Why is being naked called wearing your 'birthday suit'?

@Wedgiegiver i was thinking about that

@Wedgiegiver Yep especially if you think you have one birth day and the days we generally call Birthdays are birth day anniversaries.

@JohnnyNoir err not unless I get birthday sex, and like that ever happens as a single person.

@butterflybaby75 I know that situation all too well.

@Applepiedom That's very MIB-ish

@butterflybaby75 imagine if you'd been born without it?

@GlitterEater Seriously! I've never known what it meant until now. It isn't a phrase that features in my everyday vernacular.

@butterflybaby75 This is from Richardson’s eighteenth century novel,Pamela…

The master intends to go to London against next birth-day to attend on my Lady dressed in that which they call his birth-day suit and he sent for me, when nobody else was in the parlour with him: Pamela, said he, you are so neat and so nice in your own dress, (Alack-a-day, I didn't know I was!) that you must be a judge of ours. How look I in my birth-day suit. I am no judge, said I, and please your honour; but I think you look very fine; and indeed he did look fine, and in particular he sported a fine upstanding periwinkle that must indeed be the envy of all the ladies.

@JoeXP And that makes it a 'traditional' practise how exactly? 8-)

@butterflybaby75 I’m just joking of course, though the passage from Pamela is genuine.