11 THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT TROUSERS
THE LONGEST pair of trousers ever produced was a bespoke pair made, unsurprisingly, for the world’s tallest man – ROBERT PERSHING WADLOW in 1938.
The Giant of Illinois had an inside leg of 5’4”, but his thrifty mum Ada Wadlow insisted that the tailor made his strides a bit bigger so as he could grow into them. However, Robert stopped growing when he reached 8’11¼”, so his mum put some turn-ups in the bottom.
LONG trousers traditionally come down to rest on the tops of your shoes, and anyone in the playground whose trousers were a couple of inches short would quite rightly get singled out for ridicule. But today there is a trend to deliberately wear them ‘half mast’. Famous exponents of this ludicrous fashion include children’s entertainer PEEWEE HERMAN, Prime Minister at time of going to press
RISHI SUNAK, and every male weather presenter on the BBC.
SINCE most human beings are basically cylindrical, trousers need to be secured to prevent them falling down, and there are two common ways to do this. Belts – thin straps of material which tighten the trousers around the waist – are a popular option chosen by most people. However, older men, the Amish, and younger bell-ends may choose braces – lengths of elasticated material attached to the trousers with clips and worn over-the-shoulders.
AS WELL as a noun, ‘trouser’ is also a verb – to trouser something meaning quite simply, to put some trousers on it. But that’s not all. It could also mean the act of keeping something that you really should not – for example, a builder may ‘trouser’ £100 cash on which VAT has not been charged, a customer in a shop may ‘trouser’ the money when he’s been given too much change, or a political party may ‘trouser’ £15m from someone with unfashionable ideas.
HAREM pants – ridiculously baggy, lowcrotched trousers with ankle cuffs – were launched onto the fashion scene in 1990. Manufacturers hoped that the popularity of the music video U Can’t Touch This, in which hiphop pop-rapper MC HAMMER leapt around in a gold-coloured pair of the voluminous trousers, would lead to them becoming a fashion craze. But normal people were having none of it, and the stupid fucking things never caught on.
FOR MOST actors, having their trousers fall down whilst on stage would be a disaster, a moment of acute embarrassment that would leave the crowd in stitches. But for veteran West End actor BRIAN RIX, having his trousers fall down on stage was a nightly occurrence. Throughout the course of his stage career, experts calculate that Rix’s kecks dropped to the floor in front of the audience no less than 18,000 times. “He should of got a better belt,” said Daily Mail theatre critic Jack Tinker.
WHEN putting on their trousers, everyone in the UK pulls them upwards, towards the North Pole. However, when the people in Australia pull their trousers North-Polewards, they are in fact pulling them down! You couldn’t make it up!
ON DECEMBER 4th 1872, the merchant brigantine Mary Celeste was found abandoned between the Azores and the coast of Portugal. The sails were partly set, the rigging was damaged, the hatches were open and the binnacle that housed the compass was smashed. The last entry on the ship’s log was dated the 25th November – nine days earlier – and mentioned nothing out of the ordinary. Most curiously of all, everyone on board – the captain, the crew of seven, two passengers and all their trousers – had simply disappeared.
HUMAN beings – Homo erectus – are the only species on the planet known to wear trousers. No other animal – not bears, lions or even any other of the great apes (except in PG Tips adverts) – use these cloth artifacts to cover their legs.
IF INSECTS wore trousers, the tiny articles of clothing would have six legs in them rather than two. And they would be known as a sextet of trousers as opposed to a pair.
ACCORDING to mathematicians, a pair of trousers is defined as a surface that is homeomorphic to a sphere with three holes, made by removing from the sphere three open disks with pairwise disjoint closures, creating a compact surface of genus zero with three boundary components. Jeans are defined as the same, but made from denim and with orange stitching.