Red peril: should you ditch the trickiest shade of trousers?

The colour red is getting a bad rap, and not just thanks to Jeremy Corbyn. A new bar in Fulham, south-west London, has decreed in its dress code that red trousers are banned. Any scarlet-hued hopefuls will be unceremoniously kitted out in “Eighties tracksuit bottoms” instead; not a tinge of crimson nor a touch of tomato will make it past the threshold.

It’s a particular turn of the knife that this decree (which, yes, does smack of publicity seeking) is taking place in Fulham, the natural habitat of the flame-trousered Sloane, often called Mungo, cheeks as rouged as his breeks, which are possibly paired with a mossy tweed jacket and candy-striped Oxford shirt. The endangering of his species has already been documented – Peter York called time on his Sloane Rangers years ago – but this is another blow to his way of life.

Red trouser detractors are many. In 2016, Country Life magazine signalled their death knell, dismissing them as the attire of “dear old things at Lord’s and Stewards at Henley”. A popular but now-defunct blog, Look at My F------ Red Trousers, sprang up to document, National Geographic-style, the red trouser in all its incarnations, from baronial castles to Putney boat races.

So why the stigma? In these more egalitarian times, red trousers are an unashamed symbol of aristocratic toffiness, a stylistic flare going up to purport a jolly-hockey-sticks hauteur.

It’s the uniform of Mungo and his public school chums as they cheer on the cox on the banks of the Thames, compare who has been invited to Harry and Meghan’s nuptials over the cocktails served in a bust of Silvio Berlusconi’s head at Bunga Bunga (it’s rilly hilare…) or, as he progresses in life, as a retired country squire in his merry raspberry cords.

The upper-class connotations aren’t for nothing; in the 18th-century, red trousers formed part of Napoleonic uniform, swaggering and for all to see.

A prescribed belief in the boating world decrees that only those adventurers who have sailed across the Atlantic are allowed to wear red trousers, with a shop in that most Ivy League of locations, Nantucket, famous for their “Nantucket red” options, featured in The Official Preppy Handbook (I would suggest if you require such a tome, you are on the wrong side of the country-club white picket fence).

And while fox hunting dress comprises of white breeches, the frock coat is siren shaded, all the better for jolly well cantering on through the spatters of blood.

Historically, blazing bright colours were sartorial signifiers of class; let the oiks toil in the fields in slurry shades, while nobility took to their social occasions in clashing boating blazers, public school colours and the pomp and ceremony of military ceremonies. The very word “blazer” comes from the blazing red hue of the jackets on the Lady Margaret Boat Club of 1800s Cambridge.

And yet, perhaps there is a case to be made for tones of ruby as part of your daily attire. Christopher Bailey, during his swansong from British house Burberry, certainly thought so, with a series of vivid scarlet trousers worn with rave-bright jackets; ditto King of All Things Collegiate, Ralph Lauren, who returned to the East Coast alum he knows so well with fire-engine red pantaloons.

Perhaps one of the most convincing interpretations of this most contentious item of clothing is a study of Truman Capote at his home in Palm Springs in the 1970s, by society photographer and documentarian Slim Aarons.

He relaxes in cheering vermilion chinos and soft-fit Moroccan shirt, the red trousers a sign of louche glamour and Californian ease. Aarons’ snapshots of the jet set as they flocked from Capri to the Cote d’Azur are perhaps your best inroad into red trousers: his seductive photographs are punctuated with bright hues that could only be worn en vacances.

It’s also worth considering the shade of your trews and opt for a pair that are perhaps more nuanced and less brayingly King's Road – less cardinal and more coral, for example; or veer into claret-and-rust tints.

And while many a polo lunch has been punctuated by chaps in red trousers and country tweeds, it’s best to steer clear and instead pair with contrasting blue – perhaps a long-sleeve polo to keep things preppy – or complementing tones of magenta or brick, particularly if you’re taken with the aesthetics of Netflix cult documentary Wild Wild Country. Mungo needn’t hang up his rose-tinted view of the wardrobe just yet.