Trousers

• 1. Introduction

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  Trousers were once the mark of a barbarian. Republican Rome looked at the draped robes of Greek and Minoan culture and called them civilization, then looked at people who covered each leg separately and saw the edge of the known world. Yet the oldest known trousers, pulled from mummies at the Yanghai cemetery in Turpan, Xinjiang, date to somewhere between the thirteenth and the tenth century BC. They were made of wool, with straight legs and wide crotches, and they were likely made for horseback riding. Older still are the trouser-like leggings worn by Otzi, found on the Austria-Italy border and dated to between 3350 and 3105 BC. This is the story of a garment that began as the uniform of mounted nomads and ended as the most ordinary thing a person can put on. How did a single English word travel from the Scottish Highlands? Why did empires fear it, churches debate it, and parliaments legislate over it? And why, after thousands of years, does the question of who is allowed to wear trousers still reach courtrooms?

• 2. A Word From The Highlands

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  In Scotland, Highlanders wore a kind of tartan trousers called trews, or in the original Gaelic, triubhas, as an alternative to the Great Plaid. That Gaelic word is the source of the English word trousers. Trews are still sometimes worn instead of the kilt at ceilidhs and weddings. The Scots even kept a trace of the original sound. Because Scots did not fully undergo the Great Vowel Shift, the standard form trousers is sometimes pronounced in a way that retains the vowel of the Gaelic triubhas it came from.

  Dialect splits the family of words in ways that can trip a traveler. In North America, Australia, and South Africa, pants is the broad category, while trousers, or slacks, often points more specifically to tailored garments with a waistband, belt-loops, and a fly-front. An elastic-waist knitted garment would be called pants in those places, but not trousers. In Scotland, the same items are also known as breeks, the cognate of breeches, and there the word pants means the garment worn underneath.

  Undergarments carry their own dense vocabulary. North Americans call them underwear, underpants, undies, or panties, the last being women's garments specifically. The term drawers usually means undergarments, though in some dialects it can stand in for breeches, in which case underdrawers names the inner layer. Australians reach for under-dacks, undies, dacks, or jocks, New Zealanders for undies or dacks, and in India the word is innerwear. There is a grammatical quirk underneath all of this. Trousers and pants are pluralia tantum, nouns that appear only in plural form, like scissors and tongs, which is why a pair of trousers is the usual correct phrasing.

• 3. From Barbarian Dress To Empire

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  Trousers enter recorded history in the sixth century BC, on the rock carvings and artworks of Persepolis, and through the horse-riding Eurasian nomads who turn up in Greek ethnography. Iranian peoples such as the Scythians, Sarmatians, Sogdians, and Bactrians wore them, as did Armenians and Eastern and Central Asian peoples such as the Xiongnu. Among these early wearers, trousers were worn by people of any gender. The Greeks coined terms for them, anaxyrides for the trousers of Eastern nations and sarabara for the loose trousers of the Scythians, yet they refused to wear them, finding them ridiculous. As a slang insult they used thulakos, meaning sack, for the baggy trousers of Persians and other Middle Easterners.

  Rome changed its mind for a practical reason. As the empire expanded beyond the Mediterranean basin, the greater warmth of trousers led to their adoption despite the old contempt. Two types took hold. The feminalia fit snugly and usually reached the knee or mid-calf, while the braccae were loose-fitting and closed at the ankle. Both were borrowed originally from the Celts of Europe, with later familiarity with the Persian Near East and the Germanic peoples easing their acceptance. Each began as a military garment before spreading to civilian dress, eventually made in leather, wool, cotton, and silk.

• 4. The Hidden Layer

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  Loose-fitting trousers were worn in Byzantium under long tunics, and many tribes wore them too, including the Germanic tribes who migrated into the Western Roman Empire. The fourth-century costumes recovered from the Thorsberg peat bog survive as relics of this period. These medieval trousers, generally called braies, varied in length, were often closed at the cuff, and sometimes had attached foot coverings. Open-legged versions appear on the Norman soldiers of the Bayeux Tapestry.

  By the eighth century there is evidence of two layers of trousers worn together, especially among upper-class males. Over the under layer went trousers of wool or linen, which in the tenth century began to be called breeches in many places. Charlemagne, who lived from 742 to 814, is recorded to have habitually worn trousers, putting on the Byzantine tunic only for ceremonies. Yet the pull of the Roman past and the example of Byzantium pushed men toward long tunics, which hid most of the trousers and slowly turned them into an undergarment.

  Fashion at court eventually dragged the hidden layer back into view. In the fourteenth century, noble and knightly men began connecting their hose directly to their pourpoints, the padded under jacket worn beneath armoured breastplates. In the fifteenth century, rising hemlines shrank the drawers until the most fashionable elites dispensed with them and joined their skin-tight hose into trousers. We would call these tights, but they were still called hose, and they were conspicuous for an open crotch covered by a separately fastening panel, the codpiece. In fifteenth-century Hungary, men wore a shirt and trousers as underwear beneath a dolman, with simple trousers whose only unusual feature was their colour.

• 5. Breeches, Decrees, And Revolt

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  Around the turn of the sixteenth century, hose were split into two pieces. The upper part, running from waist to crotch, was called trunk hose, which soon reached down the thigh to fasten below the knee and took the name breeches. By the end of the century the codpiece had been folded into breeches that featured a fly or fall front opening. Breeches were the garment of higher-class men in early modern Europe, where trousers were otherwise the everyday lower-body clothing for adult males.

  Rulers and revolutions both used trousers to make a point. As a modernization measure, Tsar Peter the Great of Russia issued a decree in 1701 commanding every Russian man, except clergy and peasant farmers, to wear Western dress, with the upper dress of French or Saxon cut and the lower dress of the German type. During the French Revolution of 1789, many male citizens adopted a working-class costume with ankle-length trousers, or pantaloons, named after a Commedia dell'Arte character called Pantalone, in place of aristocratic knee-breeches called culottes. The new garment broke with the old in three ways. It was loose where breeches had been form-fitting, it was ankle length where breeches had been knee-length for over two centuries, and it was open at the bottom where breeches were fastened.

  The style crossed the Channel and went mainstream. Pantaloons became fashionable in Regency England, introduced by Beau Brummell, who lived from 1778 to 1840, and by mid-century they had supplanted breeches as fashionable street-wear. Breeches survived as court dress and in baggy mid-calf versions known as plus-fours or knickers, still worn by fencers, baseball and American football players, and equestrians. Sailors helped spread trousers worldwide, wearing baggy ones called galligaskins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and pioneering jeans made of denim, which grew popular in the late nineteenth-century American West for their ruggedness.

• 6. Who Is Allowed To Wear Them

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  Around the mid-nineteenth century, the Wigan pit-brow women scandalized Victorian society by wearing trousers for their work at local coal mines. They wore skirts over the trousers and rolled them to their waists to keep them out of the way, because sorting and shovelling coal in long skirts would have hindered their movements. Eastern culture later inspired the French designer Paul Poiret, who lived from 1879 to 1944, to design trousers for women. In 1913 he created loose, wide-leg harem pants based on the costumes of the ballet Sheherazade, which Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote in 1888 from a collection of Middle Eastern legends called 1001 Arabian Nights.

  The twentieth century turned trousers into a frontier of women's rights, won one defiance at a time. In 1919, Luisa Capetillo became the first woman in Puerto Rico to wear trousers in public and was sent to jail before the charges were dropped. Photographs of actresses Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn in trousers during the 1930s helped make them acceptable. In Britain during World War II, clothing rationing led women to wear their husbands' trousers to work, and by the summer of 1944 sales of women's trousers were five times the previous year's. In the 1960s, Andre Courreges introduced long trousers for women as a fashion item, opening the era of the pantsuit.

  Government chambers fell slowly. In 1969, Representative Charlotte Reid became the first woman to wear trousers in the US Congress, and in 1989 California state senator Rebecca Morgan became the first to do so in a US state senate. Women were barred from wearing trousers on the US Senate floor until 1993, when Senators Barbara Mikulski and Carol Moseley Braun wore them in defiance; the rule was amended that year by Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Martha Pope to allow trousers worn with a jacket. In Malawi, a 1965 law barred women from wearing trousers until 1994 under President Kamuzu Banda. Since 2004 the International Skating Union has allowed women to wear trousers instead of skirts in competition.

• 7. Trousers On Trial

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  In Sudan in July 2009, thirteen women, including the journalist Lubna al-Hussein, were arrested in Khartoum for wearing trousers under Article 152 of the Penal Code, which prohibits obscene outfits in public. Ten of them pleaded guilty and were flogged with ten lashes and fined 250 Sudanese pounds each. Al-Hussein, who considers herself a good Muslim, said Islam does not say whether a woman can wear trousers, and that flogging does not hurt but is insulting. She was eventually found guilty and fined the equivalent of $200 rather than flogged.

  A courtroom in Italy turned a pair of jeans into a legal argument. In Rome in 1992, a 45-year-old driving instructor was accused of raping an 18-year-old during her first driving lesson. Though he was convicted, the Supreme Court of Cassation overturned the conviction in 1998 because the victim wore tight jeans, reasoning that she must have helped remove them, which the court treated as consent. The day after the decision, women in the Italian Parliament protested by wearing jeans and holding placards reading Jeans: An Alibi for Rape. The protest crossed the Atlantic. Patricia Giggans, executive director of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, made Denim Day an annual event, and wearing jeans on the 22nd of April became an international symbol of protest. In 2008 the Supreme Court of Cassation overturned the earlier ruling, ending the denim defense.

  In the United States, the fight ran the other direction, toward banning sagging trousers. In May 2004 in Louisiana, state legislator Derrick Shepherd proposed making it a crime to wear trousers below the waist and expose skin or intimate clothing, but the bill did not pass. In February 2005, Virginia legislators tried a similar law carrying a $50 fine; it passed the House of Delegates, but critics argued it would mostly penalize young African-American men and amount to racial discrimination, and the state senators voted it down. California took the opposite stance, with Government Code Section 12947.5 expressly protecting the right to wear pants, so the standard state discrimination complaint form even includes an option for being denied the right to wear pants.

• 8. Faith, Pockets, And Fit

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  Some groups read Deuteronomy 22:5, which forbids a woman to wear a man's apparel, as a reason women should not wear trousers, among them the Amish, Hutterites, some Mennonites, some Baptists, and most Orthodox Jews, though they permit hidden underpants. Many Muslim sects approve of trousers as more modest than a short skirt, while some mosques require ankle-length trousers for everyone on the premises. The Catholic Pope Nicholas I took a relaxed view. In 866 he wrote to the Bulgar Kahn that whether you or your women wear pants neither impedes your salvation nor leads to any increase of your virtue, then praised the spiritual pants of a temperate life.

  Pockets reveal an inequality stitched into the garment itself. Men's trousers generally carry pockets for wallets, keys, or phones, while women's trousers often lack them, sometimes offering only Potemkin pockets, a fake slit sewn shut. In 2018, journalists at The Pudding found that fewer than half of women's front pockets could fit a thin wallet, and that on average the pockets in women's jeans were 48 percent shorter and 6.5 percent narrower than men's. The French designer Christian Dior allegedly captured the old logic in 1954, saying men have pockets to keep things in, women for decoration.

  Keeping trousers up and keeping them fitting are their own quiet engineering problems. A belt through belt loops was once acceptable only for casual or work trousers, while suit and formal trousers were suspended by braces buttoned to the waistband, a method still preferred by adherents of classical British tailoring who find it more comfortable. Fit is harder to maintain than in many garments, since girth can be let out only so far, though higher-quality trousers hide extra fabric in the centre-back seam allowance for exactly that purpose. Far from a courtroom or a coal mine, the future of any pair of trousers may simply be a hem let down during a growth spurt, or a pair of scissors turning worn-out legs into cut-offs.