Comments on: Red Fine Legs: A Pocket Guide to Red Trousers

By: Terrace Stomp

Terrace Stomp — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:17:53 +0000

This is a most interesting thread, in its way even more improving than the article. I had always assumed Mellors was the product of a minor public school and a provincial university, who concluded, after years of obscurity teaching land economy with Eng Lit joint honours at another, slightly more renowned, university, that worldly and sexually success would elude him until he got back to nature. Apparently not, and I am indebted.

I cannot think why you would choose the Intelligence Corps, which as any fule kno is almost wholly working, rather than lower middle, class, because of the very high numbers of its officers who are commissioned from the ranks. If you must have one, Captain Ludovic, formerly Corporal Major Ludovic MM of the Royal Horse Guards, provides a literary example.

Typical Int Corps plain clothes in my army days was jeans, desert boots and a fleece, combined with the sort of sideburns that civilians think are ironic, but which military wearers believe to be some kind of Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak when worn while negotiating the streets of the Short Strand or Falls Road.

I suppose there *is* a faintly Roman Catholic air to red trousers, although really only in opposition to the sort of pinch-faced, mortified, self-denying killjoy once prevalent among the reformed so-called ‘churches’. Incidentally I believe that St Peter would have favoured a vibrant purple elephant cord.

By: General Zod

General Zod — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:34:37 +0000

An officer in ‘the technocratic, lower middle class support arms’ (I’m thinking of the Intelligence Corps in particular) likes red trousers because he dreams of being up to his waist in blood rather than up to his waist in desk. And he dreams of being Mellors to some wealthy lady. In fact, Mellors was a lower middle class officer in the army before he became a gamekeeper.

Personally, I have also always associated red trousers with Catholicism. Catholic-convert Int Corps types.

By: Terrace Stomp

Terrace Stomp — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:38:49 +0000

There is an important distinction to be made between types of cloth. Someone sporting a pair of jean-cut bright scarlet leather trousers would be a different sort of customer from someone in a pair of pleated needle-cords or moleskins in a darker red or maroon. The latter sort of trouser was commonly available from Hackett until recently, when obsession with the bottom line meant that they concentrated on the ‘youth’ preference for jeans, sent production to Hungary and Slovakia, and embraced the Alan Partridge ’sports casual’ look visible in their window displays today. Cordings still sell them, but in ever decreasing numbers, apparently.

Slightly O/T, Tatler ran an article on coloured cords a couple of years ago, and I seem to recall it concluded, I think correctly, that, basically, ‘the brighter the trouser, the bigger the twat’. (I write this as one who wore dusty pink cords with tweeds as a lad, but who now wears only browns and blues, for similar reasons to Larkin. The folly of youth…)

The 11th Hussars – the Cherry Pickers – wore scarlet breeks; their successor regiment, the King’s Royal Hussars, wear them in some orders of dress today. As a result, red trousers retain a quasi-military overtone, and remain common in middle class shires among men of a certain age. (Interestingly, among younger army officers, when worn in plain clothes red trousers are now something of what Larkin or Amis would have called a ‘wanker indicator’. They tend to be worn by officers in the technocratic, lower middle class support arms, who believe they are the sort of thing officers in proper regiments wear.)

I would guess that it is this red moleskin/corduroy/twill brigade, rather than the Mercury axis-of-leather or the Ingres-Ucello Old Masters connections, that is responsible for their perpetuation by the likes of Boden (who have succeeded Hackett as purveyors of inferior faux-bespoke hosiery to the aspirational middle class).

By: Max Cairnduff

Max Cairnduff — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:14:23 +0000

Nice article, but I’m not sure about the conclusion. I associate red trousers as being firmly a badge declaring that one belongs to the English upper middle classes, a statement of class affiliation as marked as the cloth cap of another age (and, of course, for another class).

The semiotics of class is of course tricky stuff, and class itself these days is something it’s no longer quite done to speak of, but even so I don’t think these are quite classless yet even if Britain may supposedly be…