Of Trousers and Cuffs

In the late 19th century, men's trousers were worn at the natural waist, unpleated and uncuffed. Cuffs, or in England turnups, originated on a certain Prince's country clothes at the beginning of the twentieth to keep his trouser bottoms out of the mud. Their popularity was assured by the natural inclination of the English aristocrat to emulate the smallest details of the royal family's clothing (another being the now unused bottom button on men's waistcoats).

Somewhat later, around the 1920s, an enterprising Savile Row tailor first conceived trouser pleats. Pleats, which are relevant to cuffs only for a rule that will be promulgated later in this essay, give trousers better shape as they fall over the hip bones and are principally associated with high waisted trousers that will be worn with braces (in America, suspenders). They quickly spread to essentially all Savile Row trousers, becoming the lounge suit environment in which cuffs did or, less often, did not exist.

Of course, since the Second World War the majority of men in North America as well as much of Italy wear belted trousers sitting on their hips and that makes pleats technically unnecessary. Cloth shortages during that same war caused the U.S. government to ban pleats as well as trouser cuffs, returning American trousers to a nineteenth century state where, assisted by the trouser manufacturers who are always ready to save a bit of cloth here and there, they have remained ever since.

Now that bit of background is relevent only for the way that I think about trouser cuffs, which is that they are worn with pleated trousers except that they are never seen on semi-formal and formal versions. Remember that cuffs began on country clothes and though they became accepted for lounge suits they have never progressed further up the formality tree. For some reason they are always associated with double breasted jackets but are optional with single breasteds (this may be a holdover from their failure to become accepted with formal wear).

Personally, I think flat fronted American style trousers should always be worn uncuffed, but if one is going to wear flat fronted trousers on the hips to begin with the addition of cuffs surely does not make the situation worse.

Out of the mud, cuffs do perform some useful work in that their weight helps maintain a straight fall of the trousers (uncuffed trousers benefit from a bit of heavy tape sewn inside the trouser bottoms but this is less effective than a cuff). Aside from that they exist principally for aesthetic reasons, which is to say that properly sized cuffs look better.

Visually, cuffs should be relatively proportionate to the length of the leg wearing them. The cuff for a man of average height should usually be one and three-quarter inches high and may be as large as two inches. Tall men benefit from a full two inches, and shorter men look better with a cuff of one and a quarter to one and a half inches. My own cuffs run run 1 3/4" to 1 7/8," depending on the tailor and general randomness.

In summary, each of the three schools of thought about cuffs has some basis in history however transient that basis may be. My own religion is high waisted trousers with pleats and cuffs. Except that my formal and semi-formal wear is cuffless. And that is probably enough about that.