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.

The 20th c is massive, because this is when we start wearing them.

Sunday, we talked about several thousand years of garment history that basically condenses to this: trousers are an inefficient garment if you don’t have
good heating,
good plumbing, or
good fasteners.

When we have at least two of the three, trousers start becoming universal.

(How do I know this? Places where trousers were more common had less cold, wet weather than Little Ice Age Europe & invented better fasteners/fabrics much earlier. Shalwar kameez & Mongolian riding trousers and Han/Manchu ku and most of the pueblo-building Native peoples, and...

...so many others either have far superior indoor heating & fasteners, or slightly more clement weather, or greater access to silk and cotton, or some combination. Having a strong riding & desert culture pushes trousers in Europe, Asia & Africa, but not in the Americas.)

I have a whole long thing about button holes and button technology, but it’s long (like that ever stopped me...)
and

I took a research dive into the forensic use of early buttons (because I hinged a murder plot on a button...)

and I don’t wanna spoil myself.

It’s not nice to readers. It breaks some of the magic if I show how the trick is done before you get to see the trick the first time. (I may do the button thread in a couple months, but not before November.)

So... Here’s a mid-thread plug of my fiction. I USE all of this research! My stories aren’t just lectures on textile history. I write civil servants as ordinary superheroes who try to change their worlds.

First book’s free. Subtext is always hope.

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

Let’s just say that we made simple & crappy buttons long before we made bad buttonholes. We made much better buttons before we made even tolerable buttonholes. Bad buttonholes were because of our sewing thread, our spinning & weaving tech, and what we called scissors.

Do recall: I said our scissors were awful until 1761. Yep. This is what we used to have. Hard to sharpen, hard to use, VERY short blades. Cutting curves with something like this is sucktastic. (This is also why pieced quilts are not really a thing until about 1775.)

When we got better scissors (L to R: 1870s, 1820s) we started cutting a lot more curves in our clothes, and doing a lot more decorative work. Trousers, especially , really do require good curve cutting tech. See the pattern pics.

Trousers ALSO really do require good fastening technology. You need them to stay at your waist 99% of the time, and only drop down when you want them down. You need to be able to do that FAST, because humans are distractable dolts who put off peeing until it’s an emergency.

Around the middle of the 19th century, three things come on scene that just change everything: sewing machines, cast iron coal heating stoves, and early bicycles. Sewing machines revolutionized garment construction for the obvs, but also...

...because they required better thread. For thousands of years, if you wanted to sew a garment, you most likely unraveled some of the weft thread & wound it onto a couple of these rather than go find a hank of matching thread. (Remember: VOCAB from previous thread.)

There’s no incentive to sell a hank of thread with the fabric, since the weft is right there, and weft thread is perfectly fine for hand-sewing (though not strong enough for buttonholes...)

But sewing machines needed thread that was consistent, strong, didn’t break, and preferably matched something in the fabric. Spool thread existed before sewing machines, but the two really did encourage each other’s use. At which point, spools of thread became standard equipage.

Coal stoves, too, meant warmer indoors. Coal is filthy, but it provides far more heat per ton than wood, and that density of calories meant it was possible, for the first time in history, to effectively heat a wide range of buildings, from claim shanties to London townhouses.

Layers still mattered (see long johns) but now you can warm up after being cold & wet. Being able to warm up meant less risk of death by chilblain/frostbite. Waterproofing improved (via boiled linseed oil & latex rubber). We got better at making warm fabrics in quantity.

And then we started replacing the v expensive Bentleys that eat ink-jet cartridges (horses) with moderately expensive entry level BMWs that eat far less rubber & oil (bicycles). Early bicycles were unreliable& unsafe, but an amazing replacement for horses for personal transport.

Bicycles prompted the adoption of trousers for women. It started with bloomers because bike chains eat skirts. At the end of the 19th century, we began the 1st suburbanization push &middle class, unmarried women started working as typists, telegraphers, telephone operators.

Women had to get to work, so along with public transit (which had the same problems we still have - crowds, handsy jerks, motion sickness) and walking paths, the new safety (both wheels same size) bicycle enabled a longer commute.

Let’s be clear: this was not a cheap alternative. A $13 bike cost about the same as a union worker’s week’s paycheck in 1907 (30 cents an hour, national average; still a 48 hour work week.)

Bikes are only cheap compared to horses.

The bike bloomer was athleisure wear: the 1902 version of yoga pants & hoodie. No WAY would Delmonico’s seat a woman wearing that. Opera wouldn’t let her in the door. But... she could probably buy crackers, cheese & pickles from a grocer; fruit, beverages or an ice from a cart.

And she could consume these in public, in a public park in the cities that had them (post-fire Chicago, NYC, Boston, London) without causing a public morals scandal.

The ability to earn money, spend it freely, travel within a town, purchase & eat immediately accessible food...

We take this for granted.

Women born just 200 years ago would not.

(And yes, like women wear sneakers & carry heels to get to work, typists were wearing cycling kit & changing into their skirts out of sight of their employers. We have always conjured work-arounds.)

But just as the yoga pants we first wore 10 years ago have become daily wear (and are approaching professional wear, as podcast listeners know, thanks @Betabrand & your dress pant yoga pant) so did bicycling costume spread for women. (I borrowed your pic. Thanks!)

And for that, we can mostly blame/thank World War I. Women, especially in Canada and Europe, took up the work the men left behind, from flying the mail to working the fields to healthcare to factory work. WWI blockades also caused rationing (especially in Britain). Land Army pics

Women started borrowing mens’ coveralls & overalls, the plus fours & knickerbockers that brothers and cousins left behind. (Especially the plus fours, which were tweed sporting wear, and since they’re intended to be baggy, were easier to re-tailor & felt more comfortable.)

Fun fact: men’s wear & women’s wear were distinctly gendered professions for most of history, so there’s parallel evolution of technique. It’s most obvious in lining, where menswear used our now standard bagging out lining vs women’s flat-lining. Knowledge transfer starts in WWI

TW:

The wars brought cars into daily reality. World War I especially.

In 1914, so many horses went to war. And got shot as quickly as all of those idealistic young men who grew up during the long European peace and got sent to the grinder by old men.
thewarhorsememorial.org

By 1918, Europe often barely had stud horses left & was short on donkeys, mules & ponies. Having killed & maimed so many men, they lacked labor to raise the fodder the livestock needed to rebuild the lines. The push towards mechanization was equally necessity & convenience.

(Less so in US/Canada, since horses found Transatlantic shipping against their taste. Smart horses!! Ship a car or motorcycle; they don’t poop or get colic or panic when the sea gets rough.)

(Seriously, Europe fought from the fall of Rome until 1815/ 1856 (do you consider Crimea part of Europe?)

But while it had a few flares of temper & internal ire, Europe mostly outsourced local territorial violence for most of the 19th century. They just stopped fighting.
...

...

The colonies didn’t deserve the violence, but the breathing space made the latter half of the Industrial Revolution possible. Which is its own horrific curse-miracle, but the post-Napoleonic European peace is itself an absolute fucking-unlikely-as-all-hell miracle.

...

And may the gods damn the Brexiters for trying to stir that pot again. I know most are Russian or Russian paid. I don’t care. Bring them closer because I want to explain what 50,000 grotesquely dead people smell like. Waterloo & Ypres.)

(Yeah, the 20th century is horrific. Except when compared to all the other centuries. I love history, but I really hate human beings. We’re so fucking depressing, because we keep doing the same stupid shit over and over.
Time to go watch Wonder Woman again. )

(I need to learn how to do Twitter Footnotes. Sorry, everyone.)

We were talking about the necessity & convenience of automobiles...

But here’s the thing about those early cars: learning to drive an Auburn does not mean one necessarily can drive an International, or a Haynes-Apperson, or a Zimmerman, or a Premier. Don’t count on pedals, or them being in the same places. No standardization yet.

Your throttle control may be a knob under the hood that you have to set & hope you get right; the carburetor is likely to get fouled if you drive through fog; you have no mirrors or windshield, no top, often even seats were options.

It’s like driving MS-DOS. The Model A was such a HUGE improvement, it’s somewhere between an Apple ][ and an Amiga. Or going from an old Motorola Brick to a Nokia candy bar....

And this is what it’s like to drive an A. (My mass spectrometer has a shorter instruction manual...)

modelabasics.com/Starting%20&%2…

And yet, women learned to drive right beside men; by 1918, there’s gender parity in new drivers. Women were also driving professionally, and racing, & inventing. Often stuff like rear view mirrors. (See Dorothy Leavitt. She’s amazing.)
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_L…

Despite early cars being physically exhausting to drive & needing brute strength. No power steering/brakes; you cranked those wheels by hauling a circle of heavy steel. Sometimes you had to STAND on the brakes. No gas stations: you buy fuel in 5 gal tins. Junk in trunk? Literal!

(Credit for this goes to my great-grandparents who drove these early cars, and told stories about them, and to the Longmont CO Dougherty Museum. bouldercounty.org/open-space/edu… )

Bicycles stabbed the bustle & crinoline; cars strangled the floor length skirt & hard corsets. You can’t bike in a bustle; can’t drive if your skirt tangles your feet; you shouldn’t change a tire in stays (lower back injury, also risk of rotator cuff tear pulling it off the axle)

Trousers are still athleisure in the 1920s — especially beach pyjamas! — but they’re NEVER GOING AWAY.

These young women literally teach the next generation...

who are 17-20 in the late 1930s.

Who have also spent much of their childhoods wearing some sort of bloomer or trouser for work and play.

These are the young women who step up & literally PRODUCE World War II.

They create the pantsuit, as 1 of a triplet with overalls & coveralls. They still wear skirts, but these same women will be the ones who reluctantly hand over the factories to returning soldiers and go home. In the US, they’ll wear a lot of capris & cigarette pants in the 1950s.

They raise kids as involved mothers. They’re subject to the same physics — rugburn on knees is painful, and stockings shred if you get on the floor with your baby. (They may dress up for a photograph & change into a dress for dinner, but they’re wearing pants at home.) (kitty!)

In Europe, it depends on location & recovery. The UK was still under rationing well into the 50s & their textile infrastructure got blitzed in Coventry, B’ham & Lancashire; Germany, France & Italy also had their textiles infrastructure bombed into rubble.

US & Canada were exporting fabric as fast as it could be produced, but the peace dividend came at a high cost.

(Oh, Dior’s reactionary New Look? Debuted in 48, was coming off the shelves by 53, when Schiaparelli/Chanel Sleek Suits started coming back. These are both ‘53 ads.)

Fluffy skirts are a PITA. By ‘60, they’re Formal Wear Only. They stay that way until a brief flirtation during St Ronnie of the Inifinite Tax Cut years. For the 20th century, fluffy skirts are reactionary and almost always show up when women have made legal/Econ/social progress.)

These same moms raise 3-4 kids through 50s & 60s & find they’re really fucking bored when they hit their early 40s.

So they get busy. Title IX, contraception rights, abortion access, voting, banking - not the hippies & youth culture doing that detailed, organizational work.

(Sorry, boomers. You were young &callow, thought you were the center of the universe. Really, it was your moms doing the work. Your mom sent you off to protest & sit in, usually said how pointless it was. Know about snipe hunt? Prop wash? ID10T form? Breastplate stretcher? ...

Yep, your moms got you out of their way. Also, most of you were not hippies, did support the war, were Goldwater & Nixon supporters who fell for St Ronnie’s spiel, bought into Greed is Good, killed my public schools to save $2 on your property taxes & You Weren’t At Woodstock.)

But they’re mid-40s ladies with big plans & lots of work to do. Stockings & garters are going away, being replaced with pantyhose, but what these busy ladies really want is to not have to wear either.

How about dress slacks?

And the markets respond.

Between 1968 and 1980, the women who came of age during WWII changed the world again. Quietly, and behind the scenes, often while serving cake with one hand. (They weren’t perfect. They were rockstars. Like the incredible Betty Ford.) (yup, barefoot. On cabinet table.)

By 1980, almost every school district allowed teachers to wear trousers, Kmart, Kroger, Sears & Penneys preferred most of their retail staff in trousers. (That’s around 70% of retail at the time.)

Nurses started ditching the white polyester dresses for cheerful, easy to autoclave cotton print scrubs on CDC recommendation. (Poly melts at sterilization temps.) (Partly blood borne pathogens, but also comfort. And get away with it...)

And GenX grows up without ever blinking an eye at women in trousers. The mission that started with women on bicycles in 1902 ends in 1987 with acid wash jeans. It took 3 generations of central heating, reliable buttons & zippers, and plumbing, plus bikes, cars & rubber. Worth it!

The real miracle, though, is the polyester double knit suit, whether menswear or women’s pantsuit. We call them the leisure suit, but they came in navy & charcoal, too, and were reasonably acceptable everywhere but federal court, NYSE, Chicago Commodities floors.

For the first time in history, EVER, someone could have a completely clean set of clothes in two hours by shoving them into a pair of boxes.

No other work required.

Yes, 1960s poly DK was scratchy & pilled like hell and came in a range of eye-searing colors.

No ironing. Wash & wear.
That wins on points every time. No worries about interlining or structural padding in a poly suit jacket. The washer doesn’t break it.
It always looks like the day you bought it. (This, BTW, is why high end clothing that looks too new is arriviste.)

Polyester, for all its flaws, is a goddam miracle, even if a burnt orange miracle. (Modern Poly is SO MUCH BETTER. ITY Jersey, especially: it’s the cool to touch, drapey, silky, stretchy poly that shows up in packable garments & floaty tees? It’s comfortable-all-weather poly.)

And going into the mid-seventies, women needed some miracle fabrics, because a set of economic PURE FUCKERY is about to try to break everyone.

It started, I *think* with Nixon’s Ag Secretary fucking up the farm economy in the early 1970s (his name was Earl Butz; curse him daily. He is the abusive step-father who effectively caused everything from HCFS in everything to the current state of corn & soy monoculture.)and ...

... the Vietnam war winding down, which meant far less defense spending, which meant layoffs...

and the Oil Crisis.

Any one of these would have been minor blips, but they hit more or less simultaneously, and they fucked up the economy for quite some time.

Also, the oldest Boomer brats hit 30 in 1976, the median were 25, so hitting the job market at the same time, just as the market was getting flakey.

Hey, we know this tune! It’s sucks worse than Ice Ice Baby (which at least stole a good beat line...)!

The Oil Crisis caused a knock-on crisis in Detroit & the Rusty Farm Belt (WI, IN, OH, Western PA, where auto manufacturing & farming overlapped).

The Big 3 were dealing with a lot of pressure from Toyota, Honda & VW — those small, thrifty cars with excellent manufacturing.

A lot of Big 3 leadership wanted to move towards the Japanese model, which came with reduced manufacturing & repair costs, and higher customer satisfaction.

... But to do so meant re-tooling the factories, and re-tooling means layoffs.

In Rusty Grain Belt, working class families both worked for GM/Delco/Chrysler/Ford AND farmed.

There was a symbiosis in those communities, and when Earl Butz fucked up farming by killing Roosevelt’s Ever-full Granary (& crop supports), the UAW kept food on the table.

(Yep, that’s IWW, not UAW. IWW gets my props; UAW does not, because of this time period. They fucked the Midwest more or less permanently, because they refused to take the long view. Even when their membership was saying the needed to.

Wobblies forever.)

Retooling layoffs wouldn’t have mattered 5 years earlier. But in the mid-70s, people would have starved. Lost their houses.
It happened anyway, but it took longer. Since the UAW resisted retooling, and sales kept dropping because nobody could afford to drive 8 mpg land yachts...

Big 3 management got... surly. And resentful of the UAW. Who got resentful right back. Those were horrible years for American auto manufacturing. By design, those cars were... okay... but there was also some active & passive sabotage ongoing. Morale just kept getting worse.

(Our deplorables, lentils & jadielen. Yes, exact same generation, just add time. They’ve had a lot of practice being this awful. They really like it. They’re asshats that way.)

At the same time, the near destruction of the farm economy made food costs rocket skyward, & cascade layoffs caused recession, and interest rates spiked (18% FIXED rate APR mortgages. No exaggeration) and heating oil/gas prices/electricity rates soared & inflation got bad.

(The inflation was not the problem. Inflation is EXCELLENT for debtors, who can usually rely on income rising which makes debt proportionally smaller. The problem in the 1970s, as now, is STAGFLATION, where interest rates & costs rise, but income stays the same or drops.)

(Yes, we’re re-living That Seventies Show, but with more interesting publications than The Whole Earth Catalog & Our Bodies, Ourselves. Also, I’m told the pot has improved drastically. But statistically? This sounds like history playing a bad cover tune.)

When your household can’t get credit (especially at actual usury rates), the only way to increase income is for more people to work.

Which women did, in droves.

Sure, they only got 74% of a paycheck & were still doing 85% of household labor.

See how this might be a problem?

Better than losing the house. At least for a while. (Note that divorce got a lot easier, real fast, in this same block of time. Not a coincidence.)

Ain’t nobody got time for laundry, ain’t nobody got money for dry-cleaning, ironing is for suckers who like high electric bills.

Heels hurt, loafers look best with pantsuits.

Congratulations, 1980 has arrived.

Over the next twenty years, GenX grows up, having kept ourselves fed with microwaves and programmed our school computers & VCRs.

We run a scam on our employers & convince them we’re wunderkind because we know SQL, and khaki cargos are just as good as other khaki pants, and...

...Casual Friday is a good reward, which we make into Casual Thursday & then all week...

Yoga pants are black; if we wear them with a drapey, waterfall cardigan, nobody can tell these pants are nothing like trousers in the technical sense...

And here we are.

These are all actually great; clothing as class marker does a lot of damage.

When I’m being supercilious about shit looking new or being in poor taste, note that I always do so at someone who has far more power than most of us.

It’s punching up.

I do this because the only way for us down here in the trenches to stop being Poor Bloody Infantry is to see what our supposed betters do wrong and how they use it against each other, then work to be outside their expectations.

We give no inch.

That’s what was so revolutionary, in its way, about the Geek Revolution of the 90s & clothing. Women lost ground in that revolution (though I say we took our computing skills &went to fix the stuff we care about, like sociology, law & psych, instead of selling game codes online.)

But now? There are very few professions where one can’t find a position that allows a fairly casual level of dress. Even lawyers are downshifting. And this is good, because class markers exclude people who grew up in BFE Mormondom or Evangelicalism, or a public housing tower.

Clothing is a part of the social credit that gets used to keep the ivory tower of academia so pale. It’s a different code, but it’s still A code, and it’s also breaking down. And the more we understand the codes, the faster we break them.

Here endeth 7.2.

I’ll be posting some doll pics of skirts & leg wraps & stockings later today that go with Sunday’s thread.

And now onto the #Shameless #SelfPromo...

I write fiction. I use this research to build my worlds.

I make far fewer typos when I have editorial control!

First book is free. Second debuts on Saturday for the price of a cup of coffee. All formats.

#RiensRebels See my site!

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

I forgot the picture. Sorry. These are old thread bobbins. Embroiderers still use something similar for floss. These were bone, but they were also made of wood. They were sometimes a flirting object, since they’re little, simple, cheap gifts that don’t imply permanence.