Why did sailors wear bell-bottom pants?

Bell-bottoms have long been synonymous with sailors in the U.S. Navy: Just picture Sailor Jack, the patriotic mascot who first appeared on boxes of Cracker Jack in 1918, or Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly dancing and singing in the 1945 musical Anchors Aweigh. During World War II, songwriter Moe Jaffe even reworked the lyrics of a bawdy 19th-century English sea shanty into “Bell Bottom Trousers,” a song about a woman’s love for her sailor, who wore “bell bottom trousers, coat of navy blue.”

The Navy first authorized wearing bell-bottom denim dungarees in 1901 as an alternative to heavier wool pants. With a few rare exceptions, bell-bottoms remained the official working uniform of enlisted sailors from 1913 through the 1990s. Some changes were made to the uniform over the years, and in the late 20th century pants with wide, straight legs replaced the flared bottoms, but they were still referred to as “bell-bottoms.” The classic image of the bell-bottom-wearing seaman lives on today — but why did Q sailors start wearing this style in the first place?

Before there was a Navy uniform, there were bell-bottom trousers

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why bell-bottoms became the clothing of choice for the U.S. Navy, but we do know the tradition started in the early 19th century, at a time when the Navy lacked a standardized uniform for enlisted personnel. By the mid-1800s, Britain’s Royal Navy had also adopted the flared-pant style, and by the end of the 19th century, other seafaring militaries had joined the bell-bottom bandwagon, too. One of the first descriptions of the attire of U.S. Navy enlisted sailors comes from an 1813 Navy file about the arrival of Commodore Stephen Decatur in New York, which describes “glazed canvas hats with stiff brims, decked with streamers of ribbon, blue jackets buttoned loosely over waistcoats and blue trousers with bell bottoms.” One theory about the origin of these bell-bottoms is that before uniform regulations were established, Navy tailors may have been aiming to differentiate sailors’ dress from civilian clothing. But it turns out that bell-bottom trousers didn’t just serve a stylistic distinction — they were also a practical choice for sailors.