A few months ago, once it became clear that the pandemic was going to last for awhile, I decided to try out wearing suspenders instead of just a belt. My reason was a practical one, I have become shaped a bit like a funnel – meaning that as soon as my pants moved down a bit caused by bending over, sitting down, or some other “extreme” movement the circumference encompassed by my belt was smaller and my pants would fall off.
I had been fighting this tendency for several years by tightening up my belt sufficiently to squeeze my belly enough to prevent this potentially embarrassing event. The problem with that is that after a few hours it becomes pretty painful. The fact that I was now hidden from the public opened up the opportunity to experiment with suspenders. I figured that suspenders would do just what they are called, suspend my pants to keep them from falling off. This resulted in a rather extensive online search for the “right” pair of braces (suspenders).The first pair I got were too short (I am 6′ 5″ tall so require LONG suspenders) resulting in them pulling down too hard on my shoulders. In addition to that, the catch that clamps onto my pants was not strong enough and when I bent over the back catches would release, sending them through the air and over my head, with the additional outcome that my suspenderless pants would fall right off, ending up bunched around my feet. Not a fine outcome.
While worrying this situation I happened to be in the parking lot of the local grocery store getting my weekly “curbside” delivery when I noticed a man wearing pants with a belt and suspenders that held up the belt with a hooks rather than with clamps. I ordered a pair of those. They were sort of alright, but they tended to bother me where they hooked onto the belt, they tended to disconnect too easily, and they required a pretty tight belt. Not the option I was hoping for. On top of that, they were also a bit too short.
My next attempt was with clamps again, but also a much longer pair of suspenders. When I got them I discovered that they didn’t attach at the front and back but instead attached at the sides of my pants. They felt what I image it feels like to wear shoulder holsters on both sides. That is an interesting configuration since it leaves the front and back clear. Unfortunately, they were good as long as I wasn’t doing anything but walking and sitting. Trying to do “work” involving bending, lifting and things like that just didn’t feel right and tended to become unhooked.
So that put me back at the store once again, this time getting “regular” clip-on suspenders that are long enough for me. Not only are they long enough but the clips are REALLY aggressive. The clips are big, very strong, and have a big pin that punctures my pants. As long as the clip stays closed my pants will not fall off. I am wearing them right now. This was a great solution. I went for a month or so without a belt just wearing my new bracers. That was pretty liberating. I looked a bit like I was wearing clown pants – but was finally comfortable. Until I realized that if I tightened then enough to keep my pants from drooping they pulled my pants up so much that I ran out of “comfort room” and the bottom of my pants legs were now “high waters”.
The solution to this is wearing a loose fitting belt that keeps my pants from going up, and a loose fitting pair of suspenders keeping them from falling off. It then dawned on me that the slightly funny term for “redundancy” being the use of a “belt and suspenders” is not really redundancy at all. The belt and suspenders might appear to be performing the same function (keeping my pants from falling off), in actuality they are performing very different, non-redundant functions. One keeps things up, the other keeps them down.
As a safety engineer, this shift in focus brings much more meaning than just a funny saying. When reviewing equipment designs for redundancy, it is important to remember that what at first glance might seem redundant might not be that way at all, but instead might be performing very different and important functions that would result in potentially catastrophic, but different, failures of either one of the supposedly redundant elements. An interesting example comes to mind with the FAA’s use of the term on commercial aircraft. They require safety related elements to be redundant, but if the pilot has control should a component fail, then the pilot is identified as the “redundant” element. Perhaps this is true, but that “if the pilot has control” should be considered very carefully to make sure it holds true in all situations.
There is another type of attachement for suspenders – these end in leather tabs with vertical buttonholes that attach to buttons the inside of the waistband of dress trousers. The buttons are special, kind of chunky with a tall shank so that the leather buttonhole part stays put. I have put buttons on Joel’s dress trousers for this kind of suspender and they work very well and are quite comfortable. The suspenders themselves are adjustable. However the buttons might be a bit challenging to sew onto jeans, as the jeans material is very dense and thick in multiple layers like the waistband.
Yep, I am very familiar with them on my fire turnouts. They are great, but you need the buttons on all of the pants and that is pretty difficult. The one thing they don’t do is come disconnected accidentally. I also have a pair that I wear on my suit pants that button on, much more elegant than the clip on types.
On the “redundancy” issue, we had a term at the Air Resources Board that I learned from Narcisco (read: Narci) Gonzalez, my employee-friend and spiritual guru for the Internet activities of the department. His dad’s term for system safety was “a belt, suspenders and a rope.” That was our mantra for building our systems.