Tailor measuring trousers, San Angelo Texas, late 30s or early 40s (note the short brimmed cowboy hat). This only occurs in the modern US when a man buys a fairly decent suit. My guess is that most American men today have never had this experience, and my guess is that most American men after 1920 and before 1950 did.
Truly.
What brings this about is a recent trip (now not all that recent, given that this was a draft post that was stacked up in the queue) with my son and daughter to purchase jeans for my son. We bought four pairs.
Four pairs of cotton trousers. I.e., "jeans".
Levi Strauss advertisement circa 1904. I don't know what "spring bottom" pants were but Levis were uncommon at the time and not, as we might imagine, the largest blue jean manufacturer. It's interesting to note that they could be had in gray at the time.
I wonder if it were 1919 how many pairs of trousers a person would have?
Four pairs isn't a lot, and its into even a lot to buy at one time. My son gets by with an economy of trousers so for him, my guess is that right now he doesn't have many more than that. I've often thought, as my working years are getting ready to slip into a fourth decade, that if I was retired or occupied another line of work that was less subject to the evaporating American dress code, that I'd get buy with many fewer. I don't need a lot of Levis or Lees, and if I had my ruthers, almost everyday, that's what I'd wear.
I'd probably still have some additional trousers, mind you, as I have some GI cargo pants that I wear hunting, heavy Carhartt overalls for some and winter use. And a man really ought to have some formal clothing so you need a suit. But I could get by with less.
Teenage office worker, 1917. I'll bet that kid didn't have more than a couple of pairs of trousers and they were all wool. As he was working indoors, and writing, he was probably well on his way to some sort of long lasting white collar job that would require a college education today.
Anyhow, that means I have more trousers than I had if my main occupation was punching cattle, to be sure.
And in the case of the female denizens and satellites of the domicile, that's very much true. Women have a lot of pants.
The trousers part of this 1914 photograph eludes me, as they don't look like trousers, but women's fashions have always been mysterious. For some reason, I suspect that if this same fashion was introduced today, it'd sell.
I've noted that from time to time to my wife, who always counters with "you have a lot of shoes". I do. But that is partially for the same reason. If I could wear just what I want to everyday, I'd still have a selection, but I'd omit having more than one pair of dress shoes. I have four, or five if I count my old Army low quarters which I still wear on odd occasion.
Anyhow, it'd be easy to imagine that this has always been the way the world worked, or the modern world, by which, here, we more or less mean the post 1890 world. But I don't think so.
Man working in the Aero factory during World War Two cutting sheepskin panels for flight jackets. Note, he's wearing a tie and his clothing isn't otherwise what we'd regard as "work" clothing.
I don't know that with certainty, but my guess is that men had a two or three pairs of trousers at the most, save for the wealthy and upper middle class. By the 1910s, men who worked indoors were wearing suits, but based upon contemporary photographs, their weekend trousers were the same as their weekday trousers. Maybe the older pairs of earlier pants that they'd worn to work in some instances. Indeed, even when my father was a young man in the 1940s and 50s I know that suits typically came with two pairs of trousers, which isn't the case anymore.
Worker demonstrating zipper placement on an Army extreme cold weather high altitude flight coat. These parkas were of very limited issue and are really only found in photographs of men serving in otherwise already cold climates, such as Alaska. This worker, who appears in other photographs of this series, is just that. An industrial tailor who is wearing what today would be quite formal clothing.
All this is speculation, of course. I don't know for a fact how many pairs of trousers men owned in a century ago (the average woman, of course, owned none at all, which raises questions about how many dresses, etc., they owned). And we should keep in mind that for certain types of things, including certain types of outdoor work or outdoor activities, clothing was unique, which is part of the reason those activities had a certain glamour to them in some circumstances. After all, when they sang:
I see by your outfit
You are a cowboy
They cold see just that. They could also see if you were a logger, a hunter, or a dedicated outdoorsman, in varying degrees.
But for most men pants meant wool pants, and I suspect that the trousers they wore on the weekends weren't much different if different at all than those they wore during the week.
And, ironically, I also guess that the average number of trousers of all types, including juvenile knee pants, i.e., the infantile shorts American men now affect, owned by the average American today vastly outnumbers the number owned on average in that more formal era.
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