Red Fine Legs: A Pocket Guide to Red Trousers

13 Jul 2009

Guy Cuthbertson

Anyone and everyone wears red trousers these days, even women, but there was a time when they meant something. Red trousers were for showing off, for standing out, and they were for men. Yes, women have worn them in the past, but they were cross-dressing, wearing menswear whether they knew it or not. There’s a wonderful Henri Matisse painting from the 1920s called Odalisque in Red Trousers, in which a reclining woman stretches out in red trousers that end just below the knee. In another, similar painting, Odalisque with Red Trousers, from a couple of years earlier, the woman reclines rather more sexily, and rather more nakedly.

Both women (French models pretending to be North African) are rather masculine, with their big limbs and their short hair, and their red trousers are manly trousers – in France, the army wore red trousers until the First World War and the rough squaddie was called a pantalon rouge. Red trousers are for men. They only become feminine or epicene when they become hot pants, a jump-suit or an all-in-one lycra number. Who could be more masculine than hairy deep-voiced Father Christmas, whose gender and male potency are highlighted by that ‘Father’? And Chris de Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’ wore a red dress, not trousers: ‘I’ve never seen that dress you’re wearing’, he says (not because it’s new but because ‘I have been blind’).

But red trousers, mind you, are Eighties trousers – Chris de Burgh might have had a pair, though I think of him as a nicely-ironed black jeans kind of guy. Red trousers are trousers for a decade of showing-off. ‘Lady in Red’ was released in 1986, and, the year before, we had the tremendous film Teen Wolf – Michael J. Fox starred, but when Fox isn’t a wolf, the man the ladies love is Jerry Levine’s Stiles, the wild ‘Wolf Buddy’ to Fox’s Teen Wolf. Stiles is the party animal, the matchmaker, the joker, the individual, the urban surfer, and he wears red trousers. At the same time, we had the video for Thriller, in which Michael Jackson is red-trousered (or red-panted I suppose) – maybe he wasn’t the most manly of men, but this was before the Liz Taylor lookalike face-change stuff and he was selling himself as a bad man of the streets. Like so many things, it started with punk – Vivienne Westwood sold red trousers (for men) at her shop called Sex, and Blondie (but not Debbie) wore red trousers.

Red trousers go back further though, and they do have a long history. Rose-red legs are ‘half as old as time’, and every age has had its red-legged attention-seekers. Dr Johnson noted in the eighteenth century that among men in London ‘it has been a fashion to wear scarlet breeches’. And art has a long history of painting male legs red. Looking at Ingres’ Paolo and Francesca at the Barber Institute, one might think of Chris de Burgh: Francesca is a lady in a red dress, and she is being kissed by Paolo, who is resplendent in red tights. As Milton says in Paradise Lost, red is ‘love’s proper hue’.

At Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, there’s a great painting called The Hunt in the Forest, created by Uccello in about 1470. It is one of the most vigorous paintings in the world: the dogs, the men, the horses chase leaping deer through the darkness. The energy, the virility and the pure style of the picture come, partly at least, from the bright red tights of some of the men. Red here, as in Thriller five centuries later, is the colour of blood, the colour of excitement and the colour of masculinity. Vitality and death come together in The Hunt in the Forest in the red legs, as they do in another famous painting, Paul Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1834) in the National Gallery, where the strong rippled executioner wears very red tights. Red trousers are life and death, energy and danger (the film called Red Trousers is about ‘The Life of the Hong Kong Stuntmen’).

The great writer for blood, energy, the force of life, was D. H. Lawrence, and, yes, he liked those trousers. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Mellors doesn’t see red trousers as feminine in any way, and doesn’t imagine that women could wear them. Mellors the masculine gamekeeper likes ladies, especially Lady Chatterley, and he likes them to be different from men. Men, he says, should wear ‘close red trousers, bright red’:

Why, if men had red, fine legs, that alone would change them in a month. They’d begin to be men again, to be men! An’ the women could dress as they liked. Because if once the men walked with legs close bright scarlet, and buttocks nice and showing scarlet under a little white jacket: then the women ’ud begin to be women.

One reason why Philip Larkin liked red trousers is because he liked Lawrence’s books; another reason is that he was trying to get women, stuttering and prematurely balding though he was. Perhaps Dylan Thomas also wore red trousers because he had read Lady Chatterley’s Lover and fancied himself as a ladies’ man and a man’s man. In 1938, he noted that ‘our cottage was brushed and cleaned and lardered; I wore a fresh shirt and red trousers’.

They’re not necessarily heterosexual trousers though. Lawrence had his own gender and sexuality issues (you get the feeling that he rather fancies Mellors). And remember Freddie Mercury in tight red leather trousers. In Larkin’s Selected Letters, there’s a picture of Larkin by Larkin, walking down the street in red trousers as a bus-load of locals shout ‘oo’s ee?’, ‘Ere, look at ’im’ and ‘Chase me, Charlie’. He was scared to be out because they would think him gay. The beautiful, brilliant and bisexual travel-writer Bruce Chatwin wore red trousers when he was a student struggling with his sexual identity: at Edinburgh University he ‘dressed in bright red corduroys and delivered his essays typewritten’.

As I’ve suggested by referring to all these chaps, red trousers are also artistic and intellectual. Now, admittedly, they were also worn by Bruce Forsyth and numerous boring golfers, but red trousers are radical trousers, clever trousers (smarty pants). Universities have tolerated them more than most other places have. Larkin wore red trousers at Oxford quite happily and easily, but it was when he was at home in Warwick that he feared homophobic abuse from buses and was scared to go outside: ‘It is a glorious September day & I am wearing red trousers – therefore I can’t venture out of doors’. When Chatwin wore his red trousers at Edinburgh University, the trousers announced that ‘he had worked or moved in circles his fellow students could not fathom’. Indeed, red trousers are for the few: red trousers make you stand out in the street; red trousers attract eyes. Here I would disagree with Lawrence’s Mellors, who seems to suggest that all men should wear red trousers. But Mellors does say later on that ‘if the men wore scarlet trousers, as I said, they wouldn’t think so much of money’ and scarlet trousers are certainly for those who don’t want to have a sensible job, a grey suit and a secure salary – Father Christmas wears a red suit to work, but he’s not making money, he’s giving it away (although he dislikes children who ask for actual cash); and Will Scarlet wore a red outfit but he was an outlaw, giving to the poor what he took from the rich. They are the trousers of the revolutionaries, the outsiders, the people who want to be different and are different – they are never middle-of-the-road (again, I can’t believe that Chris de Burgh wore them, nor the ‘many men’ who were ‘looking for a little romance / Given half a chance’). And yet everyone wears red trousers nowadays.