Figure 1.-- A HBC reader provided us sacans of American boys underpants worn about 1900, although just a guess. What is interesting is how completely different and more compicated they were from modern undwewear. We think the 25 inch waist here equates to something like a modern child 6-8 year old. The underpants had fly so we know it was for boys. Notice the button holes, but lack of buttons. It would have buttoned to a waist (underwaist or panti-waist hence the name).

When people began wearing underwear, there was an immediate problem, at least with underpants which we believe was the first underwear garment. This was how o hold underpants up. The answer was strings tied to other clothing. The drawstring, as a concept, appeared in ancient times, but was used for bags rather than clothing. Various civilizations used cords or strings to secure bags. We believe the use in clothing was much more limited, but there is something much more limited. The specific invention of the modern drawstring, a cord threaded through a casing to restrict or tighten an opening is so ancient that there is no actual date or inventor. The use of drawstrings became much more common during the medieval era, especially for clothing. Here the increasing use of pouches and hoods were a factor. Another medieval development was the invention of buttons. People today probably can't conceive of buttons in underwear, but buttons an button's were very common for centuries. Here we see an example about 1900 (figure 1). This mean that dressing up in the modern was complicated, especially for children. This must have made getting dressed a bitbof an ordeal. Younger children would have needed help to a older age than modern children. Here we are talking about children in America and the advanced countries of Western Europe. Children in many other countries did not face these complication because they were nor as well dressed. The variety of traditional dress styles around the world make this difficult to assess. Outside the few most advanced countries, as far as we can tell, most children around the world did not wear underclothes. This may have been different for the wealthy elite, but seems to have been the case for the vast majority of the population. Modern underwear did not appear until the 20th century and this is because of elastic. Underpants today are imaginable without elastic. We see elastic being used for boxing trunks (1925). Here we are talking about pugilists. And gradually we see companies offering underpants held up with elastic, first boxers and the new briefs (1930s).