Thread by @CZEdwards

#TailorSnarkWars

**Battle 7.1: Pants Planet In the Beginning**
Battle 7.2: Rubber, Plumbing, Roadsters: 20th Century Pants
Battle 7.3: Everybody Else Is Doing It

Long promised, fully overdue, women & trousers.

I will consistently use the term trousers to refer to the outer garment consisting of two tubes of fabric that join at the torso. I will use culturally appropriate terms when referring to specific garments, but mostly, they’re just trousers.

While pants has fewer characters, it means undergarments for a considerable part of the world. Less ambiguity in language, please. A legging means a long tube garment that covers from waist/hip to foot; leggings include the crotch seam.

In this one, I’m mostly talking about western Europe, from ~435 CE to now. Western Europe is NOT the center of the world, but it is the historical antecedent to the Hillary pantsuit, so we need the basics. If we were wearing shalwar kameez, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

Women have been wearing trousers since they were invented, in whatever culture, in whatever time, assuming trousers were *practical* for what women wanted to do with their clothes and bodies.

But trousers aren’t always all that practical, given conditions in most of history.

We know that trousers have been re-invented several times. Otzi, the 5000 year old frozen dead guy found on the Swiss-Italian border? He’s wearing a kinda proto trouser. (His goatskin leggings are on bottom right, his loincloth - of sheepskin! Wool inside! Oo! - is bottom left.)

Or... a breech clout and a legging on each leg, held up by a suspender. (Garter belt for Americans.) Kinda like chaps? That’s the first trouser, every single time. Assless chaps and a loincloth.
Modern reinterpretation. Jacket, loin cloth, chaps.

Pre-history in the snowy parts of Europe must have looked like a leather fetish bar on $1 Kamikaze Shots night.

Fitting the crotch seam (navel to ass crack) is the difficult part of pants; else, they’re 2 tubes of fabric. The simplest trousers/pants are still two tubes of fabric, with a drawstring waist & no crotch seam. Also known as bloomers/pantaloons. A little shaping, not much.

BTW: No, they’re rarely sexy. They are relatively convenient, pretty good at mediating chafing, and relatively airy, but they’re a pretty specific niche item as sexy underwear goes... (Let’s not forget can-can. That’s what they were wearing...)

The big issue wasn’tt figuring out how to shape & sew that seam (though it wastes fabric to cut big curves, good pivot scissors that cut curves easily were only invented in 1761, & crotch blowout is ALWAYS a thing) but how to keep trousers up.

Which is harder than it looks.

Let’s talk real quick about cloth.
2 types: woven & knit. Knitting is really old. Yet, not; we’ve got one ancient Egyptian sock, a couple of Roman references (soldiers in York asking their families to send them socks because YORK in WINTER is COLD) & a few nalbinding samples.

(Nalbinding isn’t strictly knitting; it’s likely what came before both crochet & knitting, if evolution favored making stuff that NEVER EVER unravels. It’s fairly fast, not labor intensive. That it’s not dominant is... interesting.)

We have tons of woven foot & leg covering.

We don’t know if knitted garments just wore out (probably) or if they were harder to make in sufficient quantities (likely) because it takes longer to knit a garment in the round than weave the same quantity of yarn. We know a lot of people wore woven clothes...

despite those same clothes being far functionally better when knit. Woven leggings (before Spandex) and socks are not nearly as good as knit ones.

Actually, they sucked. A lot.

But... like Betamax vs VHS...

The simplest weaving runs a bunch of really long, strong threads away from you, and ties them all to something solid. Then you tie the odd numbered other ends to one stick, and the even numbers to another stick, and keep it all under tension.

You separate them up & down, pass a ball of acceptable but doesn’t have to be fabulous thread between them, switch which stick is on top & send the ball back to the other hand.

This takes more hands than we have. We used feet, teeth, backs, trees, kids, frames. Sometimes dogs.

Repeat a billion times. Squish all the threads together sometimes. Make improvements. Over centuries.

Textiles are hard fucking work. Always have been.

It’s our species’ primary technology, along with fire & wheels.

(N & S America used FAR more textiles than wheels.)

(And this description of weaving is like saying a 2018 BMW engine causes a few drops of gasoline to explode inside a chamber at precisely the right time. This is technically correct and leaves out almost everything. Loom tech makes internal combustion look like kindergarten.)

VOCAB:
Long strong threads? WARP.
Ball of thread that goes back & forth? WEFT.
Edges where ball makes U turns? That’s the Self Edge, or SELVEDGE. Selvedge is critical to fabric. It keeps the fabric from falling apart.
Cut on the diagonal, you make BIAS.

Remember this.

The third reason there’s maybe little old knitting is because the ability to spin LOTS of long string that won’t break under tension is ALSO relatively new. It can be done with a drop spindle/distaff & women WERE doing it, but in a market where there’s huge demand ...

...for that strong thread, the weavers got it before the knitters. Weft quality thread doesn’t need to withstand as much tension. We can tolerate a LOT more inconsistency in weft thread than warp. Weft thread *can* be knitted.

...

Knitting itself can tolerate inconsistent yarn, but knitWEAR can’t, especially on feet & knees.
OTOH, weft yarn can be nalbound v well . It’s ideal for it, because weft does short pieces well & nalbinding is all about turning short threads into stretchy garments that don’t ravel.

(I don’t know why nalbinding died out. It’s not a labor or materials issue. Big mystery.)

Yeah, there’s an economic incentive to NOT marry if you’re a great spinster who can crank out warp thread. Good spinning takes concentration; weft you can do with cranky babies around.

Let’s also not forget: weaving is fast.

It takes a day(12 hrs) to set up a loom for 25 yards.

A professional weaver can weave that in about 36 hours of work.

Even a professional knitter cannot manufacture the same amount of cloth from the same amount of yarn in 48 hours.

Speed is the essence of war, and also textiles.

A knitted stocking/legging/undergarment is more comfortable than a woven one, but a knitted stocking was then 2x more expensive; a legging 3-4x, and the undergarment may be 5x more expensive, if it could be found at all.

Trousers are slow to show up in most western historical contexts for 3 reasons:
1. snow
2. Sanitation
3. Loom width

Here’s the thing with trousers, which any person who has ever lived in a cold climate can tell you: when your ankles get wet, you’re kinda miserable. Water-proofing, in most of history, is aspirational, not descriptive.

When your feet are cold & wet & stay that way?

You get either chilblains (raw spots) or frostbite.

Without good ways to warm up & dry out, this becomes gangrene & without antibiotics, you die.
Central heating, like waterproofing, was mostly aspirational. Even for the Romans.

Wanna stay warm when the climatologist who won’t be born for 1500 years is calling your local weather a “Little Ice Age”?

Two tubes of a single layer of fabric that requires you to flash your ass every time you wanna pee is not going to help you prevent death from cold.

You wanna keep your body heat inside your clothes, so we start with layers. You’re gonna wear a long, big, shirt, almost to your knees. Over that, you’re gonna add a plain sash at the waist, to keep your shirt close to your body & give you a place to tie shit on.

Next you wrap your feet & legs in 2-3 layers of good wool strips, and drape another long garment over you, one with sleeves & a skirt from waist to knees or calves. The bell of a skirt keeps all your bits a lot warmer than if they’re in individual tubes of one layer of cloth.

Fine. Call it a kilt, a houppelande, a cotehardie. WHATEVA.

It’s a skirt, you misogynist. Get over yourself, stop being afraid of comfy garments. Having worn both knee length skirts & tights, and wool trousers, in sub-zero weather: skirts are warmer, for longer.

But you said cold ankles—
I said layers of wool. Imagine bandaging each leg from thighs/knees to toes, with slightly stretchy wool strips ~4-8 inches wide. Min 2 layers. Sounds like a PITA, and it probably was (this didn’t last forever, obvs)... but layered wool keeps you warm.

And also cool & dry. Which is why we still make good socks of wool, even with wicking fabrics. Nothing beats it. Wrap your legs, tie on garters, strap on boots (Roman style, not riding) You’re good to go. They’re kinda like light compression stockings &they stay in place well.

If you’re gonna run a marathon, do it naked (Like the Romans & Norse) or wrapped in a blanket (the Scots). You’ll be warm enough, even in Scotland.

So we did the DIY strip leggings for several hundred years.

Eventually we figured out we could make a bunch of chauses (single leggings) from wider fabric with a little more stretch if we cut the leggings on the BIAS (diagonal).

Flattering, huh?

Which was mostly an improvement over leg wraps, but not always. Basically, chauses are Otzi’s leggings, this time in wool, not goatskin.

Which is an improvement, because wet leather isn’t comfy, and gets stiff and clammy. Wet wool chafes a little but it keeps you warm.

Still held up by garters/suspenders, still tied on, still very little ass & junk coverage & we’re back to one layer or +DIY wraps when it’s cold. But it’s faster to weave wider fabric & cut it up to make 10 separate legs. You can mix & match & the LADIES think they’re sexy.

Underwear, you ask? Shirts. About knee length, for most of history. You pull the back tail between your legs, then fold it a couple times with the front tail, tuck the tab into that sash around the waist (& to which you tied your hose). Squish it all between waist & pubis.

There’s always somebody trying to sell braes, or ‘medieval boxers’ to re-enactors accustomed to underwear.

They have almost no textual evidence for this separate garment, which is only partly an improvement on shirt chonies. Possible? Sure. Likely? Less so.

I’m pretty firm on this because a shirt hangs from shoulders, so it’s a LOT harder to get pantsed/stripped in battle/ robbed of *expensive clothes* or pranked if your underwear are the result of turning your shirt into a onesie.

Nothing in clothing ever comes for free.

But braes are easier with privies & portapotties, and easier to clean up. I’m sure they were independently invented a bunch of times, people wore them for a little while or special use, and they kept falling out of use because the world wasn’t ready for them yet.

Does this all sound uncomfortable?
FUCK YEAH it pretty much was.

Most people’s clothes made them cranky.

Most people were running around at least a little drunk (since small beer/cider is safer than raw water & cheaper than boiling) so... does this explain all those wars?

We like knit fabrics now because comfy. They stretch & don’t bind (much). When we get a good fit, they don’t wedgie us, and with mechanized knitting machines, it’s just as fast to knit fabric as weave it (often faster).

Not always true. (We also needed zigzag sewing machines.)

Woven fabrics don’t stretch as well, until 1958, when Dupont invents Spandex. You only get relatively good stretch with pre-1700 wool by cutting it on the BIAS, at a 45 degree angle to selvedge & warp. Then fabric stretches... some.

This is why stockings used to have seams.

Bias doesn’t have the recovery (revert to original size/shape) that knits do. Bias stockings often got baggy at knees & ankles.

Ramona Quimby talks about this in one of the books; it was written long enough ago that many stockings still lacked Spandex.

Also Dorothy Parker.

(If I don’t have a bunch of doll phobes here, I’ll take some pics of one of the dolls with these various variations of wraps, bias chauses, bias stockings & knit stockings/breeches. On Tuesday...)

Eventually, though, we started joining up the separate stockings into breeches, at first with a codpiece in the middle... (Do not tell me there was no homoeroticism in the past. Dudes were totally peacocking, and it wasn’t for women.)

Fun fact: these sexy tight breeches that look so damn good on our Colonel Brandons? Note that you never see them from the back without their knee-length tail coat. Because without good stretch, there’s gotta be room to move somewhere, or they couldn’t ride or sit.

So that movement fabric? In the butt. (Paging Chuck Tingle) Looks like a full diaper. It’s the most unattractive thing ever. But breeches ARE comfy. Like leggings that stay in place & don’t shift around or crawl up your wedgie. With MUCH better pockets & warmth.

(Women’s Land Army version, 1940s. If you sew at all & can resize a pattern, make those from corsetra’s re-build. Seriously, best trousers EVER, especially for boots lovers. These need to come back, but you cannot at all worry about the rear view. For pears & hourglasses.)

Twill/Denim is the stretchy woven exception, since that weave exists for people who rode horses all day & needed fabrics that would stretch around their moving legs without wearing holes too fast. But that’s a specific exception & the Mongols got there long before De Nimes.

In modern sewing, we use LOTS of bias since it drapes real well, fits around curves, it can be gorgeously decorative. We also have TONS of fabric waste. But we have much less expensive fabric, of every sort. In the pre-industrial world, every yard of fabric cost a day of labor.

That’s saying that even the cheapest muslin or Walmart special buy fabric would start at $60 a yard. Every adult tee takes about 1.5 yards, so about $100 ($90 for fabric, 1.5 hours to manufacture) wholesale. Every pair of trousers start at $300.

Clothes were WEALTH.

Most clothing yardage made before ~1950 was narrower. A loom was only as wide as a person could comfortably manage to throw the weft back - so 28”-45” was normal. (Weavers got very specific repetitive motion injuries: hips, shoulders,elbows. We can see it in their bones.)

(Yes, looms were mechanized by the 1810s, but the width stayed pretty narrow because they were built to be run by weavers. Those machines were built to last centuries, and they did. The destruction of most of Europe’s manufacturing base brought a LOT of changes on the world.)

Which means, by the basic Euclidean principles, that anything cut on the bias was at most the length of the hypotenuse of the woven fabric, where a = width, and the angles are 45, 45 & 90. Mostly, this meant about 60” long on the bias, which is PLENTY for most legs & legging.

And that was normal from ~1200 to the 1930s. Broadcloth at one time meant 40 inches, then 48, then very slowly crept up to 60, but the cotton version has come back down and usually is 45-48” (Wool & linen broadcloth are still 60” fabrics.)

(Sheets are a specific exception, though the max width of 20th century sheets was only ~80” from 1920s to I think late 1970s. I’m still trying to pin down when old school percale & strong muslin stopped being made, but it was gone by 1980. Loom width influences bed width...)

This matters because of human circumference. The top of the bell curve for human circumferences for most waist/hips is between 28” & 55”. That’s consistent into the far past. This is the really easy 1 piece trouser pattern. Cut 2. Fold in half, long way, fold goes down outer leg.

See all those curves? That’s wasteful when every yard is 12 hours of labor.

As looms got wider and scissors got better, and we mechanized textile production, trousers became more reasonable technology. But when fabric was equal to gold?

Cut everything straight.

And then there’s the problem of pee & poop. Do recall that when trousers were just starting out, keeping them up was a problem (button tech took a long time! elastic & zippers didn’t exist).
Dropping trou was actually a process. Belts & drawstrings & sashes.

No fly.

For menswear, the center front fly is a late invention that doesn’t show up consistently until after the Napoleonic Wars (ended in 1815).

Romance novels sometimes get these right. Not often, though.

And... no toilet paper. Just leaving that there. (A rag or a sponge on a stick.)

Can we start to see why maybe people preferred kilts & houpelandes and cotehardies and wrapping their legs in long strips of cloth?

And also why a lot of otherwise entirely rational people were pretty sure that sex was filthy & gross and they’d rather not, ever?

Put me in the Middle Ages, goddam right I will be celibate. I’ve smelled Boy Scouts after a 3 day camp. No fucking way. Never.

(Convinced time travelers will die of nausea from the smell.)
(Maybe a time traveler might kill his own grampa. No bets on any TT ever fucking anyone.)

Which is not to say women weren’t wearing trousers, too. And leggings, and assless chaps. If men had them, women wore them. Sometimes alone, sometimes under gowns.

And we know this because men made laws against it.

Sumptuary laws are the term for “you’re not allowed certain clothes”, and nobody ever makes a law against things that were physically impossible (so there are no laws against polyester in medieval France) or that weren’t happening.

Judgy assholes are universal!

Yay!

Boo.

We figure this out because the sumptuary laws we most commonly think about are things like “only princesses can wear ermine” or “only really rich people can have certain colors” or “everybody has to buy a wool hat”.

So... who is buying the ermine that the princess wants?

Somebody rich, who isn’t a princess. And therefore, it must be made illegal.
Why do we all hafta buy a wool hat? To support the domestic wool & hat industries.
Why can’t people wear certain colors? Because those dyes are expensive & imported & we’re at war with those assholes.

(Rich people always get exceptions.)

(We wonder why it took 4 centuries of peasant revolts, ending w/ the French Revolution & Terror, to convince rich people that our pitchforks & torches weren’t quaint, decorative symbols of rustic life...)

(They’ve forgotten that lesson...)

So, there are repeated sumptuary laws against women wearing trousers across all Western European communities between 800 & 1865.

Since women weren’t making laws, this is dudes having a conniption.

Isn’t it nice to know that mantrums aren’t new?

Yeah, me, neither.

But there aren’t any pictures of —

yeah. The people drawing those pictures were men, mostly monks, mostly supporting sumptuary laws against women in trousers since having a couple extra sins comes in handy in the professional confessional protection racket & gender policing.

Now, another reason we’re pretty sure women wore some form of trouser is the *format* of the skirt between the fall of Rome & 1900, with one brief exception in 1795-1820.

Skirts were never slim. They were always full, usually in the round, and mostly worn at the natural waist.

If you own a long, full skirt, put it on & reach down for the hem. Remember above, about shirt chonies? You can do that with a long, full skirt. Tuck the back hem into front waist, it becomes a pair of temp trousers. The English language term for this is girdling one’s skirt.

In a mirror, it’s a lot like those Thai Fisherman’s Trousers that go in and out of fashion amongst certain crunchy granola cultural appropriators. Wearing a long skirt like this is pretty comfortable for peasant labor like weeding or harvesting.

(Or running flat out across a field with a med kit because a dumbass in a tin can wouldn’t fucking listen when told to drink a liter of water an hour in the desert sun... No, you’re not going to have to pee a lot, you’re gonna sweat... or die. Your choice. P38 on my belt.)

It’s also how most women would have experienced the 1st wash of new shorn wool & retting ponds with the fresh flax & a bunch of other water-intensive food & textile production steps. If you gotta be in the water, you want to control your long, heavy skirt as much as possible.

And you do want to wear them, because you’re in a world full of utter fucking assholes who have legal & religious permission to treat every woman like shit, and if you kill them for being utter fucking assholes, you’re getting burnt at the stake (petty treason, not witchcraft.)

For the most part, girdling a skirt is better than trousers, because it protects the legs a bit better, it’s more flexible, it’s a lot easier to do & undo when you gotta pee.
Again, no underwear. Bloomers? Late invention, 19th century. Drawers? There’s split crotch numbers...

... ...that are essentially two tubes of cloth with a draw string waist... but those were associated with loose women. Proper, nice women? Snatches open to the breeze. (Nobody ever said the past makes SENSE.) (You’d think they’d want some protection... )

But the sexual harassment was awful. When someone went up someone’s skirt in the Elizabethan/Renaissance/Regency... that asshole exposed her to the room.
It happened.
Again, it’s no surprise that a lot of women didn’t like sex or men. It wasn’t all internalized misogyny.

For women, being able to just tuck a chamber pot under the skirt and go without having to undress or venture out into a dark night where raping assholes might be lurking (this remains a REAL PROBLEM TODAY IN INDIA) was a feature, not a bug.

Menstruation?
Well... there’s less of it; most people were somewhat malnourished, so periods were less regular.
Most married women were more often pregnant than not, menarche tended to be later (15-17) for poorer women, all factors led to lighter periods & earlier menopause...

...and breast feeding does have some effect. It just doesn’t last & it’s not contraception!

The “String Bikinis” we keep finding in medieval trash pits are probably how women dealt with menstruation. They’d use ‘em to hold wads of rag or lint or other fiber in place. Textiles being $$$$, rags got washed & reused; lint (the literal linen too short to spin) was discarded.

And since rags & lint are not modern cellulose & polymers, they tended to leak. Which is easier to deal with when there’s nothing wicking into fabric, especially when soap is expensive. (Soap is fat, fat is food. And food was expensive.)

(You’d rather wash off skin than cloth.)

So... there’s a lot of reasons not to be interested in trousers if you’re just an average woman doing an average woman’s job & living an average woman’s life between 400 and 1800.

If you’re rich enough to own a horse - like owning a Bentley fueled by ink-jet cartridges - a seamstress would make you a divided skirt. They’re not difficult or unknown; Eleanor of Acquitane & Maud/Matilda of England & Katharine of Aragon had them in wardrobe.

Women with divided riding skirts also often had a couple of wrap around panels for when not riding, or just a wrap around outer skirt. Owning a riding horse for a woman meant you were at least a multimillionaire equivalent. You’re not worrying about cost of yardage.

Some women in Venice took fencing lessons; they wore breeches for that. (&got accused of being witches, but everyone got accused of witchcraft?)
For the most part? Skirts were more flexible & useful & warmer, given weather called the Little Ice Age & Year Without a Summer.

What made trousers attractive to women? Bikes, cars, plumbing. Those are the 20th century.

Here endeth 7.1. Please don’t forget WARP, BIAS, STRETCH.

Thank your toilet & the oil industry - together, they make yoga pants possible!
If ever offered a free trip to the past, don’t.

If you’ve enjoyed this, I write fiction and use all of this to build my world! #Shameless #SelfPromo #RiensRebels

The first book of my series is available from the links below and Book 2 on Sept 1.

When a monarch is assassinated, what happens next?

https://twitter.com/czedwards/status/1033489464348135425?s=21

One more tiny thing that doesn’t have a good entry point: Textile workers were behind the 1st labor orgs in the 18th & 19th c, when that was ILLEGAL AF. At least, men were.

The women who left accounts knew their lives were better as employed workers than the alternative...

...and were not interested in breaking their own ability to support themselves. When they asked the men if they, as workers, would have equal rep in these unions, the men refused. The women refused to cooperate.

They gt screwed either way; they picked getting paid;...

... this effectively stopped the nascent labor movement for a century. Men just needed to not be jerks &we’d have the fin de siecle labor mvmt in 1800, not 1900.

When entrenched power complains about not getting outsiders to join up & fall in line? Here’s an example of why.