Today a facebook friend of mine, Abu Faris, mentioned a blog: Look at my fucking red trousers! It mostly concerns (this being England) a form of dress worn by men who want to be taken for upper-class. The trousers are an extra shibboleth of twittedness just in case the brown trilby hats don’t get the message across. Here’s another example, some hostile-looking graduates of the British military college Sandhurst posing in their red-trouseredness as a group. Something that struck me is how confrontational some of the pictures are, mild-mannered photographers almost starting fistfights: I especially like this and this one (the three school prefect types in the second one look up to no good to me, though I couldn’t tell you why). Elsewhere on the blog are pictures of hipsters in red trousers. I’m guessing they’re following in the footsteps of punks on both sides of the Atlantic. After black, and white, red was always the punk colour. There’s a picture – it must be somewhere on the web, but I can’t find it – of Richard Hell in about 1978 wearing tight red trousers; for me at the time it represented some kind of extreme of coolness.
Which brings me to Norwegian red trousers. The russefeiring is an elaborate and meticulously prepared drunken month-long celebration made by and for kids in their final year of high school. My daughter is currently part of this. Strictly speaking the red trousers are dungarees, but the upper portion is NEVER worn, I’m told. It just isn’t. Your name and the name of your school are applied to the trouser legs in block letters and then you don’t remove them for a month except for the obvious reasons. Later in May every russ person in Norway goes to Stavanger to do more celebrating.
If I was dressing up like this I’d consider wearing red Italian pope shoes but maybe, like for the fat Englishmen, these outfits are about contrasts rather than matches.
They wear the outfit every day now. Yesterday Alma rebelled and wore her canary-yellow drainpipe pants, but today I saw she’d come to her senses. There’s also a cap (you can see it on the Wikipedia page) but it’s not worn until 17 May, Norway’s July 4th, for some reason. Some russe groups (not Alma’s) buy an old school bus off last year’s celebrants and drive around all night drinking beer. Every so often you’ll see a small band of them at the supermarket loading up on hotdogs and cases of beer. Things to be thankful for: it’s light until quite late by this time of the year and I’m quite sure, being Norway, the driver doesn’t touch a drop. Everything is so well planned. To me the most peculiar part of it is that when it’s over the boys & girls return to school, with terrible hangovers, to take their final exams.
I can’t figure out who’s responsible for Look at my fucking red trousers! except that they’re using the pseudonym Henri de Pantalon-Rouge. I do wish people would stand up and use their own names.
A.J.P. Crown.
A Bad Guide 
Some groups wear blue outfits or other colours. It has something to do with the kind of school you’re attending: blue means you’re doing business administration, black means you’re studying to be a mechanic. I find this way too over-organised (not that anyone cares, presumably).
A bit like the colour-code for hard hats on construction sites?
At least there’s some point to that. Although these 18 year-olds get business cards printed, so I’m sure some networking takes place. Small children collect the business cars. Alma’s says You know my name, look up the number, after my (or rather ‘her’) favourite Beatles’ song, and there’s a Bob Dylan allusion on it, that I’ve temporarily forgotten.
My comment vanished…try again…
I thought “dungarees” were more like Osh Kosh B’gosh, the Genuine Article [http://www.carters.com/The-World%27s-Best-Overalls/oshkosh-worlds-best-overalls,default,sc.html]? So with what appear to be sleeves tied around her waist, yes, I’d’ve said “overalls” for this garment which would be called a “mono” or monkey suit here in Spain…rather than “dungarees”.
I see, though, that Osh Kosh themselves seem to call those railroad trousers “overalls” – Wait! I remember, there was the phrase “bib overalls”?
[I used to sell, them as well as wear them and dress my daughters in them; so this is just further testimony that my brain is turning to mush.]
Alma looks fabulous in them!
I’ll tell her you said so. You’re right about dungarees & overalls. I mean overalls.
It’s Paul McCartney’s favourite Beatles’ record too, I read somewhere. Not that he’s my favourite Beatle or anything (but we’ve done that one).
Trying to open some of those links crashed my wi-fi connection. Anyway; among overalls, It Is Important (as pompous people now say about the trivial) to distinguish dungarees from boilersuits.
Anyway again; your lassie looks very dashing in her red breeks. You’ll miss her when she’s in London, Crown.
Alma looks great (but that’s not surprising)
Here the “egresados” (kids in their final year at school) use some sweatshirts that they order and design by themselves (no code at all). I believe this and their “viaje de egresados” ¿graduation trip? are the most important things they do this final year…
Overalls is a very used word here, in its Spanish form: “overoles” (the /o/ sounds like dog, hot… not like cold nor over…) and the /e/ like less
This red trousers blog is fantastic (in fact, I’m captivated looking at so many good looking lads ;-)
The idea of 18-year-olds with business cards doing networking fills me with the kind of sentiment that leads to Letters to the Editor and gastric upset. But the overalls are great, in their strange way.
Me too, Language. And Alma too. I may have made it up that they are networking. Far more likely to be getting each other’s phone numbers for other reasons.
dearie, is it important or possible to distinguish boilersuits from overalls?
I’m interested that you use overoles, Julia. Well, not you personally. Necessarily. You can never guess the words that are going to leap over linguistic boundaries – or can you?
I think the number of good-looking young lads is equalled by the number of red-faced Young Conservative farmer types, but that’s probably just my prejudice. No reason why Tories shouldn’t be good looking. I guess.
Oh, yes, you may be right. But ostranenie works wonders, you know… So that for some of us (I mean for ME) almost any Briton has its charms. And posh british men are paradigmatic of their specie. Probably I couldn’t stand many of them, though. And they would never look at me… (that’s for sure).
Overoles are typical clothes for workers as in every place. But the word is so ‘our’ that we tend to forget its English origin. I don’t think I ever wore an overall, well perhaps in the ’80, but who’s to blame at that era?
Rupert Everett’s probably a closet Tory. Sadly his looks go downhill at the same rate as the British economy.
If I were a fashion designer, I would now introduce overoles in Paris and New York.
Hat: The russ gatherings are very far from networking, and the cards don’t have much to do with business. Mine, 26 years ago, contained my least flattering ID-card photo, my name and number, school and class, and two lines of bad and convoluted puns. Nobody ever called. In my days the overall could be worn with the top and all, but I didn’t – since a girl I barely knew drew something wildly obscene and not even funny across the shoulders. I remember having a hard time moving around when my mother wanted me to pose for a photo on May 17th.
We had a change of dress code in our final year at school – no longer did we have to wear uniform (implying a school blazer and tie – the insistence on caps had waned as we moved through the school) but could instead wear a sports jacket and any old tie. This opened the possibility of the older-looking buying a naughty beer.
That’s pretty shocking, Dearie, but it reminds me that on the very last day of school – this being in the radical early 70s – everyone bought an old boy’s striped tie at the school shop, put it on, and went off dahn the pub for a half of lager (and doubtless several packets of peanuts).
I don’t know how people get these shots. I’m lucky if I can get a bird’s image to stay within the viewfinder rectangle for long enough to take one fuzzy snap.
Maybe it’s a clockwork owl?
Or I’m a clockwork photographer.
I have to share a sad story about goats. A fine young fiddler of our acquaintance who was at our house last night told us that she grew up on a farm (in the sense that her parents were hippie types who lived on an old farm); that, although she was a bit afraid of horses, her brother had a horse; that she in contrast had a goat, who was great friends with the horse; and that one day the horse tragically died because the goat tore open a bag of food and the horse did not have the good sense not to overeat.
I wonder why the goat didn’t overeat too. Access to food is something you’re supposed to worry about. I think overeating may be more common as a cause of death for other animals than it is for us. I suppose birds can’t fly if they eat too much. Do penguins & ostriches and other non-flyers tend towards a rotundness that isn’t just feathers? How do vultures cope with disparities in their weight at takeoff: do they just sit around until all the food’s been metabolised and used as energy? It doesn’t sound very practical. Storing food to be eaten later is one of those things like speech that scientists could use to separate us from the lower orders. Perhaps it’s actually squirrels and leopards we’re closest to. It’s not chimps at all.
Or crocodiles.
I’m so old that I can remember when this blog featured goats.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/09/would-you-could-you-shoot-a-goat-in-the-name-of-climate-change/
Maybe the goat also overate, but was one of those goats with an iron constitution. She also mentioned that the same goat once did the classic goat thing of eating some clothes off the clothesline. The vet was able to reach down his throat and pull out a pair of long winter underpants.
Do you mean this blog or that blog, dearie? I might take some goat pictures soon.
I don’t think our goats would be interested in eating long underwear, though they could claim it was tit for tat (we take their fur). The goats prefer normal nutritious stuff like oats, hay, leaves and wood bark. The dogs sometimes try and eat the mohair. It’s very bad for them.
Why do people mock men in red trousers?
Almost half of Britons don’t like seeing men wearing red trousers, a survey has suggested. Why does the garment provoke, asks Jon Kelly.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-23530064