Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (57 page)

Pockets
. Simple and indispensable as pockets are, it is hard to imagine that they did not exist before the late 1500s. Money, keys, and personal articles were wrapped in a piece of cloth, an impromptu purse, and tucked into any convenient part of a person’s costume.

One popular place for a man in the 1500s to carry his personal effects was his codpiece. These frontal protrusions, which fell from fashion when their exaggerated size became ludicrous and cumbersome, originated as a convenient opening, or fly, to trousers. Fashion of the day dictated that the fastened flap be stuffed with cloth, and it became an ideal place to carry the special cloth containing a man’s valuables. When the codpiece went out of fashion, the cloth did not move far: it became a small bag, drawn up at the top with a string, that hung from a man’s waist. The cloth was on its way to becoming the lining that is a pocket.

The first pockets in trousers appeared near the close of the 1500s. They evolved in two steps. At first, an opening was made as a side seam in a man’s tight-fitting trousers. Into the opening a man inserted the cloth pouch containing his belongings. The independent pouch soon became a permanent, sewn-in feature of trousers.

From drawstring bag to waist purse, the evolution of pants pockets
.

Once introduced, pockets proved their convenience and utility. In the next century, they became a design feature of men’s and women’s capes and coats. At first, they were located down at the hem of an overcoat; only later did they move up to the hip.

Suspenders
. Before suspenders were used to hold up pants, they were worn around the calf to support socks, not yet elasticized to stay up on their own. Trouser suspenders were introduced in England in the eighteenth century. First called “gallowses,” then “braces,” the straps, worn over the shoulders, buttoned to trousers. They were given their graphic name “suspenders” by eighteenth-century New Englanders who adopted the British fashion.

Knickers
. Like early breeches, knickers were a form of loose-fitting trousers gathered just below the knee. Their name originated as an abbreviation of Knickerbocker, a Dutch surname prevalent among the early settlers of New Amsterdam. The loose trousers were worn by early immigrants. But they did not achieve their nickname until nineteenth-century writer Washington Irving created the fictitious author Diedrich Knickerbocker.

In his humorous two-volume 1809 work,
A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty
, Knickerbocker, a
phlegmatic Dutch burgher, wrote about Dutchmen clad in breeches that buckled just below the knee. Many examples were illustrated throughout the text. Americans copied the costume, especially as pants for young boys.

Leotard
. Similar to the centuries-old tight-fitting hose worn by men throughout Europe, leotards were named for nineteenth-century French trapeze artist Jules Léotard. In the clinging costume that became his trademark, Leotard astonished audiences with his aerial somersault, as well as his risqué outfit. He enjoyed a large female following. And he advised men that if they also wished “to be adored by the ladies,” they should “put on a more natural garb, which does not hide your best features.”

Bloomers
. A pair of baggy trousers gathered at the ankles and worn with a short belted tunic was sported by Amelia Jenks Bloomer of Homer, New York, in 1851. She had copied the pants costume from a friend, Elizabeth Smith Miller. But it was Mrs. Bloomer, an early feminist and staunch supporter of reformer Susan B. Anthony, who became so strongly associated with the masculine-type outfit that it acquired her name.

Pants, then men’s wear, appealed to Amelia Bloomer. She advocated female dress reform on the grounds that the large hoop skirts of her day (essentially seventeenth-century farthingales, in which the hoop had dropped from the hips to the hem) were immodest, drafty, and cumbersome—not only to maneuver in but also to manage when attending to bodily functions. Matters were made worse by the stiff linen and horsehair crinoline in vogue in the 1840s, worn to further exaggerate the femininity of a dress.

Amelia Bloomer refused to wear the popular fashion. Starting in 1851, she began to appear in public in baggy pants and short tunic. And as more women joined the campaign for the right to vote, Mrs. Bloomer turned the trousers into a uniform of rebellion. The pants trend received additional impetus from the bicycle craze of the ’80s and ’90s. Skirts frequently caught in a bike’s cogs and chains, resulting in minor or serious accidents. Bloomers became ideal riding attire, challenging the long tradition of who in the family wore the pants.

Blue Jeans: 1860s, San Francisco

Before jeans were blue, even before they were pants, jeans was a twilled cotton cloth, similar to denim, used for making sturdy work clothes. The textile was milled in the Italian town of Genoa, which French weavers called Genes, the origin of our word “jeans.”

The origin of blue jeans, though, is the biography of a seventeen-year-old immigrant tailor named Levi Strauss. When Strauss arrived in San Francisco during the gold rush of the 1850s, he sold much-needed canvas for tents and covered wagons. An astute observer, he realized that miners
went through trousers, literally and quickly, so Strauss stitched some of his heavy-duty canvas into overalls.

Though coarse and stiff, the pants held up so well that Strauss was in demand as a tailor.

In the early 1860s, he replaced canvas with denim, a softer fabric milled in Nimes, France. Known in Europe as
serge de Nimes
, in America the textile’s name was pronounced “denim.” And Strauss discovered that dying neutral-colored denim pants indigo blue to minimize soil stains greatly increased their popularity. Cowboys, to achieve a snug fit, put on a pair of Strauss’s pants, soaked in a horse-watering trough, then lay in the sun to shrink-dry the material.

While denim pants resisted tearing, miners complained that the weight of tools often caused pockets to split at the seams. Strauss solved that problem by borrowing an idea from a Russian-Jewish tailor, Jacob Davis. In 1873, copper rivets appeared at each pocket seam, as well as one rivet at the base of the fly to prevent the crotch seam from opening when a miner squatted panning for gold.

That crotch rivet, though, generated a different kind of complaint. Miners, unencumbered by the etiquette of underwear, found that squatting too near a campfire heated the rivet to give a painful burn. The crotch rivet was abandoned.

Pocket rivets remained in place until 1937, when complaints of still a different nature were voiced. Children in many parts of the country routinely wore jeans to school. And principals reported that back-pocket rivets were scratching and gouging wooden desks and benches beyond repair. Pocket rivets were abandoned.

Blue jeans, strictly utilitarian, first became a fashion item in 1935. That year, an advertisement appeared in
Vogue
. It featured two society women in snug-fitting jeans, and it kicked off a trend named “western chic.” The fad was minor compared to the one that erupted out of the designer-jeans competition of the 1970s. The pants once intended for work became the costume of play, creating a multimillion-dollar industry. At the height of the designer-jeans war, Calvin Klein jeans, for instance, despite their high price of fifty dollars (or because of it), were selling at the rate of 250,000 pairs a week.

Shirt: Post-16th Century, Europe

Fashion historians point out that the modern waist-length, tuck-in shirt originated in response to pants, as the blouse came into being to complement the skirt. Previously, a man’s or woman’s “shirt” was an inclusive body covering, reaching to below the knees or longer and belted at the waist. Pants, and, later, skirts, made below-the-waist shirt material redundant, thus, in effect, creating the need for new garments.

The male shirt came first, in the 1500s in Western Europe. It was worn
directly over the flesh, for the undershirt would not appear as a standard article of attire until the 1800s. The blouse, on the other hand, emerged much later, in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was loose, with high collar, full sleeves, and fitted cuffs.

As women were beginning to hang blouses in their closets, a new garment appeared which complemented the shirt, and later the blouse: the
cardigan sweater
.

A collarless wool sweater that buttoned down the front, it was named for James Thomas Brudenell, seventh earl of Cardigan. On October 25, 1854, as a major in the British Army during the Crimean War, Brudenell led his men in the famous charge of the Light Brigade. The earl was one of the few survivors. Although the event was immortalized in a poem by Tennyson, the seventh earl of Cardigan is remembered today only for the knitted woolen sweater he wore and popularized.

Button-down Collar
. In the 1890s, the standard attire of a British polo player was white flannel trousers, white wool sweater, and long-sleeved white shirt. The shirt had a full, straight collar. Untethered, the collar tended to flap in response to a breeze or the up-and-down jouncing of a horse. Players routinely asked seamstresses to batten down their collars, and two buttons became the most popular solution to the problem.

In 1900, John Brooks, son of the founder of the Brooks Brothers clothing concern, observed the button-down collars. He dubbed the look the “Polo collar,” and a new shirt was added to the Brooks Brothers line.

The style became a classic. And the word “button-down” found its way into the language: in a literal sense, as in Mary McCarthy’s short story “The Man in the Button-Down Shirt”; and figuratively, as in the title of a comedy album,
The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart
. Although it was traditionally popular to name collars after the people who popularized them—the Lord Byron collar, the Peter Pan collar, the Nehru collar, the Windsor collar—the Polo collar became best known by its function: button-down.

Lacoste Shirt
. Whereas a polo match inspired John Brooks to create the button-down collar, an alligator-skin suitcase in the window of a Boston store inspired French tennis star René Lacoste to produce a line of shirts bearing a crocodile trademark.

In 1923, on an American tour with the French Davis Cup tennis team, the nineteen-year-old Lacoste spotted the alligator luggage in a store window. He boasted to teammates that he’d treat himself to the expensive bag if he won his upcoming matches. Lacoste lost. And he did not buy the alligator-skin bag. In jest, his teammates took to calling him
le crocodile
.

René Lacoste retired from tennis in 1929. Four years later, when he began designing tennis shirts, he patented his former nickname as a trademark. And although the garments today are popularly called “alligator shirts,” the name’s a misnomer. Lacoste had researched his reptiles. The long-snouted animal on the shirt is technically a crocodile, of the zoological family
Crocodylidae
. An alligator is a reptile with a shorter, blunter snout, a subspecies of the crocodiles.

Neckties originated in France as a fashion affectation and quickly spawned a variety of styles, knots, and names (clockwise): Puff, Windsor, Four-in-Hand, and the Bowtie
.

Necktie: 17th Century, France

This functionless, decorative, least comfortable of mens attire is of military origin.

The first recorded neckwear appeared in the first century
B.C
. In the heat of day, Roman soldiers wore
focale
—scarves soaked in water and wrapped around the neck to cool down the body. This completely utilitarian garment, however, never caught on sufficiently—in either a practical or a decorative sense—to become a standard article of menswear.

The origin of the modern necktie is traceable to another military custom.

In 1668, a regiment of Croatian mercenaries in the service of Austria appeared in France wearing linen and muslin scarves about their necks. Whether the scarves were once functional, as were
focale
, or merely a decorative accent to an otherwise bland military uniform, has never been established. History does record that fashion-conscious French men and women were greatly taken with the idea. They began to appear in public wearing neckwear of linen and lace, knotted in the center, with long flowing ends. The French called the ties
cravates
, their name for the “Croats” who inspired the sartorial flair.