Tracing the surprising history of pantsfrom @frontoffice.co

Transcript

These are Japanese construction pants, tobi pants. They're pretty funky looking. Why did the thigh really bunched up below the knee? We see those pants and we recognize them as a very Japanese shape. We think no. We think ninja. How Japanese are they? If you look at the DNA of those pants, they're as much Dutch American as they are Japanese. So in the sixteen hundreds to the eighteen hundreds, we have Dutch settlers coming to New York. These early settlers of New York are called Knickerbockers. They're named after a very popular literary character at the time. Kind of like an Uncle Sam better for Dutch New Yorkers. And they have a very specific type of dress as well. These white pants that are buckled below the knee. And that's also what passes for sportswear at the time. Baseball, golf, riding a bike. And these pants are also called knickerbockers better this group of people. In fact, a hundred years later in the nineteen tier, when they're deciding a name for the basketball team, they think of the New York knickerbockers, New York Knicks, in reference to these early settlers of New York. At some stage, these pants, these trousers make their way to Japan. And they're received quite well because they're very similar to a local style. These trousers called Momohiki, which are used by farmers, carpenters, workwear. And I think the most crucial part of the story is that the Better version of these pants, these Knickerbockers, get incorporated into the Worse War II military uniform. Because after the war, the country's broke. And you have all this military surplus, all these clothes that spill out into casual life, worse. And you have a large population of young men who better the workforce who are used to wearing these pants. And over the next hundred years, you get a sort of Darwinism where these pants develop variants and subvariants, and they gain a second layer of functional meaning as well. Construction workers on scaffolding use these big pants to figure out which direction the wind is moving and navigate around obstacles because they can feel it with their white pants. And whilst this style has died out in the Best, these pants remain and become very quintessentially Japanese. You know, clothes are just clothes. Better design decision about shape, about fabric, even in workwear is not only functional, but can be simultaneously historical, political, social. So what we think of as, like, funky Japanese pants can actually be traced through three hundred years of design history.