page_title: Knickerbockers (clothing)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Knickerbockers (clothing) / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Alice Manfield (Guide Alice) (1878-1960), mountain guide, naturalist, chalet owner, photographer, and early feminist figure based at Mt Buffalo, Victoria, Australia. In this image Alice is wearing custom made woollen clothing for hiking in the mountains and holding a long walking staff. Written on image lower left: "Guide Alice, Mt. Buffalo". Converted to digital from transparency: glass lantern slide, 8.5 cm x 8.5 cm.
context_page_description: Knickerbockers or knickers are a form of men's or boys' baggy-kneed trousers particularly popular in the early 20th-century United States. Golfers' plus twos and plus fours are breeches of this type. Before World War II, skiers often wore knickerbockers too, usually ankle-length.
  Until after World War I, in many English-speaking countries, boys customarily wore short pants in summer and knickerbockers in winter.
  At the onset of puberty, they graduated to long trousers. In that era, the transition to "long pants" was a major rite of passage. See, for example, the classic song "Blues in the Night" by Johnny Mercer: "My mammy done told me, when I was in knee-pants, my mammy done told me, son..."
  In Britain, they are always called knickerbockers. The fashion was imported from the US around the 1860s and continued until the 1920s, when it was superseded by above-knee length short trousers, probably due to the popularity of the scouting movement whose uniform included shorts. Towards the end of this period, knickerbockers may have been more of a "fancy dress" item, for formal occasions, rather than everyday wear. At around 13 years, boys exchanged their knickerbockers for long trousers.
context_section_description: The name "Knickerbocker" first acquired meaning with Washington Irving's History of New York, which featured the fictional author Diedrich Knickerbocker, an old-fashioned Dutch New Yorker in Irving's satire of chatty and officious local history. In fact, Washington Irving had a real friend named Herman Knickerbocker (1779–1855), whose name he borrowed. Herman Knickerbocker, in turn, was of the upstate Knickerbocker clan, which descended from a single immigrant ancestor, Harmen Jansen van Wijhe Knickerbocker.  Jansen van Wijhe invented the name upon arriving in New Amsterdam and signed a document with a variant of it in 1682.  
  After Irving's History, by 1831 "Knickerbocker" had become a local byword for an imagined old Dutch-descended New York aristocracy, their old-fashioned ways, their long-stemmed pipes, and knee-breeches long after the fashion had turned to slacks.  (Such cultural heritage sprang almost entirely from Irving's imagination and became a well-known example of an invented tradition.) "Knickerbocker" became a byword for a New York patrician, comparable to a "Boston Brahmin".
  Thus the "New York Knickerbockers" were an amateur social and athletic club organized by Alexander Cartwright on Manhattan's (Lower) East Side in 1842, largely to play "base ball" according to written rules, the first organized team in baseball history; on June 19, 1846 the New York Knickerbockers played the first game of "base ball" organized under those rules, in Hoboken, New Jersey, and were trounced, 23–1. The Knickerbocker name stayed with the team even after it moved its base of operations to Elysian Fields at Hoboken, N.J. in 1846. The baseball link may have prompted Casey Stengel to joyously exclaim, "It's great to be back as the manager of the Knickerbockers!" when he was named pilot of the newborn New York Mets in 1961.
  Hence also the locally-brewed "Knickerbocker Beer" brewed by Jacob Ruppert, the first sponsors of the TV show Tonight!; hence the gossip columnist "Cholly Knickerbocker", the pen name of Igor Cassini; hence the extremely high-toned Knickerbocker Club (still in a neo-Georgian mansion on Fifth Avenue at 62nd Street, which was founded in 1871 when some members of the Union Club became concerned that admission policies were not strict enough); and hence the New York Knicks, whose corporate name is the "New York Knickerbockers".
  The Knickerbocker name was an integral part of the New York scene when the Basketball Association of America granted a charter franchise to the city in the summer of 1946. As can best be determined, the final decision to call the team the "Knickerbockers" was made by the club's founder, Ned Irish. The team is now generally referred to as the Knicks.
caption: Alice Manfield wearing a style of knickbockers in the early 20th century for her work as a mountain guide in Australia
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