Chinos, cargo pants, bell bottoms, skinny pants, slim jeans, baggies... pants , whatever their shape, are today a must-have in the men's wardrobe.
However, this status is very recent in terms of fashion history: this garment, as we know it today, is barely two hundred years old. This might seem old but this antiquity is entirely relative when we think that men hid their thighs, even their legs, under tunics and dresses from Antiquity to the 14th century, before wearing breeches for more than four hundred years.
Like all items in our wardrobes, pants have a history and their almost universality was not established overnight. By putting it on mechanically every day, we don't think about the barriers it had to break down to parade on our legs from morning to evening.
1. Antique breeches and Ancien Régime breeches: pants in the making
Its most distant ancestors are the braies, which our collective imagination today associates with the Gauls, as the Romans already did in their time
Colored engraving made from the Monument to Vercingétorix by Aimé Millet (1865). Epinal image of the Gaul, under his tunic we can see his breeches, tied to the legs with strips of fabric (a fashion attested in any case a little later, in the 9th century).
They derived from the clothing of Celtic and Germanic peoples who found them practical for insulating their legs from the cold, particularly when traveling on horseback. If ecclesiastics and people of power adopted the toga and its avatars, the breeches survived it and resisted the Romanization of society. They consisted of two legs joined by a simple seam and it is in these that our contemporary pants found the first of their characteristics: their bifid appearance.
However, unlike these, we only saw the lower part. They were in fact worn with a tunic falling on the thighs, which led to the medieval bliaud, a dress worn by men and women from the 11th to the 13th century, then to the coat and surcoat, even longer.
It was only in the middle of the 14th century that clothing, by becoming shorter, revealed the junction between the legs and the bust, giving the male silhouette the general appearance that we know today.
Dedication of the historical Bible of Jean de Vaudetar, Paris, 1372. King Charles V still wears the dress, Jean de Vaudetar a doublet revealing his breeches. (Copyright Wha United Archives)
Around 1330, wealthy young men adopted the doublet, a sort of rising vest with long sleeves, falling over the hips and revealing the breeches. These, short under the Gauls, became longer as the breeches shortened and transformed into simple undergarments. Tight, they reveal the shape of the thighs and, scandalously, hug the buttocks and crotch.
In the 15th century, the beginnings of stockings appeared covering this area. Worn in different forms in the 16th and 17th centuries (breeches, gregues, rhingraves, etc.), we can see avatars of the characteristic breeches of the Ancien Régime.
Attributed to François Clouet, portrait of Henri II, circa 1550. The king wears a doublet over padded breeches (gregues). Fashion wanted a prominent faux and padded fly (Credit Active Museum Collection)
2. From underwear to outerwear: the appearance of modern pants
In 1789 the essential garment to cover his legs was very bifid, tight at the waist, but it was short: he still had to find the length of the original breeches, from breeches to pants. If we no longer speak of breeches to designate this long garment with two legs, it is because it was (re)introduced in France by the Venetians and their theater accompanied by another name.
In the Commedia dell'arte the character of the old man, Pantalone, was always dressed in long johns, which took his name from our side of the Alps. Trousers remained associated for a long time for people of the world with this garment originally worn underneath. In 1768, Louis-Antoine de Caraccioli, in his Critical, Picturesque and Sententious Dictionary, described it as a “kind of underpants which fits with the stockings”, and we can understand that it was worn under the breeches.
The common people wear it as outer clothing. The fitted breeches require the know-how of a craftsman while the pants are of a primitive enough shape to be easily sewn at home . Their length makes them more protective and means they are still often referred to as "long breeches", the term pants only really becoming established in the 19th century.
In the upper classes, it was little boys who, at the end of the 18th century, were the first to adopt pants as outer clothing. This was part of a so-called “matelote” costume , then very fashionable and, as its name suggests, inspired by the costume of sailors. At a time when thinkers, such as Rousseau, were interested in the good development and uniqueness of the child, we undoubtedly saw in this outfit a means of liberating the movements of youth
Louise-Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, portrait of Queen Marie-Antoinette surrounded by her children (1787). The dauphin Louis-Joseph wears a so-called “matelot” costume.
These childish pants can also be compared to the English notion of “comfort”, which then spread in France, affected by a real Anglomania which also influenced adult costume. Before the Revolution, some elegant people already wore tight-fitting pants, which were more comfortable for riding horses than breeches.
These also have the advantage of providing a solution to the fears of several hygienists, including Doctor Macquart who alerted his contemporaries in 1798 about the garters of breeches; according to him, they would prevent good blood circulation and movement of the leg muscles.
It is for this same reason that European infantrymen saw their breeches replaced by long pants from the 18th century, but especially in the 19th century, which would then influence civilian fashions, sensitive to the prestige of the uniform.
3. From the legs of the Sans-Culottes to those of the aristocrats: the conquests of pants
We often think that it was the “Sans-Culottes” of the French Revolution who replaced this aristocratic garment with the trousers of the people. No doubt they had a role to play in this story, but not as major as we wanted to believe.
Their image was immortalized by the actor Chenard, represented by the painter Boilly, costumed as an ideal Sans-Culotte during the celebration in honor of the freedom of Savoy, October 14, 1792. Next to this image of Epinal of the revolutionary in clogs dressed in pants and a carmagnole
Jean Baptiste Lesueur, “Liberty or Death”, circa 1790. In the foreground a “Sans-Culotte” wears pants and a carmagnole next to a man in a tailcoat and breeches (Photo Josse Christophe)
And if, as Christine Bard teaches us in her book A political history of pants (Seuil, 2010), Saint-Just, “the Angel of Terror”, owned two pairs of breeches and two pairs of pants when he died in 1794, we We can assume that these must have resembled English tights and therefore fashionable pants much more than those of the Sans-Culottes, shapeless and still too popular, patriotic as they were.
It was only at the beginning of the 19th century, when an era of freedom of clothing began, that breeches began to seriously compete with trousers. During the day it is narrow, heir to the English trousers of the previous century, or wide and straight like those of the Sans-Culottes; worn with fine shoes or patent boots it loses its popular side.
Journal des Dames et des Modes, “Parisian Costume” n°1153, 1811: model of pants for walking. (Credit Collection IM KHARBINE TAPABOR)
In the evening, it can be worn tight, with pumps, flat and open shoes. However, it is not immediately unanimous, as Horace-Napoléon Raisson reminds us in 1829 in his Toilet Code: “The fashion for panties, which for several years we have tried in vain to abolish, will undoubtedly continue for a long time to come in good company; it is in fact more elegant, much more suitable than that of the pants that we want to replace it.
Journal des Dames et des Modes, “Parisian Costume” n°1469, 1815: model of tights for riding (Credit Collection IM KHARBINE TAPABOR)
The author recognizes, however, that the pants, in addition to being "conducive to maintaining health", are "convenient and elegant in small outfits"
It remained worn at court by the men who were received there for official ceremonies until the end of the reign of Napoleon III, in 1870, and remained an essential element of the festive costume of several "countries of France", in Brittany. and in Alsace for example.
During the Belle Epoque, panties found favor in the eyes of some aesthetes, like Oscar Wilde who wore them every day in the 1880s, in a dandy spirit. His return was also supported by hygienists who felt that the pants, open, did not sufficiently insulate the legs from the cold air.
4. From the 20th century to the present: the almost undivided reign of pants
In the first half of the 20th century, if some athletes adopted derivatives, such as the knickerbocker, it was then only the little boys who remained in short pants in the city, until they entered middle school or even high school. . The first long pants, for adults, have been those for communion since the 19th century.
Photograph of a group of communicants, circa 1910. (Credit Collection KHARBINE TAPABOR)
Today, it is becoming more and more rare and only boy scouts and a few old families seem to continue to defend this ground on which pants are irremediably progressing, which no longer really have any competitors.
We certainly wear shorts and Bermuda shorts but, from a cut point of view, they are only a shortened version. As for the skirt for men, promoted by great designers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, it is an epiphenomenon. After more than a thousand years of evolution of fashions and mentalities, pants have managed to establish themselves in the men's wardrobe for all circumstances, and have even, at the same time, found their way into the ladies closet.
But this is another story
