The surprisingly deep history of trouser technology.


Whence came pants? I'm wearing pants right now. There's a better than 50 percent chance that you, too, are wearing pants. And neither of us have probably asked ourselves a simple question: Why?


"Historically there is a very strong correlation between horse-riding and pants," Turchin wrote in a blog post this week. "In Japan, for example, the traditional dress is kimono, but the warrior class (samurai) wore baggy pants (sometimes characterized as a divided skirt), hakama. Before the introduction of horses by Europeans (actually, re-introduction - horses were native to North America, but were hunted to extinction when humans first arrived there), civilized Amerindians wore kilts."




I'd add one more example from history: the rise of the rational dress movement in conjunction with the widespread availability of the bicycle. Here's a University of Virginia gloss:


What all these examples suggest is that technological systems -- cavalry, bicycling -- sometimes require massive alterations in a society's culture before they can truly become functional. And once it's locked in, the cultural solution (pants) to an era's big problem can be more durable than the activity (horse-mounted combat) that prompted it.