Geppetto unlocks his front door to noise coming from his workshop.
From here, he can hear someone rummaging through his tools. He starts to close the door, a firm frown on his face, careful not to alert the intruder.
Before he can shut the door, a loud crash startles him. He drops his food basket and hurries in the direction of the crash.
He stops short of the workshop doorway, a look of wonder in his eyes ironing the wrinkes on his forehead.
“It can’t be," he whispers to himself.
It’s quiet now, too quiet, even for Figaro.
"Pinocchio?"
A thud.
Geppetto braves through the door and is greeted with a bizarre scene.
The marionette he finished carving yesterday is standing in the middle of a tornado of tools, eyes wide, holding a knickerbocker in one hand and a pedal pusher and clam diggers in the other.
Geppetto tilts his head in a silent question at the items in the marionette’s hands, perhaps in an attempt to ignore the miracle before him a little longer.
"Huh?" He motions to the two items he has never seen before...
While Geppetto’s three-letter inquiry might be interpreted as curiosity, I prefer to interpret it as disgust directed at the pedal pushers and clam diggers.
This attitude is common among older generations when new fashion trends appear on the horizon with the dawn of youth.
Here stands his newly animated son holding the long tradition of knickerbockers and an unfamiliar variation of it in the other two items.
All three items are not carpentry tools despite their names, and they share an awful idea.
This is the story of the fashion abomination known as "pedal pushers.”
Pedal Pushers, or "pedals" as they are known in Uganda, are calf-length trousers which were popular in the 90s and early 2000s pop culture never to be seen again except in your auntie’s closet of shame. And the pedal pushers' shame runs deep.
The fashion goes back to the 1860s when the British exported the knickerbockers to America.
Knickerbockers are a baggy-kneed form of breeches (which were worn on the whole by aristocrats). Up until the 1920s and 1930s, knickerbockers were a rite of passage for boys who transitioned to full-length trousers at 13 years of age.
By the 1930s, knickerbockers were worn for athletics and outdoor work. Around this time, shorts were growing in popularity owing to the scouts' movement, whose uniform included shorts as a staple.
It’s crazy that shorts took so long to break onto the scene because there’s no way knickerbockers were seen as the practical attire over shorts in manual labour and mobility. It looks like if you kneel in a knickerbocker, the cuff starts to cut off your blood supply from the back of your knee.
Except for the creepy name, the pedal pusher learnt nothing and forgot nothing when it inherited that awful trait.
In 1940, Disney released the animated feature film "Pinocchio". It’s because of this timing that coincides with the outgoing knickerbocker and the pedal pusher boom that I have chosen Pinocchio as the cross to crucify this trend.
(Did Geppetto remodel knickerbockers into pedals to better conceal Pinocchio’s knee pedals? Did his pedal pushers turn into trousers whenever he lied? How many times have you read the words "knickerbocker” and “pedal"?
In the 1950s, pedal pushers, also known as clam diggers, became popular fashion. I wonder how the marketing of a piece of cloth called "clam digger" went down.
It went pretty well actually because they were primarily made for cyclists, hence the name "pedal pusher" because trousers and skirts would get caught in bicycle chains.
"Clam diggers" worked just as well for the men who went digging for clams on shorelines because this style left enough leg room for wading through the water.
They should have been restricted to these activities.
Today, they masquerade as capri pants (three-quarter legs), which look better but tragically share a similar fate of silly names. Capri pants also rose in fame around the same time the pedal pushers did, except they did so in Capri, Italy, where actresses like Audrey Hepburn put them in the limelight.
From knickerbockers, pedal pushers, and clam diggers to capri pants, in a perfect world, these names would be a collection, but alas, the worst fashion trends make the most cumbersome names.
Capri pants are also called crop pants, man-pris, flood pants, ankle pants, jams, highwaters, or toreador pants.
Jeans were worn during coal mining. You don’t see them make a fuss.