When I was growing up in Wisconsin between the ages of 7 and 12, I was pretty much on my own. My mother was in graduate school at the university of Wisconsin. She went in at the age of 45 with three kids in tow and no husband or alimony. Mom was a pretty independent woman, having gone off in 1946 to Venezuela with the Rockefeller Foundation, when women did not do those kind of things and driving jeeps in the hills of the Orinoco was way out there in the extreme (not that it wouldn’t be even in today’s world), so nothing much phased her. I’m sure she figured that her only son could handle being alone in a Midwestern suburb, getting himself to and from elementary school and amusing himself after school and on weekends. My sisters had each other (they were only 18 months apart), but my free-range nature and the gender gap between us forced me to fend for myself. That certainly applied to feeding myself, which is probably where all my bad eating habits came from. That’s pretty funny when you think about it since my mother went on to lead the Nutrition Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN for many years…arguably the leading nutrition professional in the world. It also applied to clothing myself. My mother would certainly go to Treasure Island discount store with me to buy basic clothing, but what I wore and how it got maintained was left mostly up to me. Besides learning how to use a washing machine (dryers were a luxury and backyard clotheslines were more the norm in those days), I also had to learn how to use the portable Singer sewing machine that my mother bought for my sisters to use to make some of their own clothes. My sister Kathy became a world class seamstress, going on in her early teens to win a nationwide Singer sewing competition. But that skill was in no way available to me and I needed that sewing machine more than you can believe. Being a big kid (not yet so much fat as very beefy), and given that blue jeans were, at that time, far more rural than urban attire, I wore the ubiquitous khaki chinos most of the time.
Chinos began as military wear. In the mid-1800s, British troops in India started dyeing their white uniforms a dusty tan to blend in and hide dirt. The color became known as khaki, from the Hindi-Urdu word for “dust-colored,” and lightweight cotton twill became the standard for warm-climate uniforms. The name chino arrived around the Spanish-American War in 1898. U.S. soldiers in the Philippines wore cotton twill trousers made from fabric sourced from China, and the Spanish word for “Chinese” stuck. American troops kept wearing them through both World Wars. After WWII, returning GIs wore their surplus chinos on college campuses under the GI Bill. That helped make them a staple of 1950s Ivy League style, worn by figures like Steve McQueen and later JFK. In 1986, Levi’s launched Dockers, which made chinos the centerpiece of “business casual” in the ’90s office. Today they sit between jeans and dress trousers as a menswear basic.
Traditional chinos are made from cotton twill, a sturdy weave with fine diagonal ribs. Compared with denim, chino twill is lighter and smoother. It’s usually piece-dyed in solid colors such as khaki, olive or navy, while denim uses indigo-dyed warp threads. Classic chinos are 100% cotton. That meant that for little Mr. Beefy in the Madison, Wisconsin crackerbox suburbs of the early 1960s, those pants had little or no give to them and I would split those suckers several times a week. If I was lucky, I would split them on the seam and a simple seam repair (often spanning from zipper to back belt loop…called “the full blowout”) would be easy to fix on the Singer, usually by not even bothering to change the bobbin from whatever color thread my sisters were last using. It got trickier if the rip was your basic twill-shred, especially if it was in the crotch, That would often require an iron-on fabric patch and end up feeling like putting a bale of barbed wire in my crotch…lots of fun.
Somewhere along the line, the clothing industry wised up and started the whole blue jeans explosion. The word “denim” comes from serge de Nîmes, a sturdy twill from Nîmes, France and “jean” comes from a cotton fabric associated with Genoa, Italy (“Gênes” in French). The modern jean was born in 1873. Jacob Davis, a tailor in Reno, Nevada, had the idea of using copper rivets to reinforce the stress points on work pants. He partnered with Levi Strauss, a San Francisco dry-goods merchant who supplied his denim, and they patented the design. These “waist overalls” became standard for miners, railroad workers and cowboys. The famous 501 lot number appeared around 1890. Jeans moved from work clothes to a cultural symbol in the 20th century. They came to stand for the romance of the West in the 1930s. In the 1950s, Marlon Brando in The Wild One and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause made them a sign of youthful rebellion, and some schools (and lots of country clubs) banned them. The 1960s counterculture adopted them next. The late ’70s and ’80s brought designer jeans from Calvin Klein and Gloria Vanderbilt. Premium and Japanese selvedge denim followed in the 2000s, and jeans became perhaps the most widely worn garment in the world. But here’s the thing…the Levi rivets and tougher twill made the pants less likely to split like the chinos, but that lack of flexibility made them less than comfortable until they were well-worn or if the wearer was perfectly fit and trim. How those of us who were not so fit and trim (which was most of the population) got around that discomfort was with the introduction of stretch fabric.
Stretch is now standard in men’s clothing rather than a niche feature. In jeans, chinos, dress shirts, and many suits, a non-stretch version is increasingly what you have to seek out since stretch has become the norm. Exact market-share figures are hard to pin down. Industry estimates usually say roughly half or more of men’s jeans now contain some elastane, compared with a large majority of women’s. Most stretch jeans use 1% to 3% elastane, and that small amount is enough to meaningfully change how denim feels and moves. It began when DuPont invented spandex (sold as Lycra) in the late 1950s. For decades men encountered it mainly in swimwear, athletic gear, socks, and underwear. Stretch denim appeared in the 1970s and ’80s but was marketed almost entirely to women. It spread to menswear starting in the mid-2000s to around 2010: slim and skinny fits came to men’s jeans, and stretch made those cuts wearable. By 2014, the percentage of stretch had dramatically increased among men, though it’s said that men in places like Italy and Germany resisted because they saw it as undermining denim’s rugged image. In the ten years to 2010, global demand for elastane fibers more than doubled, from around 160,000 tons to over 350,000 tons. By the mid-2010s the “performance” chinos, travel pants, and stretch dress shirts and blazers were in full swing. Remote work during the pandemic made comfort a priority, and stretch moved into tailored clothing as a selling point rather than a compromise. The main tradeoff is durability. Higher elastane content gives more comfort but can make knees bag out, and stretch denim tends to wear through faster, especially in the crotch. That’s why some minority of shoppers still deliberately buy 100% cotton rigid denim.
Lycra is DuPont’s brand name for spandex (called elastane in Europe), a synthetic fiber invented in 1958 by chemist Joseph Shivers at DuPont’s lab in Waynesboro, Virginia. DuPont went into production around 1962. The goal was to replace rubber thread, which since the 1930s (in products like Lastex) had been the only way to make garments stretch. Rubber was heavy and broke down with body oils, sweat and washing. Spandex is a segmented polyurethane polymer that can stretch to five to seven times its length and snap back, while staying light and durable.
The moment you sit down, most jeans or chinos tighten across your thighs and dig into your waist (or split). Stretch men’s pants solve that by weaving elastane or spandex into the denim, giving you a full range of motion without looking like athletic wear. The difference between a good pair and a great one comes down to how much recovery the fabric has, the stretch that sags after an hour isn’t stretch at all. I now have 27 pairs of pants that fit me properly (I know, I was surprised it was that many too), and every one of them has 2% Spandex. The comfort is amazing, the look is great and I have them in several sizes, which is to say the stretch is very forgiving. No need for that Singer any more. Is it stretching the truth to say that I’m finding that pants are making the man?