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How to dress like a gentleman- A guide on the history of underwear for the true gentleman.
UNDERWEAR
HISTORY
Like the continents that sink only to rise again from earth’s heaving mantle, garments long
submerged have a tendency to reappear centuries later, and the reverse is also true. It sometimes
shows in a confusion of names.
Take the long, loose trousers worn by the barbarians of northern Europe and so mocked by the
ancient Romans, who called them bracae.The bracae became ‘braie’, breeches, which over the
course of time became shorter and disappeared under the Saxon tunic as knee-length linen
drawers.
Many centuries later, the garment surfaced once more in the form of close-fitting pantaloons, which
with the advent of wider trousers became shortened to ‘pants’, meaning tight underwear in English,
though retained by Americans in its previous sense.
A similar story could be told of the word ‘vest’
The shirt is the supreme example. Up to the middle of the 19th century. It was always worn next to
the skin and consequently it was essentially underwear. An instinctual awareness of this remains, in
the sense of ‘shirtsleeves’ being a state of undress inappropriate for formal occasions. With the
shirt removed from the tale, the story of underwear becomes exciting only in modern times, once
Victorian industry and 20th-century enterprise and, finally, American imagination had been brought
to bear upon functional unmentionables sometimes euphemistically termed ‘small clothes’.
Bronze Age man sported a belted loin cloth, or so the limited evidence suggests, but from the time
that clothes of recognizable form existed, the basic arrangement consisted of some form of simple
linen tunic and loose linen drawers, closed by a string round the waist and often tied at the knees.
Needs of modesty aside, the purpose was purely sanitary: to protect outerwear from bodily
secretion. With no dry cleaning, and less concern for personal hygiene, this was an important
consideration. Though wool was sometimes worn next to the skin in northern Europe, the notion of
underwear as a source of warmth is quite a new one. Until the development of closely-woven fabrics
in the 19th century, one simply wrapped up with sufficient layers of extra outerwear in cold weather.
Linen was the universal choice, of poor as well as rich: the poor making do with coarser, thicker
cloths, while the rich vied for the finest lawn or cambric or muslin, fine Holland cloth or Irish linen,
sometimes so fine it was almost transparent.
Linen is strong, cool and absorbent. Silk was too expensive for all but the very rich, and wool is less
comfortable next the skin and does not wash as well; it was believed that wool was more liable than
linen to harbour lice. Cotton was not a major factor until its industrial development in the 19th
century. The turning-point was the 1880s. For some time thereafter, the word linen was still
synonymous with men’s underwear.
Also in the 1880s, new industrial knitting systems began to release a flood of knitted underwear,
much encouraged by health theorists like Gustay Jäger, who recommended its use at all times.
‘Long johns’ with long sleeves and legs enveloped the male form in the first decades of the 20th
century, their wool weight depending upon the season, until common sense dictated their
abandonment, in summer at least.
Cottons came to the fore, with more comfortably cut ‘athletic underwear’ offering from the 1920s a
new approach to healthy practice. Elastic-banded underpants replaced tied ‘drawers’ and began to
inch upwards, eventually to become briefs. In 1934, Clark Gable removed his shirt to reveal a bare
torso in the Oscar-winning It Happened One Night, and men everywhere began to discard their
vests in early acknowledgment of the power of Hollywood to determine popular style.
A form-fitting cotton ‘training shirt’ worn by U.S. troops in the Second World War became that
postwar phenomenon, the T-shirt, worn at first as a vest and then as a sports top by young
admirers of Hollywood idols James Dean and Marlon Brando. Underwear and outerwear had
become one
HISTORY
Like the continents that sink only to rise again from earth’s heaving mantle, garments long
submerged have a tendency to reappear centuries later, and the reverse is also true. It sometimes
shows in a confusion of names.
Take the long, loose trousers worn by the barbarians of northern Europe and so mocked by the
ancient Romans, who called them bracae.The bracae became ‘braie’, breeches, which over the
course of time became shorter and disappeared under the Saxon tunic as knee-length linen
drawers.
Many centuries later, the garment surfaced once more in the form of close-fitting pantaloons, which
with the advent of wider trousers became shortened to ‘pants’, meaning tight underwear in English,
though retained by Americans in its previous sense.
A similar story could be told of the word ‘vest’
The shirt is the supreme example. Up to the middle of the 19th century. It was always worn next to
the skin and consequently it was essentially underwear. An instinctual awareness of this remains, in
the sense of ‘shirtsleeves’ being a state of undress inappropriate for formal occasions. With the
shirt removed from the tale, the story of underwear becomes exciting only in modern times, once
Victorian industry and 20th-century enterprise and, finally, American imagination had been brought
to bear upon functional unmentionables sometimes euphemistically termed ‘small clothes’.
Bronze Age man sported a belted loin cloth, or so the limited evidence suggests, but from the time
that clothes of recognizable form existed, the basic arrangement consisted of some form of simple
linen tunic and loose linen drawers, closed by a string round the waist and often tied at the knees.
Needs of modesty aside, the purpose was purely sanitary: to protect outerwear from bodily
secretion. With no dry cleaning, and less concern for personal hygiene, this was an important
consideration. Though wool was sometimes worn next to the skin in northern Europe, the notion of
underwear as a source of warmth is quite a new one. Until the development of closely-woven fabrics
in the 19th century, one simply wrapped up with sufficient layers of extra outerwear in cold weather.
Linen was the universal choice, of poor as well as rich: the poor making do with coarser, thicker
cloths, while the rich vied for the finest lawn or cambric or muslin, fine Holland cloth or Irish linen,
sometimes so fine it was almost transparent.
Linen is strong, cool and absorbent. Silk was too expensive for all but the very rich, and wool is less
comfortable next the skin and does not wash as well; it was believed that wool was more liable than
linen to harbour lice. Cotton was not a major factor until its industrial development in the 19th
century. The turning-point was the 1880s. For some time thereafter, the word linen was still
synonymous with men’s underwear.
Also in the 1880s, new industrial knitting systems began to release a flood of knitted underwear,
much encouraged by health theorists like Gustay Jäger, who recommended its use at all times.
‘Long johns’ with long sleeves and legs enveloped the male form in the first decades of the 20th
century, their wool weight depending upon the season, until common sense dictated their
abandonment, in summer at least.
Cottons came to the fore, with more comfortably cut ‘athletic underwear’ offering from the 1920s a
new approach to healthy practice. Elastic-banded underpants replaced tied ‘drawers’ and began to
inch upwards, eventually to become briefs. In 1934, Clark Gable removed his shirt to reveal a bare
torso in the Oscar-winning It Happened One Night, and men everywhere began to discard their
vests in early acknowledgment of the power of Hollywood to determine popular style.
A form-fitting cotton ‘training shirt’ worn by U.S. troops in the Second World War became that
postwar phenomenon, the T-shirt, worn at first as a vest and then as a sports top by young
admirers of Hollywood idols James Dean and Marlon Brando. Underwear and outerwear had
become one
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