The Day Seattle’s Dudes Learned to Crease Their Trousers
A royal fashion blunder in New York trickled down to Seattle’s menswear stores, forever changing how local men pressed their slacks.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A foreign prince recently arrived in New York under a cloud of misfortune; sloppy weather had ruined his evening clothes. On the day of his arrival, he had accepted an invitation to a reception. He sent his valet ashore to buy a pair of plebeian ready-made trousers for his evening suit. The valet procured them, and the crease in each trousers' leg was most marked. That night, the prince wore his creased trousers. New York bloods eyed the creases through their glasses and decided that if the prince wore creases, it must be the proper thing. Next day on Fifth Avenue every well-dressed man had a distinct crease in his striped trousers. The craze reached Seattle quickly, and now men have a tailor carefully press their trousers. Last night a young man hurried down Front street carrying a satchel in his hand. He turned the corner and on impulse pushed into the little laundry kept by a Chinese man. The laundryman hesitated and held out his hands to take the laundry, but the young man shook his head. He whispered to the head launderer and made motions with his hands. The laundryman shook his head in refusal, but the young man cried out aloud: 'All right.' The young man handed him a quarter. Then he undid the satchel, took out a pair of trousers, grabbed a hot iron, laid a damp cloth over the goods and in a twinkling he had a crease there to make every dude envious. The laundryman looked in wonder, then they laughed. The young man finished his work, put back the trousers into the bag and left the store, chuckling all the way.
“New York bloods eyed the creases through their glasses, and later in the night, at their clubs, they decided that if the prince wore creases, it must be the proper thing.”
The 'trouser crease' obsession of 1892 serves as a quaint early example of how global fashion trends, amplified by news and social status anxiety, quickly permeated frontier cities like Seattle. While we laugh at the idea of a 'dude' sneaking into a laundry to iron his own pants, the behavior mirrors the modern desire to signal status through specific, curated aesthetic markers.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.