Knickerbockers or knickers are a form of men's or boys' baggy-kneed breeches, particularly popular in the early 20th-century United States. Golfers' plus twos and plus fours are similar. Until after World War I, in many English-speaking countries, boys customarily wore short pants in summer and "knee pants" similar to knickers in winter. At the onset of puberty or sometime in their teens, they graduated to long trousers. In that era, the transition to "long pants" was a major rite of passage. The fashion was imported from the US to Britain around the 1860s and continued until the 1920s, when it was superseded by above-knee-length short trousers (shorts), probably due to the popularity of the scouting movement whose uniform included shorts. Towards the end of this period, knickerbockers may have been more of a "fancy dress" item, for formal occasions, rather than everyday wear. At around 13 years, boys exchanged their knickerbockers for long trousers. In British English, "knickers" are women's underwear. Baseball players historically wore a stylized form of knickerbockers, although the pants have become less baggy in recent decades and some modern ballplayers opt to pull the trousers close to the ankles. The white knickerbocker-like pants worn by American football officials are a legacy of early football players wearing knickerbockers to play in. In recent years, the NFL has equipped its officials with long trousers rather than knickers in cold weather. History The name "Knickerbocker" first acquired meaning with Washington Irving's History of New York, which featured the fictional author Diedrich Knickerbocker, an old-fashioned Dutch New Yorker in Irving's satire of chatty and officious local history. In fact, Washington Irving had a real friend named Herman Knickerbocker (1779–1855), whose name he borrowed. Herman Knickerbocker, in turn, was of the upstate Knickerbocker clan, which descended from a single immigrant ancestor, Harmen Jansen van Wijhe Knickerbocker. Jansen van Wijhe invented the name upon arriving in New Amsterdam and signed a document with a variant of it in 1682. After Irving's History, by 1831, "Knickerbocker" had become a local byword for an imagined old Dutch-descended New York aristocracy, their old-fashioned ways, their long-stemmed pipes, and knee-breeches long after the fashion had turned to slacks. (Such cultural heritage sprang almost entirely from Irving's imagination and became a well-known example of an invented tradition.) "Knickerbocker" became a byword for a New York patrician, comparable to a "Boston Brahmin". Thus the "New York Knickerbockers" were