Logic might suggest that men’s dangly bits might be happier unconfined, while women might like trousers.
Roman men wore skirts so what happened in Europe to make the switch?
I wonder whether it had something to do with horseback riding. Just my WAG.
No answer to the OP but just to reiterate in the greco-roman world trouser wearing was associated with decadent “easterners”, specifically Persians.
Drawing a picture of someone in trousers on the ostraka (pottery shards) used to vote for ostracism in ancient Athens indicated you thought the person you wanted ostracized was working for the Persians.
No idea how or when that changed though.
If you’re going to insist on mapping ancient practices onto modern ones, you would need to say that the Romans wore dresses, not skirts.
Yup. It seems to have entered the awareness of the ancient European world in association with horse-riding Eurasian nomads.
Roman equestrians wore woollen or leather half-breeches—shorts, basically—under a tunic to prevent chafing from the saddle.
Likely when the barbarians invaded the Empire from north-eastern Europe.
I think everyone used to wear skirts (or dresses) and that clothing for women tends to be more conservative than that for men. By which I mean it changes less.
Yeah, I know that fashion changes women’s styles every year, but that’s pretty superficial. But I see the persistence of skirts on women as similar to many countries where the men mostly wear western clothes but a lot of the women in the street still wear traditional garb. Like robes in the middle east and saris in India.
I suspect that had more to do with the impact of colonialism than with built-in gender differences in sartorial conservatism. Namely, for indigenous men in colonial societies, becoming part of the establishment/middle class meant adopting western clothing as well as western languages and so on. Women tended to remain much more limited to traditional and domestic spheres, so there was not as much pressure on them to swap out traditional clothing styles for modern western ones.
Women wear skirts and men wear pants to match the signs on restroom doors.
I think another issue is that having a quick pee is a lot easier for a man in trousers than a woman. So until indoor plumbing was standard, there was a certain pressure to keep skirts.
Quora has a good, very long, answer on the history of clothes.>
500-700 years later in the 10th to 12th century, you have men and women wearing pretty much the same thing, a belted ankle length tunic with long scrunched up sleeves and another tunic over that with either elbow-length sleeves or angel sleeves. The only difference is that men wore long hose and long pant-like underwear that would be scrunched up to the thighs with the hose being tied up to the rope belt that holds up the underwear. Yes, men wore garters and belts first! Women wore knee length hose tied below the knees. As time passed, men’s tunics started getting shorter and their hose tighter while women’s dresses got longer and more voluminous. As men’s tunics got shorter and hose tighter and longer, their underwear shrank too, cut down to boxer size or bikini size. By the 15th century, the tunic, now called a doublet, was only a few inches below the waist, the hose was halfway up the butt, attached to the doublet by ties in front and back. But since the hose were cut straight front and back, men couldn’t bend over without untying the back. Sagging pants with underwear showing isn’t a new thing, I’m afraid. So instead of figuring out the J curve cut, men solved the problem by adding short shorts on top of the hose. From there, hose started to shrink down into stockings then socks and these short shorts started to grow, sometimes in ridiculous ways, but usually downwards in a very slow crawl until by the 17th and 18th century, they were at or below the knees. By the early 19th century, pants were born, but they weren’t meant for high society. They were things sailors wore on board their ships! Tight leggings were acceptable though. Later loose pants like trousers were finally accepted by high society and worn all the time by men. From there, we know the rest.
But as for why women weren’t allowed to wear pants and later on, why men weren’t allowed to wear skirts. For women, they were supposed to be modest and hide their legs even though it’s easy for the wind to pick up their skirt and show off their legs. Muslim women did the opposite, wearing loose pants because it was more modest (if I read that correctly) than not. For Western men, they wanted to remain military-like, ready to spring on a horse anytime and they couldn’t be inferior like women, including wearing “women’s” clothing. The Bible reinforced this, saying men and women weren’t supposed to switch clothing even though way back in the ancient Levant, men and women wore similar clothes anyway. The Levantine women’s clothes were just longer and they covered their hair. It’s even stranger that Christianity would be so unbending on this issue when Catholic clergy wore and still wear Type 2 clothing and protray Jesus and men of his time wearing the same.
For this discussion, dresses are skirts with a top part attached. Pants are underwear while trousers cover the body from the waist to the ankles, with a separate part for each leg, but may also include short trousers.
Well, skirts make it easy for women to pee, especially before elastic.
Men merely need to have a fly.
Western wear has spread around the globe, so that people like Saddam Hussein would wear a Western business suit.
I always assumed that a man wearing women’s clothing would get very negative attention in any country with sufficient Western influence. Dresses and items that look like them are traditional wear in many cultures, but a man wearing a dress would be mocked, so women can wear traditional dress-like clothing but men cannot (unless they’re Scottish, I guess). Furthermore women may wear pants, pantsuits and the like without mockery (unless they’re Hillary Clinton).
I don’t think that’s a new phenomenon. It may be why women’s clothing tends to be more conservative – because whenever there are conquests, etc., the men are more likely to interact extensively with the new conquerors without actually leaving their society. (Women would either be taken as slaves and leave the society, or not interact so much. Or so I would guess.)
I think you might find more men actively do wear ‘skirts’, than you’re imagining. In many Asian countries, (many very populated), it is common place for men to wear a sarong type skirt, so do many religious orders. And in many truly tribal societies, what men wear can be closer to a skirt than to pants certainly.
(It now occurs to me your question was entirely North American-centric, as it were, sorry!)
Of course, men do wear kilts in Scotland, but that’s probably just because sheep can hear zippers.
I’ve often wondered if the persistence of skirts for women had anything to do with concealing what I can only imagine must have been an enormous wad of cloth needed during menstruation.
In Europe specifically, the change happened largely because of two factors: the integration of Celtic and Germanic culture into the Roman empire, and the wider availability of cloth.
Mediterranean cultures often didn’t wear that much on the legs - quite a few people of both sexes wore little more than a tunic, the length of which varied. Not co-incidentally, this works reasonable well in the relatively balmy Mediterranean climate. However, note that this was limited to that region. The Celts and Germanic peoples, and likely those who lived in colder mountainous regions regardless, probably wore trousers much earlier. We just lack good records from them, rather than Romans being the “normal” people.
As Rome pushed its borders north, they integrated most of the Celtic regions into their empire, along with quite a few Germans, and even Roman-born soldiers discovered right quick that it gets a lot colder in Britain than in Latium. Military fashions in Rome had a tendency to travel around with soldiers, (clothing, beards, decoration, etc) and so got spread around quite a bit. Trousers were quite common by the late empire. Europeans after the fall of the empire just kept on doing their thing. Styles and fashions changed of course, but we’re still wearing trousers.
The other factor I mentioned was the availability of cloth. Fabric is relatively simple to make but it requires a lot of man-hours to produce. For most of human history, it’s been one of the more expensive common goods people had to buy short of metal tools, and it wears out. A couple thousand years ago, few people could simply afford to buy more clothing than they needed for modesty’s sake, and it was not absurd for the unfortunate to own only one change of clothes. Most were probably not that poor, but they emphatically did not have closets filled with different outfits. If you didn’t need an item of clothing, you weren’t going to buy it. By the Medieval era, the development of textile technology meant there were more clothes about for everyone. Italy was a big source of cloth for all Europe, but not just them: the tax system of England was supported mostly by the wool trade for centuries.
As said, the horseback riding was a key element: Romans and Greeks do not generally ride, walking on feet or riding in carts.
Scythian wore trousers and were mocked by Tunic wearing Greeks.
When the Romans pushed into northern Europe, they meet Gallic and Germanic cultures, were warriors wore trousers.
This warriors were integrated in the Roman military, which became more and more mounted as centuries passed by.
In the middle ages, knights wore trousers, with the “ride and fight on horse” stuff, but commoners wore tunics.
Trousers became a sign of wealth and nobility and since Renaissance, the “culotte” was an item of fashion, spreading widely.