Trousers, Pants, and Hose

In this chapter, rather than attempting a comprehensive history of a garment, I have instead reflected on moments of change which I hope shed light on the evolution of trousers while also underlining how processes of cultural exchange, fashion diffusion, taste formation, as well as functional and aesthetic developments have inflected on men’s dress more widely. As we have seen, garments often shift from one context to another and take on new meanings. The emergence of the doublet and hose as fourteenth century princely fashion had its origins in knightly underwear, while the hardwearing jeans of nineteenth century American miners have transformed today into sought-after Japanese selvedge denim, elastane-enriched skinnies, and in the case of Arvind Mills an expanding Indian industry. Styles bubble up from workwear and sportswear to be absorbed into formal vocabularies of dress.

Accounts of men’s fashion sometimes lean on such notions as ‘rationality’ and ‘practicality’: there is a feeling that menswear (that is western Euromodern menswear) is governed by ‘common sense’, its global hegemony predestined and inevitable. This teleological attitude ignores the hybrid and historically contingent development of many menswear staples – not least trousers – which from their earliest incarnation have been associated with movement and migration, spread by nomadic steppe people as an equestrian technology.

Meanwhile, writing, as I am, in 30º Centigrade heat, I am reminded that neither jeans nor tailored trousers are particularly practical in all contexts, rather, contemporary men’s dress is dictated at least as much by social norms relating to appropriateness and modesty as practical considerations: the besuited man sweating on a sweltering underground train typifies the degree to which a rhetoric of rationality belies an irrational reality.

Given this chapter’s focus on bifurcated menswear, issues of masculinity and the body must also be crucial to the story. Whether capacious or tight, clothing always exists in relation to the human body and competing notions of gender, embodiment and sexuality are played out in the fashions of the age. Today, fitted sportswear and the experiments of avant-garde designers draw attention to the male form, but the strange prudishness that seen in contemporary attitudes to ‘body-conscious’ menswear reflects the degree to which masculinity today is contested, unsettled, and in flux. Split garments worn on the lower part of our bodies – trousers, shorts, hose, breeches, and plus fours – have existed in a panoply of differing forms for at least 3000 years: how will they continue to develop as society and technologies evolve in the future?