Bottoms Up: On the mysterious origins of a global fashion craze

On a guided tour of Dublin Port recently, we stopped to admire a statue called The Mariner, by John Behan. Made from distressed metal, it depicts a weathered-looking seafarer clutching an anchor. And everything about it is a little exaggerated, including the sailor's trouser legs, which widen progressively on the way down until they too appear to be anchoring him to the ground.

I was reminded that it was sailors who gave an extraordinary mid-20th century fashion – bell bottoms – to the world. But I wondered for the first time what their excuse for wearing them had been. Our pre-tour safety protocols had emphasised what dangerous workplaces ports are. How could it ever have been advisable that maritime uniforms included trousers designed to get caught in things or be tripped over?

Well, the origin of the tradition is obscure, except that it was a bottom up thing, in more ways than one. The habit seems to have started among American sailors, some of whom – in the absence of a standardised uniform – adopted their own. As noted by a naval officer in 1813, this included “glazed canvas hats with stiff brims [...] blue jackets buttoned loosely over waistcoats, and blue trousers with bell bottoms”.

As late as 1978, having flares was as necessary in a dancehall as on a lifeboat. Not to be so equipped was to risk social death

Insofar as the wide bottoms had a practical purpose it was that when sailors were walking in shallow water, they could easily roll them up. If they found themselves in deeper water, however, and had time to take them off and tie the ends, they were also potential flotation devices. In any case, the look was soon standard.

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The British navy, usually trend setters, followed suit eventually, in the mid-1800s. It took over a century after that before anyone decided that the man or woman in the street might want to wear such things too.

I wonder if the 1960s fashion didn’t originate as a cunning plan by denim manufacturers to sell more material. But however it started, it became the look of a generation. At its height, there was almost a health-and-safety aspect. As late as 1978, having flares was as necessary in a dancehall as on a lifeboat. Not to be so equipped was to risk social death. Then punk rock happened, ushering in drainpipes instead, and bell bottoms were scuttled overnight.

In the meantime, trouser-leg politics had also played a small but vital role in the 20th-century struggle between the Soviet Union and the West. The look was never haute couture there exactly, but loose, shapeless trouser legs had been part of the communist aesthetic long before the 1960s. So when Nikita Khrushchev started wearing narrower-legged business suits, it was seen as part of his post-Stalinist reforms.

"The days when Communism meant bell-bottomed trousers and shapeless coveralls for both sexes have come to an end," opened this newspaper's Eurocomment column in July 1964, under the headline "Tapering Trousers Invade the East". It quoted the Bulgarian Communist Party leader, speaking to a youth conference: "It is far from our assertion that socialism can only be built on wide trouser-legs, and that it cannot be built on narrow ones."

How much a hat alone could have disguised anyone is not clear, unless by just drawing attention to his top, it had distracted from the bottom

Searching for the earliest references to “bell bottoms” in the Irish Times archives, I found a curious story from 1916, in which they had been deemed a threat to the life of a British sailor. The incident was recalled many years later on the Letters page by a man who had taken the mailboat from Dublin to Holyhead on the Friday of Easter week and fell into conversation with the sailor in question.

The latter said he had been strolling along St Stephen’s Green earlier in the week when a doctor suddenly pulled him into a hallway and warned it was “suicide” to be walking around dressed in British naval uniform. So by way of disguise, the doctor gave him an old silk top hat, under which the sailor made it safely back to his ship.

How much a hat alone could have disguised anyone is not clear, unless by just drawing attention to his top, it had distracted from the bottom. The letter writer had himself often wondered what Dubliners made of this “apparition [of a] British tar’s shore-going uniform, complete with bell-bottomed trousers and surmounted by an ancient top hat.”

But he could assure readers that the incident really did happen, because about 10 years after the Rising, he repeated the tale to passengers on the train between London’s Euston Station and Holyhead. One of his listeners joked that it was a “tall story” in every sense. Another, hitherto silent, disagreed: “I was the doctor,” he said.