There are ways to take a ban on red trousers in your stride…
As a Fulham bar outlaws the epitome of male Sloane style, Stephen Doig has a few clever tweaks
The colour red is getting a bad rep, and not just thanks to Jeremy Corbyn. A new bar in Fulham, south-west London, has decreed in its dress code that red trousers are banned. Any scarlethued hopefuls will be unceremoniously kitted out in “Eighties tracksuit bottoms” instead; not a tinge of crimson nor a touch of tomato will make it past the threshold.
It’s a particular turn of the knife that this decree (which, yes, does smack of publicity-seeking) is taking place in Fulham, the natural habitat of the flame-trousered Sloane, cheeks as rouged as his breeks, often called Mungo, possibly donning a mossy tweed jacket and candystriped Oxford shirt alongside. The endangering of his species has already been documented – Peter York called time on his Sloane Rangers years ago – but this is another blow to his way of life.
Red-trouser detractors are many. In 2016, Country Life magazine signalled their death knell, dismissing them as the attire of “dear old things at Lord’s and Stewards at Henley”. A popular but now-defunct blog, Look at My F------ Red Trousers, sprang up to document the red trouser in all its incarnations.
So why the stigma? In these more egalitarian times, red trousers are an unashamed symbol of aristocratic toffiness, a stylistic flare going up to purport a jolly hockey sticks hauteur. It’s Mungo and his public school chums as they cheer on the cox on the banks of the Thames, compare who has been invited to Harry and Meghan’s nuptials over cocktails served in a bust of Berlusconi’s head at Bunga Bunga (it’s rilly hilare…) or, as he progresses in life, as a retired country squire in raspberry cords.
The upper-class connotations aren’t for nothing; in the 18th century, red trousers formed part of Napoleonic uniform, swaggering and for all to see. A prescribed belief in the boating world decrees that only adventurers who have sailed across the Atlantic are allowed to wear red trousers. And a shop in that most Ivy League of locations, Nantucket, famous for its “Nantucket red” options, featured in The Official Preppy Handbook (I suggest if you require such a tome, you are on the wrong side of the country club white picket fence). And while fox-hunting dress comprises of white breeches, the frock coat is siren shaded, all the better for jolly well cantering on through the splatters of blood.
Historically, blazing bright colours were sartorial signifiers of class; let the oiks toil in the fields in slurry shades, while nobility take to their social occasions in clashing boating blazers and public school colours. The word “blazer” comes from the blazing red hue of jackets at the Lady Margaret Boat Club of 1800s Cambridge.
And yet, perhaps, there is a case to be made for tones of ruby. Christopher Bailey, in his swansong from British house Burberry, certainly thought so, with a series of vivid scarlet trousers worn with rave-bright jackets; ditto king of all things collegiate, Ralph Lauren, who returned to the East Coast alum he knows so well with fire-engine red pantaloons.
Perhaps one of the most convincing interpretations of this item of clothing is a study of Truman Capote at his home in Palm Springs in the Seventies, by society photographer Slim Aarons. He relaxes in cheering vermilion chinos and soft-fit Moroccan shirt, the red trousers a sign of louche glamour and Californian ease. Aarons’s snapshots of the jet set as they flocked from Capri to the Côte d’Azur are perhaps your best inroad into red trousers: his seductive photographs are punctuated with bright hues that could only be worn en vacances.
It’s also worth considering the shade of your trews and opt for a pair that are perhaps more nuanced and less brayingly King’s Road – less cardinal and more coral, for example; or veer into claret-and-rust tints that riff on red. And while many a polo lunch has been punctuated by chaps in red trousers and country tweeds, it’s best to steer clear and instead pair with contrasting blue – perhaps a longsleeve polo to keep things preppy – or complementing tones of magenta or brick, particularly if you’re taken with the aesthetics of Netflix cult documentary Wild Wild Country.
Mungo needn’t hang up his rosetinted view of the wardrobe just yet.