Continuity Errors in Robbin Hood Men in Tights
©Warner Brothers/Everett Collection Christopher Reeve, exemplary in tights as Superman in 1978.
Sadly, for me at least, the new Robin Hood movie is bereft of tights. It's got grit. It has a vibrant undertone of socioeconomic injustice. Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett are great; praise the Lord and pass the Oscar campaign. But there are no tights in this Nottingham, alas. Despite being an unapologetic old school swashbuckler, Crowe recently apologized in The Chicago Tribune, "to everybody who wants tights." They, he said, "never made sense to me…you're a bloke, you live in the forest, and you wear tights?" Well, yeah, what's the problem? Tights were developed precisely by blokes on horses in forests. (They are cousins of riding breeches.) What's the worst that can happen? You pass a briar, a burr is buried and you get a run in your tights? Man up, Robin Hood, you live life on the run. Crowe should not have cowed from the challenge of tights but since he has, we've compiled some great moments of men in tights.
1537: Henry VIII in Hans Holbein the Younger's Henry VIII
Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images
Perhaps the first extant portrait of a man in tights — and skirt and codpiece — Hans Holbein the Younger's portrait of Henry VIII did much to convince nobility, hey, tights are okay. In Henry VIII, we have a man who had six wives, founded a church and could still pull off a pair of white tights. Like everything else in England at the time, Henry VIII owned those tights.
[There was a long period from the 16th Century to the 20th informally called The Dark Ages of Tights. It was during the end of this period when a knitting machine was invented and tights slowly moved from the legs of men to those of women.]
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1922:Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood.
Taking from the rich and giving to the rich, the founder of United Artists Douglas Fairbanks — the Russell Crowe of his day — wears tights and a cute little vest (and a jaunty little hat!) as he cuts and swashbuckles his way through Nottingham-sur-Hollywood.
Corbis
1938: Errol Flynn in Adventures of Robin Hood
Errol Flynn's iconic Robin Hood wore bright green tights and an adorable velveteen cape. If Russell Crowe's hesitancy to wear tights is grounded in any issues surrounding masculinity, he might be delighted to know that fellow Antipodean Flynn once castrated sheep with his teeth, which is paradoxically a pretty manly thing to do.
1959: Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot
©Sunset Boulevard/Corbis
Though perhaps doing little to reinforce the machoness of tights, to deny Messrs Lemmon and Curtis a place in the tightwalk of fame is to dishonor what the American Film Institute called the greatest American comedy. The tights themselves did not go unlauded at the time either. Orry-Kelly, the Hollywood costume designer (and another Australian), won the 1959 Oscar for Black-and-White Costume Design. Technically, though, tights are generally made of thicker stuff. [Tight minutae minute: In the States, anything less than 40 denier is usually called pantyhose.] But nobody's perfect.
1966: Rudolf Nureyev in Swan Lake
Technically, June 16th 1961 — when, on a trip back to the Soviet Union, Rudolf Nureyev defected at Le Bourget airport in Paris — is the defining moment of men in tights of the last century. But it was the filmed version of Swan Lake five years later, with Nureyev as Siegfried and Dame Margot Fonteyn as Odette that has proved indelible. His long white gams, in perfect a la seconde, as he competes pirouette after pirouette.
1978: Christopher Reeve in Superman
In the context of the film, in which Superman né Kal-El, spends most of his days as a beat reporter for the Daily Planet, tights underwrite Clark Kent's heroics. Had his suit been made of loose-fitting cotton, a sort of Dries van Noten disguise, think of all the innocent civilians who might have otherwise been lost as Kent struggled to disentangle his slouchy Superman trousers from his gabardine Hollywood waist pants.
1993: Cary Elwes in Robin Hood: Men in Tights
We humbly ask that this mockery of men in tights, wherein it is sung, "We're men/We're men in tights/We roam around the forest looking for fights" be stricken from the record. If you must have a young Cary Elwes in tights — and really, no one wants to see an old Cary Elwes in tights — please refer to his appearance as Wesley in The Princess Bride.
Source: https://archive.nytimes.com/tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/men-in-tights-a-brief-history/
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