Making Victorian Cycling Breeches: A Menace to Polite Society

Okay, say for example you find yourself in the 1890s. Physical activities are becoming all the rage and women are increasingly allowed, or shall I say, socially accepted into similar activities as men. One of the most popular of those activities being cycling. Now cycling in a skirt or a dress, as you can probably imagine, can be a little bit tricky, if not outright dangerous. So enter the late Victorian women's cycling costume, complete with a pair of ever-so-scandalous cycling breeches, or some of the first bifurcated outerwear garments adopted by women in modern Western culture. But what was it actually like to wear an outfit like this? Were cycling breeches actually practical or, like so much of 19th century dress, merely aesthetic? To get an idea of the Victorian cycling experience for myself, I decided to make a pair. Wow, that was the scariest thing I've done all week. I've chosen this lightweight wool check that I've had floating around in my stash for a while, and I'm referencing the cycling breeches pattern from Black's Dale. Their pattern shapes are usually really good, I found, although I don't really like following instructions and instead prefer to just do my own thing according to historical evidence I find, so we'll be referencing a little bit of multiple sources for this project. So I'm hoping to make these up unlined. This may or may not prove to be a bad idea, since this fabric is very drapey. They might not have much body, but they also might, and I'm hoping they will, turn out to be a nice, simple, lightweight pair of breeches that move well and won't be too heavy or bulky with the lining. Most trousers, even today and historically, weren't lined, so I'm feeling a bit optimistic. The pattern comes with a half inch of seam allowance worked into the pattern shape itself, so I have to take the extra step of measuring in and marking my stitching lines so that I know exactly where I need to be running my stitches. But for all the bits that aren't seen, well, really just the pockets, I'm using this cotton silesia, which is super common for pockets and in late 19th century tailored garments. I'm also going to need some parlatan, or stiffened cotton gauze, to add stiffening to some parts like the fly components, the waistband, and the cuffs. Can we take a minute? I'm just taping together the pattern. Can we take a minute to appreciate the size of this pocket? You can actually, like, you can fit multiple pigs in here. Wait, yeah, look, I can totally just carry my pigs around in my trousers. You want to come on adventures with me? Petition to make, like, the standard size for pockets, like, dimensions for at least two guinea pigs. Honestly, the Edwardians really knew what they were doing in the pocket department. If your pockets aren't big enough to hold at least two large rodents, then what, pray tell, is the point? The first step is to add some pleats into the legs of the trousers. This will just help to give them volume and movement, and hopefully will allow for some knee movement during the cycling. One large pleat is taken in each of the front and back pieces, which I'm temporarily basing down and pressing so that they behave during construction. As you can probably expect, cycling was a controversial activity for women at first. Women's encroachment on any male-dominated field is inevitably going to spark the initial wave of social and moral outrage we see all throughout history. But a lot of that controversy is centered around the clothing. Women begin experimenting with forms of rational dress as cycling becomes a more prevalent activity, from shorter skirts to split skirts to, eventually, the controversial, fully bifurcated cycling britches. And now to jump right into the most complicated part of the project, the fly, which is a button fly in accordance with a lot of historical garments before the invention of the zipper in the 20th century, which also means it has a hidden button catch. So first I need to sew this outer fly onto one of the front leg pieces, and then stitch together a little sandwich of fabric, lining, and tarlatan interfacing to make the button catch. Seams are trimmed down to reduce bulk, and then everything gets pressed. First I'm pressing all the seams open so that everything lies nice and flat, then the outer fly piece gets pressed back inside the trouser leg, and the button catch gets turned right side out and pressed flat. Keen-eyed viewers here will note that I stitched these layers the wrong way around, so that button catch would be made to go on the opposite trouser leg instead of fitting neatly under this side, so I did have to go back and fix that. But for those of you who didn't notice, absolutely nothing amiss happened here, and don't worry about it. The wonderful thing about patterns is that they mark out annoying things like buttonholes for you, so I didn't have to figure that out myself. Instead I could just prick the pattern markings and dust them over with some chalk dust to transfer those lines onto my fabric, and then to mark them more clearly with hard chalk because chalk and wool does not tend to stick around for long. Now for the fun part, hitting things. Or cutting buttonholes. You know, I think it's actually really clever of a garment to require its closures to be done at the beginning of the construction process, so you don't get to the end and decide, eh, it's not actually that important, I can just pin it all together and no one will know. Not speaking from experience or anything. Who actually likes getting to the end of sewing a whole entire garment only to find a heap of very finicky, time-consuming, and almost always purposely hidden work still left to do? Certainly not me, that is for sure. But not today, satin buttonhole twist, for here I am, forced to complete these buttonholes whilst I still have the sewing motivation. The button panel is aligned with the outer flypiece, and I'm just tucking in those raw edges before basting it all down so that it stays firmly in place for topstitching. Whilst I'm here at the machine, I'm stitching the button catch onto the other front trouser leg, and then stitching an additional facing piece, which is also interfaced with tarlatan, onto the end of that button catch. Everything is pressed for neatening, and the facing of the button catch is turned back to finish the second leg side. I know this sounds incredibly confusing. I too was also incredibly confused by this whole process, and it genuinely took me like a week to decipher everything going on. It makes a lot more sense when you have it in your hands, in three dimensions, actually looking at it and playing with it, I promise. But if you're just here for the ride and for the vibes, um, welcome! I hope you enjoy. That raw edge of the button catch facing just gets turned under and hemmed with a quick whipstitch to finish it off. I went a little rogue here and decided to do the inseams next, because I didn't feel like doing the pockets just yet, which was another fiddly task. So I took a moment to french seam the inside seam of the legs together, which just involves sewing the pieces together first with the wrong sides together, trimming down that seam to a super narrow width, pressing it of course to make sure the fold is neat, and then turning it and sewing it again with the right sides together to encase that narrow raw edge. This was a super common seam finishing method by the 19th century, and is super great for projects like this where there won't be a lining to hide the inside construction, but that with this very bray-prone wool, one cannot simply get away with thinking the edges and being done with it, as so many 19th and early 20th century seam allowances are. And I guess I have no choice now but to do the pockets, since I do need those in to do the outseams. So I'm attaching a facing strip to one side of each pocket, pressing the seam allowance towards the main pocket, and topstitching that down. Then I'm just hemming down that facing raw edge by hand, since it'll be exposed inside the trouser, and I don't want it to come undone. This probably isn't strictly necessary, but again, I'm not sure I trust this wool to stay put. And then we had to take a quick interlude whilst our building caught on fire, and we had to evacuate for a few days. Forced to take a little break? At least we will not be in want of amusement. Because June's Journey, the captivating mobile hidden objects mystery game, is celebrating their seventh anniversary, and have set up all sorts of exciting events happening all over Orchid Island. Word on the street has it that a mysterious stranger called Inkvail is connected with the cryptic messages being found in murals around the island. You can follow the investigation in a special YouTube series premiering on October 5th, as detectives from the community team are sent by June to try and get to the bottom of Inkvail's identity. You too can get in on the investigation. Comment below your ideas on who Inkvail could be, as well as their motives, and follow the link in my description to enter. Seven lucky players will be selected to receive an in-game 5-star memoirs pack. Plus enjoy daily challenges rewarding exclusive new decorations, and a thrilling new in-game event where players are invited to partake in the Masquerade of Secrets from September 28th to October 4th. Give your island the anniversary treatment with exclusive Masquerade-themed decorations to add a touch of decadence to your haven. Download June's Journey for free by clicking the link in the description or by scanning the QR code on screen. June's Journey is available on iOS and mobile devices, as well as on desktop through Facebook games. A few days later, and much gratefully spared from the worst of the damage, we are finally allowed back into the studio. I've decided to just bind off the rest of the raw edges of the trouser legs and the pocket pieces whilst they're still flat, since these outseams are going to have pockets put in, which will make French seaming much more difficult. And by much more difficult, I actually mean probably impossible. The binding is just a bit of black cotton tape I found in my stash, which gets machine stitched onto the edges with relative speed. Then I can begin the process of inserting the pockets, which is done first by stitching the pocket pieces to the pant legs to create the pocket openings, then by stitching the pockets in half around the edges, and finally stitching the outseams shut. I'm not quite going all the way down into the junction where the pocket meets the trousers with the machine. It's just too tedious for me to get neat, so I'm stopping about an inch away and finishing off the rest of that seam by hand with a backstitch. This is probably just a me and the 19th century problem, but because my Victorian treadle doesn't backstitch like modern machines do to tie off the threads, I'll have to go in and tie off all the points where I stopped mid-seam so that those threads don't come unraveled. The tails of these threads are put back through a needle and woven into the binding so that they don't just sit there looking annoying. And then I can join up the two legs at the crotch seam. And now that I have a whole pants, I'm just quickly basting the fly piece in place just to keep them from getting too unruly before I can secure it with a proper waistband and buttons. The leg cuffs are split for a couple of inches at the bottom of the outseam to allow for ease of getting one's foot in, so I'm just hemming off those two vent edges on each leg with a quick whip stitch. The waistband piece is going to be folded in half, but before I do that, I'm just first going to cross-stitch a strip of that tarlatan interfacing in to give it some nice stiff structure. The same process goes for the bands that'll go around the leg cuffs, so I'm just preparing all of these at the same time. This is a little bit of an unnecessary step, but the pattern instructions say to finish the waistband in this way, and I just thought it was really cool, so I'm going to give it a try. The bottom seam allowance is folded up onto the tarlatan and also cross-stitched into place, which will definitely save having to do this step later. It probably will take a little bit longer, but it also actually might turn out a little bit neater, so let's see what happens. I can then fold the waistband in half inside out and pin it together at the side seams before stitching these down and turning it right side out. Then the waistband and leg cuffs can get pinned on with the side that still has the unfolded seam allowance. Can you see where this is going? The seam allowance will get pressed up into the waistband, and that cross-stitched edge will get whipped cleanly on top to hide all of the raw edges of the trousers and lower waistband. It's really clever and makes this step much easier, although, to be honest, I'm not actually sure how much of a difference this made, whether it actually would have taken that much longer to just fold in that upper edge whilst in the process of whipping it down to begin with, as I would usually do. The final step is just to add a couple more buttonholes to close the waist and cuff bands, and then buttons all round. With a complete pair of breeches, I think it's time to take these out and see how well they fare in action. I know, in theory, women were not riding high bicycles, but, I mean, we're already being extremely subversive and controversial in putting ourselves in cycling breeches, by far the most controversial cycling attire available to women in the 1890s. So purely for funsies, I think we should test these in the realm of extreme cycling. So we recruited Doug Pinkerton, who has been riding, building, and maintaining original high bicycles for the last few decades. So if they put their feet on the pedal there, the worst thing that happens is that. Okay, well, we don't want that. Seeing these things up close and in action, these things are dangerous. You basically have to launch yourself up onto a moving vehicle that you also have to keep in balance, and there's a trick to slide up into the saddle that I quickly found posed some problems with these breeches, with the pleats that wanted to catch on the edges during the launch and slide process. When you're ready, put the pressure on, and keep it more into the center of the truck. That's it, relax. After getting the hang of the mounting process, I found the pedaling on the fixed wheel remarkably like operating my treadle machine. In fact, as it turns out, a lot of these bicycle manufacturing companies were also manufacturing sewing machines. Through the summer months, they would produce, say, bicycles, because that's when there was the popular time to ride them. But in the winter, they would go, well, we're not going to sell any bicycles, so let's make sewing machines, let's make typewriters, things like that. So the workforce was still employed. Doug proceeded to inform me that the original high bicycles, so they were called, because the term penny farthing was a derogatory invention of the 1890s, apparently, were almost exclusively used by athletic men as a leisure activity throughout the 1870s and 80s. The men who rode these original machines would have been wearing tight breeches, certainly beyond the realm of acceptability for women who, even in bifurcated garments, still needed to maintain some level of skirt-like volume in this period. But contrary to Victorian opinion, it was possible to ride one of these. If you enjoyed this video, you might like to go watch this one on the reconstruction of a split skirt, the slightly more socially acceptable and extremely geometrically engineered form of ladies' cycling attire during this period. And thank you once again to June's Journey for supporting this video. Do be sure to check out their links down below. Relax. I feel like gripping this for dear life, yes. Keep it going, keep it safe. I'm getting away from you. It's a workout. Yes. Wow. That was the scariest thing I've done all week.