Originally Posted by JohnDThompson

Traditional bike shorts used real chamois in the crotch, and that's all it was -- just a very thin piece of soft leather to protect your butt from chafing. No padding; that was the job of the slung leather saddle. The plastic shell saddles that started to appear in the 70s often put some foam padding between the shell and the leather top to provide some cushion, but still it was the job of the saddle, not the shorts. Only fairly recently as marketing departments saw saddle weight as a readily quantifiable characteristic to attract customers did padding start to shift into the shorts, where it wouldn't count against the saddle weight in the marketing brochures. While the end result is fairly similar vis-a-vis comfort, you didn't feel like you were wearing a loaded diaper when you wore a traditional bike short with a thin leather chamois.