Already a subscriber? Log in
Thus improved, trousers were adopted enthusiastically by officers in smart regiments. Indeed the British army to this day retains the narrow, close-fitting trousers for its evening wear or ‘Patrols’, pulled down by the instep strap, now made of elastic. As I found when I was in the army, the effect of the strap gives you a great feeling of confidence, which no other garment quite matches. Of course, you have to have reasonable legs. It is a curious fact of fashion history that, until the third decade of the 20th century, women’s legs (except of course dancers’ and whores’) were rarely exposed above the ankle. It was the men who had to sport handsome legs with shapely calves, which were the subject of admiring or even lubricious comment among the ladies. Male legs were important even in the days of breeches, but the arrival of narrow, stretched trousers ‘raised the ante’, as gamblers say. There is a daring large watercolour by Edward Burney, Fanny’s cousin, done in the stretched-trouser epoch, about 1820, and now in the V&A, showing fashionable girls giggling behind their fans as they survey the legs and arses of the young men at a music-party. In one of his rambling books, Thomas De Quincey has a comical passage about Wordsworth’s legs. He said that nobody had a better pair of legs than Wordsworth for climbing Lakeland fells or covering long distances over roads and moors, but they did not do so well at evening parties. He said it was a pity Wordsworth did not have two pairs of legs, one for walks and the other for display. This jeu d’esprit caused mortal offence at Rydal Mount.
When trousers first appeared in the 1790s, they were banned by monarchs in many territories as ugly and subversive. Then, in the mid-1820s, by which time the stretched effect had taken hold, the Pope banned them again as sexually suggestive and fatal to female honour. Neither prohibition had any perceptible effect. By the end of the decade trousers had become universal in the West and they have never since relaxed their grip on male attire.
However, it is worth adding that trousers of one kind or another had always been worn in various places in the world, both in primitive and advanced societies. Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall, wrote that ‘The Emperor Tetricus …as well as his son, whom he had created Augustus, were dressed in Gallic trousers, a saffron tunic, and a robe of purple.’ Trousers of a sort were characteristic of Celtic societies, eventually taking the form of ‘trews’, which are a tartan alternative to the kilt. I possess a pair of trews, in MacDonald hunting tartan, which I had made many years ago at that splendid emporium of Highland fashion, Fraser’s in Beauly. They are very smart indeed, when I can get into them.
All the same, there is something of low comedy about trousers and always has been. About 1805, in one of his letters, Charles Lamb notes that his young friend Robert Lloyd had been bitterly criticised by his Quaker parents for wearing ‘fastidious trousers’. It is not clear whether this was a technical fashion term for an outré garment or reflected the disgust of the senior Lloyds. But it is a good, risible word. I wish young men today were more inclined to wear fastidious trousers. As it is, men’s fashions oscillate uneasily between ‘Oxford bags’ and drainpipes, both hideous. A photograph survives in the archives, circa 1925, showing two undergraduates wearing bags over 24 inches wide. But I think this was a stunt.
The loss of trousers during amorous cavortings became a stock episode in French farce from about 1840, and once actually happened to Victor Hugo. It happened to an American president, too, though in more decorous circumstance. John Quincy Adams, president in the 1820s, hated Washington’s summer humidity and used to take an early morning swim in the Potomac, stark naked, attended by his black servant Antoine in a canoe. The Potomac was by no means a tame river and on 13 June 1825 the President was nearly drowned when the canoe was capsized by a fierce breeze in midstream. Adams lost his coat, waistcoat and one shoe, and had to run back to the White House without his trousers.
And that reminds me: what did Jane Austen and Bill Clinton have in common? A corridor. During most of her writing life, poor Jane had no room of her own and had to write in a corridor, convenient when the house was silent, but a passageway at other times, so that she had to cover up her manuscript when she heard someone approach. Oddly enough, the couplings of President Clinton, such being the public nature and geography of the White House, also had to take place in a corridor, similarly (if rarely) subject to interruption. Hearing noises, the President was forced to zip up his trousers, just as Jane had to conceal the pages of her current novel. Jane once memorably observed, ‘Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.’ Ceteris paribus and allowing for the standards of different epochs, Clinton’s awkward interruptions were precisely the ‘follies and nonsense’ which would have made Jane Austen laugh.
Also in Society
Also by Paul Johnson
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in