Slate write…
On a late January day in 1565 London, a man named Richard Walweyn found himself imprisoned for committing what was, for all intents and purposes, a crime of fashion. Walweyn, a servant, was arrested for wearing “a very monsterous and outraygeous great payre of hose” and ordered to be detained until he could prove he had some other hose “of a decent & lawfull facyon.” The garment that caused such an uproar was a pair of trunk hose, basically baglike shorts that billow out from the waist and taper midthigh, giving the impression of the wearer having two balloons strapped to his legs. As law professor and cultural critic Richard Thompson Ford writes in his new book Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History, “Trunk hose were the parachute pants of their day; Richard Walweyn, a Renaissance-era MC Hammer.”
