What are Go-to-Hell Pants? Actually, it encompasses more than just the trousers if you put it down to brightly coloured (and embroidered) articles of clothing that one could wear as casualwear. The most famous of them all are the Go-to-Hell (GTH) pants. Here, in the video below where I try review a Porsche Panamera with a friend, I am wearing a pair by Brooks Brothers GTH trousers with birds embroidered on them, that famous American brand noted for making these sort of trousers (well, I prefer calling them trousers).
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The shirt is from Tommy Hilfiger, the shoes are from Ferragamo and the belt something from Marks & Spencer (I think). Quite the ultimate GTH trad look suitable for a very hot and sunny day in tropical Malaysia.
Here are some quotes about GTH gear. Taken from the Ivy-Style website. This is a pretty good place to go if you want to learn more about American Trad style of menswear.
From Paul Fussell’s “Class”:
Photo: Gentleman's Gazette - which have a good GTH article here.
“Go-to-hell in spirit also are the sports or playtime trousers which identify the upper-middle class, especially the suburban branch. One common type is white duck trousers with little green frogs embroidered all over them. A variation: light-green trousers, with dark-blue embroidered whales. Or signal flags. Or bell buoys. Or lobsters. Or anything genteel-marine, suggesting that the wearer has just strolled a few steps away from his good-sized yacht.”
From Lauren Lipton’s “Mating Rituals of the North American WASP”:
“What do you call those preppy pants, the kind where the right front leg is, like, yellow, and the left front leg is pink, and the right back leg is, I don’t know, green and the left back leg — ”
“Go-to-hell pants,” Luke interrupted. “What’s your point?”
“You people are lunatics,” Bex scoffed. “You can wear pants like that, but you won’t say one little ‘I love you’?”
M. magazine, 1990:
A prime reason WASPs like meeting people and socializing…. is that it gives them the chance to prove what daring fellows they are. All WASP men have “go-to-hell” clothes for such occasions, usually poisonous green pants with little whales or anchors printed on them. Even though they wear dumb clothes to the office, WASPs with real guts always include one “go-to-hell” item, in their business attire too.
Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr.,”Preppies: The Last Upper Class?”
Atlantic Monthly, 1979:
“Preppies of all ages and both sexes demonstrate an unwavering taste for luminescent pastels and hard primary colors, a taste evidently designed to evoke the infantile gaiety of the nursery or the youthful certainties of Playskool.”
All of these are a good reason to be a little more flamboyant, or a little out there in terms of taste. Why? I suppose it's because you can. Or maybe I can.
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