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Clothes will always tend to follow the dictates of utility, which means victory for demotic. Take trousers. These came in for the French during the early 1790s, when it became dangerous to brand yourself as an aristo by wearing culottes (breeches) and silk stockings. The rough-wear trousers worn by peasants and workmen, the sans-culottes, became the norm. The Whigs, led by Charles James Fox, who, despite his ugliness, occupied a key position in society, began to wear trousers in the late 1790s, as well as to scrap wigs and cut their hair short. Early trousers were rough and ugly. Then along came Beau Brummell, who introduced the ribbon instep which pulled trousers tight and made the garment ultra-fashionable among all aspiring young men. Ladies learned to admire men’s legs in consequence, or condemn them (cf. the inflammatory passage in De Quincey about the ugliness of Wordsworth’s legs, as a result of which sister Dorothy never spoke to him again). This unhealthy interest in men’s legs, as the stiffer element saw it, led Pope Pius VII, just after the end of the Napoleonic wars, to condemn the wearing of trousers as a mortal sin. But that, naturally, didn’t work.
A similar process of prolerise determined the nature of what women wore under their skirts. Ladies in Jane Austen’s day might wear many layers of petticoats but nothing in the nature of what we would call knickers or panties — nothing close-fitting, that is. This gave bawdy artists such as Rowlandson the opportunity to bare all when a lady was upturned, as his famous drawing of the Royal Academy reception, ‘The Stare-case’, shows. The only two categories of women whose activities made necessary a special covering for their private parts were stage dancers and prostitutes. They wore ‘drawers’. But this proletarian garment was gradually adopted by ladies from the mid-1820s.
A similar development to the donning of trousers took place over the century 1850 to 1950, this time America leading the way. From at least the 17th century, the French town of Nîmes had manufactured a hard-wearing cotton-twill weave fabric of white and blue threads. This was known as serge de Nîmes, shortened to denims or denim. It was particularly favoured by the sailors of the Italian seaport of Genoa, or Gênes as the French pronounced it. Hence their utilitarian trousers or ducks were called jeans. A Bavarian ready-made tailor called Levi Strauss, born we don’t know when (he survived until 1902), arrived in San Francisco during the wild boom that followed the discovery of gold in California in 1849. He began to produce hard-wearing clothes for the ‘Forty-Niners’ to wear at the diggings, and for this purpose imported denim cloth from France and made it up into trousers. Photographs survive of them being worn, rather wide like the original bags of the sans-culottes. They were so successful that in 1872 Strauss took out a patent for the trade name Levis. The next year he took for partner a tailor called Jacob Davis, who introduced copper rivets at the stress points of Levis. The evolution of this strictly practical mining garment into the tight-fitting fashionable trousers of today is a classic case of prolerise.
Balenciaga, last of the great couturiers, was always looking for ideas from the pègre (scum, underworld) he could turn into high fashion. He loved the beret from his own Basque country. He did not despise middle-class innovations, either. He brought in the square, tufted, rough worked and brightly coloured shopping basket carried by St Margaret in Zurbaran’s superb painting of her in the London National Gallery — still in vogue. But of course he also dealt in aristo emblems he found in the paintings of Velazquez and Goya of the Spanish court. And it’s true that ideas come down the social scale, too. In about 1750 the Earl of Sandwich introduced cuts of beef between two slices of bread because he was too busy gambling at Brooks’s to eat a proper dinner. And in the winter of 1854–55, cavalry officers in the Crimea wore long-sleeved military jackets of knitted worsted, trimmed with fur or braid and buttoned down the front, which went under the name of the commander of the Light Brigade, the Earl of Cardigan. This eventually, minus the collar, was taken up by civilians. Then again, there was the Norfolk jacket, worn by the duke of that name c. 1875, and last made fashionable by George Bernard Shaw, though I seem to recall Ralph Lauren of New York persuaded Fifth Avenue women to wear it in the 1980s.
As a rule, though, prolerise is the way things go. I would like to read a cultural his-tory of mankind based on this principle. It underlines, for instance, much of the history recorded in the Old Testament. The Jewish high priests fought desperately against cultural pollution from the neighbouring peoples, fearing not so much kings of Israel or Judah who took pagan wives, like King Solomon, because that could easily be dealt with and stamped on (witness Jezebel, fed to dogs), as ordinary Jews adopting utilitarian non-Kosher ideas and knick-knacks. Delilah, no lady she, was a prototype of the philistine prolerise, cultural den-mother of novelty-hungry Jews like Samson. But the warnings of the prophets had no more effect than the rantings of the Forty Immortals in France.
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