November 22, 2024 
I bought a new pair of breeches last year, and I was struck by how things had changed. Not necessarily for the better, but that’s just my opinion.
As I wandered through the racks of neatly hung pants, I ran my rough calloused hands over the options available. My hands, in dire need of lotion, snagged on what are known as “riding tights”.
What in the Sam Hill are riding tights? Yoga pants with belt loops? While I appreciated the 27-way stretch technology, the fabric choice makes these a veritable Slip ‘n Slide once your butt meets the saddle. Then I noticed some had anti-slip silicone hearts or squiggles on the backside.
Not really my thing, but I wondered if tradition has gone the way of the dodo.
Now, I’m not saying the breeches of my younger days, say 1980-2000, were perfect, but they were designed for a generation of thick-skinned riders. Namby-pamby riders need not apply because our breeches from days long forgotten simply wouldn’t allow it.
Our riding pants were a zero-way-stretch affair with pant legs that ended mid-calf and fastened with newly popular Velcro that never quite closed.
Imagine, if you will, enduring the 20-minute struggle of getting your leather boots on, only to find the pokey part of the Velcro closure rubbing against your skin whilst snagging on your nylons. We didn’t have time to take our boots off and put them back on, so we toughed it out.
“Do your worst, Velcro,” we’d say. And the Velcro did, rasping off little bits of skin until suitable divets were etched from our legs for it to rest for the day.
Not only were things happening within our boots, but also just above the top of them. Due to the zero-way-stretch technology, our riding pants had the ability to press our precious kneecaps into unpredictable and unfavorable positions. Needless to say, the painful result of this torque only presented itself once our boots were firmly on.
And while our kneecaps were being repositioned, our leather knee patches had us questioning the designer. Our coaches then, as they do now, yelled, “Quit gripping with your knees!” and we, the hapless students, wondered, Then why are there leather knee patches on these stupid pants?
Tradition, that’s why.
The neat thing, other than the apparent uselessness of the aforementioned patches, was their constant ability to shrink in the wash due to a hot water oversight. This shrinkage meant that the material that sat beneath them would get bunched up and take to burrowing into the side of your knees.
I have, however, noticed that knee patches have made a resurgence, a sort of retro nod to the past I presume. The difference is these patches are made of some new-age pseudo leather, which is an unshrinkable and heat-friendly material to appease those riders who simply can’t handle a yard of material bunched up at their inner knee.
To rachet things up a notch or two, many of us loved the look of the full-seat breeches, which was a clever combination of leather and breech. These were opened faced, if you will, as there was no material between the leather and our leg skin.
Air-drying was a must; I usually used the back of a dining room chair, much to my mother’s delight. The leather dried with the rigidity of concrete with an equally rough surface.
We’d “slide” into these bad boys knowing that this was an effective way to exfoliate our entire backside from mid-calf to your hindquarters. The hot shower that followed a hot day of showing was always a bit of a gamble because we were never entirely sure what part of our skin would violently react to the hot water.
The reason we tolerated these nuances was because, in the right conditions, these fancy pants gave us all the stickability one could hope for in the saddle. However, if a little water was added to the mix, our full seats turned on us faster than a feral cat.
The water, whether from rain or an unexpected dip in the water jump, turned the leather into a slimy mess that ended our days prematurely. Though, back then, we were allowed to continue on no matter how many times we fell off, but wet leather seats were too slithery to allow for that madness.
If full seats weren’t your cup of tea, maybe the subtle, rust-colored show breeches were. They were a curious choice as they paired, questionably, with everything and nothing all at once.
They did hide dirt smudges and camouflaged the spackling of cellulite, which perhaps was the lure. They were a bold statement, a brave ode to everyone’s favorite compound, rust. We had the mettle to take on these fall colors in the middle of summer. It’s just who we were.
We also loved a side-zip breech because it meant we could also wear our belt sideways. Getting these pants done up was a tremendous way to isolate the exact location of our back pain. That quarter waist contort also tested our desire for oxygen over fashion. Tucking things in, zipping things up, and getting the belt perfectly off-center removed our ability to breathe, and it took several deep inhales and numerous attempts to get things just so.
I’m not saying that all these New Age breeches are for the birds, I’m just saying they appeal to the masses, where as in my day, they appealed to the tall and slim. The rest of us just had to get on with it.
I left the tack store that day with a New Age pair of rust breeches with faux leather knee patches, which pair (I’d like to think cleverly) with my favorite pink T-shirt.
In my own, special, non-namby-pamby, way, I’m hanging on to the old while giving way to the new.
