he had much better shield and armor them behind a huge tilting-helmet which lay idle in his closet."

A tilting-helmet was small pumpkins, however, compared to the codpiece Rabelais fashioned for Gargantua: "In shape it resembled a buttress; it was most gallantly fastened to two handsome golden buckles, caught up by two enamelled clasps. Each had a large emerald, the size of an orange, set in it... The gibbosity or bulge of the codpiece stretched out about five and one-half feet; it was jagged and pinked, with flaring blue damask, like the breeches."

Though the prize for size must surely be awarded to Rabelais' fictional hero, the all-time trophy for carelessness belongs to one Hans von Schweinichen, a soberly factual diarist of the period, who relates that he had fifty gold pieces sewn into his sturdy German codpiece for safekeeping, and was surprised to find that they had been filched from his person while visiting Cologne.

The Fifteenth Century passion for padding took an almost equally bizarre turn in 1477, when the victorious Swiss arrayed themselves in the shreds and tatters of the Duke of Burgundy's tents and battle flags by slashing their breeches and sleeves, and stuffing them "with huge puffs of taffatee or linen." The resulting fad for slitted breeches, puffed out with contrasting materials, swept all Europe, and survives down to the present day in the traditional Swiss uniform of the Papal Guards. Nowhere did this fashion take hold as it did in Germany, where enormous knee-length breeches were stuffed with as many as two hundred ells of silk. The murmuring rustle when the wearer walked was likened to the sound of "the Elbe stream flowing under a bridge or over a weir."

France, Italy and Spain developed their own grandiose variations. In England, where padding was known as "bombasting" or "blistering," the style evolved into the short, balloon-like breeches one usually associates with full-length portraits of Sir Walter Raleigh. By then, the slits and slashings were often merely indicated in the fabric, and men were wont to:

Furnyshe forthe their pryde;

With woole, with flaxe, with hair also.

To make their bryches wyde.

So sang the anonymous balladeer in A Lamentable Complaint of the pore countrymen for the losse of their caltelle's Tails – the hair of which was used for stuffing. In Passions of the Minde, Thomas Wright dispassionately stated that he had once seen the actor, Tarlton, "play the clowne, and use no other breeches than such sloppes and slivings as now many gentlemen weare; they are almost capable of a bushel of wheate, and if they be of sackcloth, they would serve to carry mawlt to the mill."

The comment seems to have been taken more in the spirit of suggestion than satire, for breeches were later bombasted with a variety of cereals. The story is told of one fine gallant who snagged his breeches on a nail while paying court to a group of ladies, and suffered the embarrassment of having bran pour forth "as from a mill that was grinding, without his perceiving it, till half the cargo was unladen on the floor."

So popular were these "great, round, abominable breeches," that special scaffoldings had to be erected in Parliament (continued on page 108) Short History of Pants (continued from page 104) to accommodate members who could no longer fit in their seats, and legislation was passed to prevent shop-boys and apprentices from bombasting beyond their proper station in life. Holinshed chronicles the story of one Elizabethan lawbreaker who had padded his "extensive recepticles" with an inventory of household articles that included two sheets, two tablecloths, ten napkins, four shirts, a brush, a comb, a mirror and a few odd nightcaps.

The fashion for these aptly-named "trunk-hose" continued through the reign of James I, who was reluctant to relinquish padding of any sort because of his morbid fear of assassination "by the stilete." In Germany, meanwhile, padding had gradually disappeared from the voluminous breeches. They now hung limp and baggy under the richly descriptive name of Schlumperhosen.

A similar tendency to calculated droopiness was discernible throughout the Continent, and took a dashingly opulent form in the Cavalier mode affected by the English under Charles I. Broad-brimmed hats, ostrich plumes, floppy boots, Spanish rapiers and flaccid flounces made every man a D'Artagnan. His straight-cut breeches, trimmed with fringe, met lace-topped hose at the knee, as he sallied forth to meet the disapproving scowls of the Puritans and Roundheads.

With the rise of the Commonwealth, all such elegance went underground or into exile. While the Roundheads were not above a discreet show of lace at the boot-top, and sat through the Rump Parliament in what appear to be loose-kneed Bermuda shorts, the purer Puritans underplayed their pants with austere, dark breeches worn in solemn conjunction with plain white stockings, and limited their "vanitie" to Biblical texts embroidered on their underwear.

Stuart fripperies came back with a beribboned vengeance in the "petticoat-breeches" of the Restoration. These languid garments, brought over from France by the returning exiles, were among the fanciest pants of all time. About as long and as wide as kilts, they hung in frilly points about the knee, and were ornamented on either side by large bunches of gaily-colored ribbon. The exquisite's legs were further prettified by ruffled hose tops, and lace-fringed boots "turned down as low as his spurres, which jingled like the bells of a morrice-dancer as he walked."

Such was the contemporary Picture of an English Anticke, and the full effect of breeches, bows, plumes, periwig, muff and walking-stick was something to gladden the heart of a Pepys. But what with the Plague, the Great Fire of London and the Great Frost of 1683, sober second-thoughts seemed to be called for. Retrenchment set in, and the style eventually disappeared under the long, square-cut coats of the second James.

Across the Atlantic in the colonies, Elizabethan trunk-hose and bombasted "Spanish kettledrums" had long since been abandoned for more practical knee-breeches that were part Puritan and part Dutch knickerbocker. The sailor's loose, devil-may-care trousers had come ashore, and were to be seen on men plowing in Pennsylvania, or hoeing corn in the Carolinas. The pioneer in his wilderness had rediscovered the hide breeches of his Saxon ancestors, and had passed them on to the Indian, who added beads and fringe.

Though news of the latest fashions in London and Paris blew in with every ship, and were echoed in the dress of the gentry, instances of pants-across-the-sea were rare. Few flaunted the garish silk breeches that were so popular with the dandies of London's exclusive Macaroni Club. French polka dots and Italian candy stripes were a bit too Macaroni for the Yanke Doodle dandy. He stuck a feather in his hat, and just called it that.

Even the mother country railed against this aping of effete Continental fashions, as witnessed by the oddly hip-sounding title of an Eighteenth Century Treatise upon the Modes, or a Farewell to French Kicks. Nevertheless, it was France and her Revolution that put men into long pants, and carried the battle against knee-breeches to the barricades. Long, liberal pantaloons were favored over the spruce insolence of aristocratic breeches and hose, and sans culotte was the scornful epithet used by royalists to describe the revolutionary rabble. "Destitute of Breeches," Carlyle defined the term: "a mournful destitution; which however, if Twenty millions share it, may become more effective than most Possessions!"

One can only hasten to agree. The Revolution happily over, however, matters did not improve. "The Nation is for the present, figuratively speaking, naked," Carlyle announced in hoarse italics, "it has no rule or vesture; but is naked – a Sansculottic Nation."

To help mend the breach, the artist David was commissioned to design a new style in keeping with the principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. With poetic enthusiasm for the body beautiful and the gauzy grace of the free-living nymphs and warriors depicted on the friezes of ancient Greece, David tapered the male pantaloons into a skin-tight simulacrum of smooth white marble, and whipped up a sheer gown for the ladies that left them more naked than before.

While the gentlemen of the French Republic dampened their pants so the material would dry tight to the legs, the ladies dampened their diaphanous bodices to achieve the desired appearance of neo-Grecian nudity. All undemocratic shifts and corsets had been abandoned, and exposure was so extreme that women began wearing underpants – for the first time in history.

The rest of the Western world was scandalized. The very idea of pants for women was regarded as "utterly depraved, unnatural and vicious." The new flesh-colored tights and long, filmy pantaloons were considered more shocking than peek-a-boo nakedness, and only the French would indulge in such naughtiness. Indeed, one British authority states quite flatly that "Jane Austen's heroines never wore them" – a bit of information that not only serves to characterize the early Nineteenth Century attitude, but could very well put Pride and Prejudice back on the best-seller list.

It was at this period that women's pants were first discussed as "unmentionables," "unutterables," "inexpressibles," "indescribables," and "innominables" – leaving the modern male scholar to wonder just what the devil went on. Though the fashion eventually took hold in England and America, progress was slow. Underpants were not commonly worn by the socially-elect miss or mistress until 1850, with the middle class trailing by another ten years. Wives, mothers and sweethearts of the working class virtuously resisted wearing them until well into the 1870s.

The most celebrated advocate of mentionable pants for women was, of course, our very own Amelia Jenks Bloomer, of Seneca Falls, N.Y., who ventured forth one morning in 1851, wearing a pair of long, black pantaloons that should properly be called "millers," in honor of the woman who originated the style. By her own admission, Mrs. Bloomer was far more concerned with temperance and women's rights than she was with dress reform, and only took to wearing trousers as a gesture of approval for the fine work being done in that line by Elizabeth Smith Miller, who had been "wearing the costume for some two or three months at home and abroad."

That Mrs. Bloomer's millers and Mrs. Miller's bloomers did not succeed in getting beyond the novelty stage may be attributed to the rampant leg-phobia of Victorian women, who concealed table legs under floor-length covers and blushingly insisted that chairs had "limbs." By the time the mass-produced bicycle arrived at the close of the century, however, reformers and suffragettes had propagandized the philosophy of the New Woman to a point where spirited young ladies were eager to avail themselves of the two-wheeler's liberating possibilities. Donning divided skirts and knickerbockers, women pedaled off into the future at a fast clip, changing pants at each new milestone. From "rational" riding habits it was an easy transition to "sensible" hiking clothes, gymnasium bloomers, beach pajamas, slacks, jeans, toreador pants, pedal-pushers, shorts, short shorts and bikinis.

The toreador, ranch or Capri pants of today's women very nearly duplicate the sort of trousers worn by men in the period following the French Revolution. Knee-breeches lingered for a while to be worn by the elite for formal occasions, and by the military for all occasions. In the army, tightness was the order of the day, and many of Wellington's officers had themselves sewn into their pants each morning to ensure and absence of wrinkles. At the Battle of Waterloo, both sides wore pants so tight and white, it was impossible to either maneuver or die without running the risk of grass stains and split seams. A similar snugness was fancied in civilian trousers, together with a passion for pastel tones, which in France ranged from a soft, golden "Canary's Tail" to the delicate pink of "Agitated Nymph's Thigh."

Tucked into boots or gaiters, and worn with weskit and tail coat, the new trousers provided Mr. Pickwick with suitable attire for both town and country. In America they were generally looser fitting, and carried political connotations as glaring as those of a campaign badge. In the early years of the Nineteenth Century, you could tell a "democratic Republican" a block away by his new-fangled pantaloons, while Federalist sentiment was expressed in knee-breeches and hose. Only by putting party interests before personal preference could President Jefferson consent to hiding his shapely calves under the new "flapping pantaloons," which he wore until the day he died in 1826.

For the most part, the pants of the men who built America were all rather commodious. Farmers, lumberjacks, riverboat men and miners needed room, and a study of old prints would seem to suggest a formula of three parts of pants showing for every part tucked in the boot. Fit was of no major concern, just as long as there was enough of it, and britches had no special brand names – until, that is, a man named Strauss went West to pan gold and hit a bonanza in pants.

Strauss, who might be called the pecos Bill of the American pants industry, arrived in California a few months after the Forty-Niners, and a year before Mrs. Bloomer appeared on the streets of Seneca Falls in her "healthy, bifurcated garment." Like Mrs. Bloomer, Levi Strauss was to have his name immortalized by a new type of pants. Being a friendly sort of man, it was his first name – so we have "Levis" and not "Strausses."

The originals were made from a bundle of brown tent material Levi had brought from the East to sell as covered-wagon tops, in the hope of earning a grub-stake. But California already had wagon tops and tents in good supply. The need, he soon learned, was for pants – strong pants, that would withstand the wear and tear of digging in the hills. Confident that nothing was stronger than his tent material, Levi had a couple of experimental pairs made up, and gave one to a miner friend.

"Look at these pants of Levi's," the old codger bragged to his confreres, "Doggone if a man ever had pants as strong as these before."

Word-of-mouth advertising being what it is, it wasn't long before the pick-and-shovel set would wear no other pants but Levis, and young Strauss found that he had struck gold, smack-dab in the middle of San Francisco. In time, rivers were added to cut down on the torn pockets miners got from bulging them out with specimen rocks. An indigo-blue dye was used to replace the original variety of colors, and Levis were on their way to becoming the most uniquely American pants in history.

Back East, the posh trousers of the fashionable urban gentleman reflected the tailoring of Savile Row. During the first half of the century they were sometimes strapped under the instep, and sometimes worn tapered tight to the ankle in the manner approved by Beau Brummell. Braces were favored over the more plebeian belt, despite the fact that their first appearance had been accompanied by dire predictions that they would "enfeeble men's shoulders, exaggerate the belly, and weaken the human race."

Apart from a general loosening, the past hundred years have produced few major changes: the removal of the in-step-strap, the use of darker materials to match the jacket and vest, the introduction of front creases, and tailored cuffs.

The most recent innovation is the front crease, which originated with packing methods used by manufacturers of ready-made clothing after the Civil War, and was permanently pressed into place by the invention of the modern pants-hanger. Though the evolution of the cuff can be traced to the practice of turning up the leg bottoms to keep them from getting muddy and wet, no one seems to be certain just when the first pair was tacked into place, or for whom. A lengthy and somewhat emotional debate on the subject, conducted in the readers' column of The London Times, ended in attributing the "turn-up" to one Mr. Aloysius Bredloser, who performed his own makeshift alterations in 1858, after skipping out of an Albemarle Street clothing shop without paying.

Such obvious levity regarding so important a matter is not typical of the British, who are apt to take their pants quite seriously, and insist upon calling them trousers. A recent Associated Press story about a West End tailor named Featherstonehaugh, is a case in point. "In Mr. Featherstonehaugh's haut monde, only the vulgar, a few Burmese and untraveled Americans refer to trousers as pants," we are told, and Mr. Featherstonehaugh "shudders at what he considers this un-British and monstrous misuse of nouns."

In all justice to Mr. F., it must be admitted that "pants" is the more colloquial and come-lately term, being a mere abbreviation of "pantaloons"-a name made popular by the traditional Italian comedy character, Pantalone, whose pants were of the sort worn by the poor in Venice, the city of Saint Pantaleone.

The Lowland Scot military man still refers to his long tartan trousers by the ancient name of trews, however, and holds them to be every bit as venerable as the Highland kilt. The age-old rivalry between trousered and kilted Celts broke out in a first-class ruckus, a few years back, when the Highland Light Infantry and the Lowland Royal Scot Fusiliers were merged into one regiment, and ordered to decide upon a common uniform. The Highlanders insisted upon keeping their kilts, and the Lowlanders demanded that they be allowed to continue wearing trews. Weeks of top-level negotiation shortened tempers and deepened the deadlock. Prime Minister Macmillan interceded with a plea that "all concerned apply themselves in all earnestness" to settling the issue. Four months passed, mutinous rumblings were heard in the ranks, and the War Office finally stepped in with a command decision for trews. In the ensuing dudgeon, Major General Urquhart of the Highland regiment, and Major General Edmund Hakewell Smith of the Fusiliers tendered their resignations, and Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery hotly declared at Christmas dinner that both "should have their heads banged together."

This is the sort of spirited clothes-consciousness we have come to cherish and admire in the great Commonwealth of Nations that has given us our plus fours, jodhpurs, tennis flannels, morning pants, and two kinds of walking shorts: Bermudas and Jamaicas. For the British are, above all others, the avec culottes of the world. In a report by The Christian Science Monitor, a spokesman for Britain's clothing manufacturers is quoted as stating that Englishmen's "trousers are in fact their country's flag."

Hoisting our own proud buntings to full mast, it behooves each of us to recall the debt we owe to the anonymous creator of the cuff, the manufacturer who first thought of using slide fasteners to replace the four-button fly, and the designer who so carefully planned our pockets, with a small tab over the one on the left hip to baffle pickpockets intent upon stealing our pocket handkerchief. Most beguiling of all, though, is the little watch pocket that survives as a charming anachronism in an era of self-winding wristwatches. What can one possibly use it for? To carry a lucky coin, perhaps – not much more, for its capacity would be exhausted by two teabags or a few ukulele picks.

In our own watch pocket, we have been carrying around a clipping from The New York Times, which cites a report made by three Swedish scientists who believe that "the wearing of trousers may be more dangerous to future generations than the fall-out from atomic and hydrogen bombs." The reason, they state, is that "Tight clothing, such as trousers ... increases body heat around the male sperm-producing cells. The heat, in turn, speeds up the rate of mutations in the genes," with results that "might imply genetical hazards one hundred to one thousand times greater than those estimated form different sources of radiation."

As an alternative. Drs. Ehrenberg, Hedgren and von Ehrenstein "suggested changes in men's clothing similar to the kilt, or else trousers fitted with a codpiece, a flap on the front, such as was used in medieval Europe."

On the basis of what we now know about codpieces, it's doubtful whether this "accessory of masculine costume" could ever achieve full consumer acceptance in the modest atmosphere of the Twentieth Century, no matter what the hazards from radiation. The kilt, on the other hand, would present its own drawbacks. A man could no longer sprawl his legs or cross his knees in public, without being on the constant quivive – to say nothing of having to hold down his skirt when the wind blew "in harde weder."

Personally, we like our pants, and don't intend to be panicked out of them until the doctors' findings are thoroughly checked. If worst comes to worst, perhaps a new kind of civil-defense program might do the trick – daily drills in which the male population would retired to air-conditioned shelters for a brief cooling-off period.

In order to prevent any awkward confusion, we would have to synchronize signals, of course. When the alert sounded all men would proceed to shelter. At the merry blast of an "All Clear," they would then drop everything, and quiely await the final signal – a discreetly warbled warning to "Take Cover" before returning to the street.