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Original meaning of hand-me-down

Everyone has a few quirky interests.  A favorite of mine is tracking the evolution of common expressions over time.  Another is the way language itself influences the way we see the world and the decisions we make.  Posts in this category will all be about language in some way.  I'd like to kick off with a couple of articles about phrases which have changed over time and what they originally meant.
One example is the phrase hand me down.  Nowadays if you wear hand-me-downs you're sort of the poor child wearing your bettrs cast-offs.  The phrase used to mean something quite different.

There are actually two different colloquiallisms here which have sort of blended over time.  This probably occurred because one of them lost its original meaning and took the meaning of the other by force rather than head for the unemployment line.

The first phrase is handed down.  That means something is passed from one person to another over time.  It is usually used for some kind of wisdom or treasure, but can be correctly applied to anything.  The key to the phrase is 'down' which implies happening over a period of time.

The expression hand me down originally had nothing to do with passing things across time.  Instead, it had to do with clothing. Here's how.

In our time, having a crease in your pants means you're neat and take care of your image.  Some even iron a crease into their jeans!  Go back a hundred years, though, and having a crease in your pants meant you were poor and upward mobile people spent a lot of time and effort removing creases.

In that era, if you had money your clothes were bespoke or custom made.  This is what the upper classes wore.  Poorer people bought their clothes from stores and their pants acquired a crease from sitting on the shelf.  When you went into a store you would have said something like: Henry, hand me down a pair of those jeans, wouldja? Your new purchase would have a crease.

As retailing of clothes became mainstream and even the upper class started buying from stores, the distinction lost its meaning, and today hand-me-down simply means second hand.  It is interesting that the intent of the expression has stayed the same while the physical evidence for the condition has changed entirely.  Someone who wears hand me downs is still somehow not as good, just for different reasons.