Regency camel toe

Further to my previous post about men's trousers in the early 19th century, I have discovered a genius blog. It's called Regency Camel Toe.



What I love about the blog is the collision between sartorial history and what we now think of as a sexualised wardrobe malfunction: the camel toe. Although 'camel toe' (sometimes spelled 'cameltoe') is usually understood as something that only happens to women; in the book I primly distinguish between "‘cameltoes’ (clothes wedging in the crotch to reveal the outlines of a woman’s labia) and ‘moose knuckles’ (the equivalent reveal of a man’s penis and testicles)."

But the joke of Regency Camel Toes is that what looks like a camel toe is sometimes just the loose, bunchy material of the trousers. You can see that back in the day, men's trousers weren't at all snugly tailored over the torso; they were really quite drapey.

In a lot of the Regency period drama productions featured on the blog, the baggy pants look different to the illustrations of the period itself. That is, the pants drape like today's tracky dacks, their bagginess revealing the merch in silhouette.

This reminds me of the men's drop-crotch pants that are quite popular with a certain kind of fashion-forward young dude – I've seen African teenagers and Asian international students wearing them. Yesterday on the tram there was a guy whose crotch was so dropped that he could sit down and rest his hands on his lap as if he was wearing a skirt.

Anyway, 18th and 19th-century pants didn't have a vertical fly; rather, the fly was a horizontally attached flap that buttoned closed at the waist, which evolved from the earlier codpiece. This is known as a 'broad fall' or 'fall front'. Later in the 19th century the hybrid 'split fall' emerged, and finally the vertical fly.

In erotic prints of the time you can see the flap hanging open for the dude to access his junk.



This is a reproduction – it's painted on the men's toilet wall at LMNT in Hackney, which bills itself as "London's most eccentric dining room". I have pixelated out the dude's junk.



This is a French lithograph, possibly by Achille Devaria (1800-1857), dated from somewhere between 1830 and 1849. I think this guy is trying to take a leak in the bushes and discovers that lady checking out his sugalumps.

Lederhosen and some traditional military uniforms still use fall-front fastenings.





Those 'sailor-style' pants with the two rows of vertical buttons on the front are references to this style of pants.