The triumph of trousers

Vicki Woods

SEX AND SUITS: THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN DRESS by Anne Hollander Claridge Press, .£15.50, pp. 224, ISBN 1870626672 Since the EU is staffed by suits, pension funds are run by suits, your office is stuffed with suits and my First Great Western (07.46, Newbury to Paddington) is heavy with suits, I can't be the only woman in the world who ever looked at a bloke in bogstandard officewear and wondered what sex had to do with it. 'Suit' is a four-letter word these days, an empty envelope of soulless gaberdine. You call a man 'a suit' in order to rid him of his humanity — let alone his sexuality.

Anyway, since men have been wearing suits since before I was born (and for 150 years before that), how can they be thought of as 'modern dress'? Your modern guys — your Beckhams, your Britpack actors, pop idols, computer geeks, Labour MPs who want the Commons to institute 'dresseddown Thursdays' — all run a mile from suits, don't they? Sarongs, yes. Football shirts, yes. Pre-school toddlers' clothes with elastic waists and no fly-buttons, yes. But suits?

Well, having read Anne Hollander's passionate love-song to the suit (straight through — twice), I find myself panting over pinstripe in a very unwonted way — eyeing up the trouser-creases, desperate to get my hands on a Huntsman, gazing hotly even at chaps in M&S readymades doing dullish pieces to camera on Newsnight. This is an odd bouleversement for someone who has always looked on women's fashion as seriously exciting and interesting and damned men's clothes as ugh, bor-ing.

But Sex and Suits has completely changed the way I look at the dressed world. It has! Hollander hymns the suit — 'the standard civil costume of jacket, trousers, shirt and tie' of professional men all over the Western world — as dynamic, heroic, elegant, graceful, unruffled, easy, superior, relentlessly modern and — above all — sexually potent. She does! She lingers over the folds of a chap's two-piece just as lasciviously as that bespectacled art nun Sister Wendy used to linger over the

torsos of Classical male nudes on latenight telly.

Hollander propounds a provocative theory about men's dress that is both intriguing and (for a lifelong member of the loyal order of Seventies liberationists) somewhat disturbing. For 30 years, I've known that when it comes to fashion women are the modernists, women are the innovators, women are the drivers of the great changes in fashion that roll through the generations. Nope, says Hollander. Not women — men led the way. Men's clothes have always set the standard, men's clothes have always been more formally interesting than women's. Men took the first step towards modernity in Western dress 800 years ago, when they abandoned the floor-length, seamed bags of antiquity in favour of the bifurcated trouser. Floorlength bags are sexless (which is why monks wear them, and — as Hollander points out — so does most of the Eastern world). Whereas trousers — seamed tubes that lie lightly over the limb, go all the way up your inside leg and meet at the groin — are not sexless in the least. By loosely covering (and yet artfully outlining) the entire male body, they forcefully suggest the nakedness of the forked animal beneath. Far from being sexless, a chap's trouser shows that his sexuality is central to his being.

Hollander traces the Great Trousered Leap Forward back to the 12th century and the development of articulated plate armour, which replaced the earlier chainmail. Since chain-mail worked like fabric, it draped like a frock and hung like a frock over the nether limbs. But a suit of plate armour enveloped all the separate parts of the man's body, outlining the shape of his legs as well as his trunk, head and arms. Underneath the articulated metal casing, men wore a padded linen suit, made by the linen-armourers ('who count as the first tailors of Europe'). Male fashion quickly aped the exciting new bifurcated shape created by the linen-armourers, and it developed into the stuffed and padded doublet-and-hose variations which were worn until the 17th century. How the doublet turned into breeches, breeches into doeskin pantaloons and finally (after 1815) pantaloons into the modern trouser is a wild ride. but Hollander's terrific prose is so full of verve, exuberance and sly wit that all you can do is hang on to your hat and stick with her. By the time she reaches the second great masculine leap forward (into sober-coloured coat and matching trousers) you're perfectly prepared for her assertion that the modern suit is still firmly based on (a) the anatomical foundation of the heroic male nude of Classical antiquity, which seized the imagination of neo-classical architects, artists and tailors, and (b) the brilliance of those (English) tailors after 1810, and their winning ways with wool.

English tailors could take the sort

of pear-shaped, big-stomached, slopingshouldered, skinny-legged body that figures in Stubbs's paintings of 30 years earlier, and turn it into a heroic ideal. By steaming, cutting, pressing and lightly padding the material to hand, they could make a loosely fitting, tailored envelope of wool suggest 'a very sexy body with a muscled chest and shoulders, lean flanks, and long legs'. Down Savile Row they still can, of course. The modern tailored suit, says Hollander, 'still displays that nude suggestion'.

Admitting to the idea that he had a complete human body, including legs, made a man look manly (and honest, and upright), whereas buffering their nether regions with skirts, kirtles, bustles, crinolines and petticoats (as women did for the next 700 years) made women look only half-human (and shallow, and dangerous). Breasts, hair, face, arms or shoulders could be more or less displayed throughout fashion history, but a woman's legs — and therefore her sexuality — were always hidden. Like a mermaid, she was a woman only above the waist and God only knew what monstrous mystery below. Flappers finally showed their knees in the 1920s, but 'trousers', writes Hollander breezily, 'had to wait until legs were old news', so it was only in the latter half of the 20th century that a woman was finally able to wear 'modern dress', i.e. a sharply cut trousersuit by M. Saint Laurent or Signor Armani, say, in which she looked bien dans sa peau as they say in Paris.

To show that women have ordinary working legs, just like men ... was also to show that they have ordinary working muscles and tendons, as well as spleens and livers, lungs and stomachs. and, by extension. brains.

I can't think why I've never read this book before; it was published in 1994 in America, and is republished here to coincide with the Fabric of Vision exhibition at the National Gallery, which Anne Hollander has curated. It's a brilliant, magical, knowledgeable, clever, funny, richly informative book, written superbly, and I can't get it out of my head. Can't stop talking about chaps' clobber. either — from the postman's anorak to Black Rod's ruffles to football strip: 'Who's the Uruguayan in the Alice band?' I wanted to know as the men in my household sat transfixed by the World Cup.

'Alvaro Recoba, Inter-Milan,' they said.

'Oh. Is he a sort of big girl's blouse of a player?'

'No, he's a bit of a beast.'

'Oh, because Alice bands are the one form of headgear that men never wear, did you know?'

'Lots of players wear head-bands.'

'Yes, head-bands round the brow are unisex; but not Alice bands, funnily enough, because they're derived from hoods and veils and still remain too distinctly feminine for men to ... '

Groaning, they went off to watch the other telly, banging doors.