Gender Bending Fashion

For 100 years, women have embraced fashion that was once only considered appropriate for men, like suits, military jackets, blue jeans, and brogues. Why hasn’t it become the norm for men to take on traditionally feminine clothing? Will it ever be socially acceptable for more men to wear skirts and dresses?

These are some of the questions that Michelle Finamore asked as she curated the Gender Bending Fashion exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition is a psychedelic experience. The space is moody and dark, with green, yellow, and red neon lights illuminating faceless mannequins, crafted by the MFA’s in-house designer Chelsea Garunay. Finamore chose to take an ahistorical approach to fashion: Outfits from different moments over the past century sit beside each other, with ’90s men’s kilts next to a women’s bicycling ensemble from 1900. Interspersed among everyday looks are clothes by designers that have played around with gender norms, including Christian Siriano, Yves Saint Laurent, Rick Owens, Rei Kawakubo for Commes Les Garcons, and Alessandro Michele for Gucci.

This allows the viewer to see the outfits out of their context — and better identify patterns. And it quickly becomes clear that there are recurring motifs. The dark suit, with its boxy shoulders and sharp angles, comes to represent masculine dress. Meanwhile, colorful patterns and flowing robes embody the feminine. But these two forms of dress are slowly colliding in our current moment. The future of fashion appears to be neither masculine, nor feminine, but an intriguing hybrid of the two.

The dark business suit is a relatively recent phenomenon. Finamore, who studies clothing in the 20th and 21st century, believes that our culture has transformed the suit into a symbol of patriarchal power. Before the 19th century, European aristocratic men tended to wear colorful, frilly outfits, along with wigs that gave the appearance of long hair. But then, in the early 1800s, wealthy men began wearing well-cut tailored suits in somber colors, like black, gray, and blue. This is still true today, particularly in male-dominated industries like finance, consulting, and law. The shift occurred during the period after the industrial revolution, when middle-class women were increasingly relegated to the home, while men were out in public spaces working. “There was this idea that colors and patterns were frivolous, and something that women cared about,” Finamore points out. “So these things came to be characterized as feminine.”

As I’ve written in the past, women have tried to access patriarchal power by wearing the suit, particularly in workplaces where women are in the minority. Startups like Argent and Dai specialize in creating suits for women. Even Savile Row, which emerged in the 19th century as the go-to place for wealthy British men to have suits made, is now reinventing itself to cater to women.

While women have gladly taken on the iconic male garment of our time, men, for their part, have not been as adventurous. In fact, men seem to be clinging onto the suit — and offshoots of it, like the blazer and the chino—as their standard form of dress. Not only are these clothes carefully designed to facilitate movement, they also project power and authority toward others. “The business suit has become so entrenched in Western culture and now in non-Western cultures, too,” says Finamore. “Men are loathe to give that up.”

But even as men have stubbornly stuck to traditionally masculine clothing, women have been eager to adopt the clothes of their male counterparts. As the exhibit shows, women often adopted male garments because they were more practical and allowed women to move more freely. For instance, women first gave up their skirts and petticoats because they wanted to take part in outdoor activities, like bicycling or fox hunting by horseback. Under neon lights, there is a painting of a young woman from the late 1800s wearing a man’s horseback riding getup, including trousers and boots. Her long hair is in a ponytail, and her face is delicate and feminine. The message seems to be that it is not particularly transgressive for a woman to wear men’s garments. It is just a matter of functionality.

World War II fast-tracked women’s adoption of men’s clothing. When men went off to fight, women took up the work they left behind, like joining the police force and becoming mechanics. Suddenly, it was normal to see women wearing men’s uniforms, which included suits and jumpsuits.

All of this has paved the way for women of our time to pick from any part of fashion history they like. This is perhaps why women’s fashion weeks around the world are a far more colorful, exciting, and creative experience, with designers mixing traditionally masculine and feminine silhouettes from different eras.

Consider the women’s fall 2019 ready-to-wear shows at New York Fashion Week. The dark business suit was very much in vogue. Chanel, Alexander McQueen, and Balenciaga all played around with suits, sending women onto the runway with boxy blazers. One Rick Owens ensemble featured a blazer on top of a bodysuit and no trousers. But other designers created highly feminine outfits. Paco Rabane sent models out in flowing floral dresses. Rodarte created frilly white gowns full of lace, as well as headbands that looked like halos and shoulder pads that looked like angel’s wings.

The men’s shows, on the other hand, were largely variations of the suit. Alyx created a suit out of leather. Berluti created a suit with a bronze polished exterior. Alexander McQueen created a suit out of layers of houndstooth fabrics. There were only a couple of outliers. Palomo Spain sent a male model out in a floral bohemian gown, and Thom Browne created long white futuristic gowns. But these were exceptions that proved the rule: Men’s fashion is more reluctant to bend gender norms.

What does it take to get men to abandon their loyalty to the suit, and become more adventurous with their clothing? Finamore says that the last century offers a couple of clues.

What does it take to get men to abandon their loyalty to the suit, and become more adventurous with their clothing? Finamore says that the last century offers a couple of clues.

In her analysis, she has observed only a few moments when men have been willing to embrace color, patterns, and flowing silhouettes. The most obvious example is during the 1960s and 1970s, which is sometimes known as the Peacock Revolution in menswear. Men began growing out their hair and wearing colorful, often sexualized clothes that were unlike anything men had worn over the previous century.

The exhibit features pictures of young men wearing floral patterns and trousers with bell bottoms that added curves to an otherwise very staid garment. The most extreme version of this trend can be seen in the 1970 David Bowie album cover for The Man Who Sold the World, which features Bowie in a long floral dress, boots, and long, curly hair. “Ideas about masculine clothing were challenged,” says Finamore.

As Finamore tells it, these moments are related to larger cultural developments. During this era, the rejection of traditional masculine clothing was a way for young men to express their opposition to the establishment, particularly suit-wearing politicians and corporate leaders. Again, the suit was symbolic of patriarchal power, but young men at the time were uneasy with what their patriarchs were doing.

By the 1980s, this challenge to traditional menswear had faded away. In fact, Finamore sees a kind of overcorrection to these more flamboyant styles, as menswear brands reverted to much more traditionally masculine looks. For instance, the high-end Italian suiting company Brioni created colorful floral suits in the 1960s and 1970s, but from the 1980s onward, Brioni suits have rarely strayed from dark colors and angular cuts.

Finamore proposes that we are currently in a moment when young, politically active people are pushing back against the authority, fighting for things like stricter gun laws, women’s rights, and marriage equality. And yet, strangely, we’re not seeing the same kind of radical rejection of traditionally masculine clothing. “We haven’t seen men adopting more colorful attire on a wide scale,” she says. “We haven’t seen them wearing skirts, for instance.”

But we are slowly moving toward a more gender-neutral aesthetic in culture as a whole. This is partly because our culture is slowly beginning to reject the suit, and the male power it represents. Workplaces have become increasingly casual, with tech and creative industries ditching suits, chinos, and blazers. In its place, activewear and jeans have become the norm, and in both cases, the looks are fairly similar for men and women. “Today, there is nothing more androgynous than jeans and a T-shirt,” says Finamore.

The future of fashion, then, is a more subtle blending of masculine and feminine looks. Men and women are already wearing very similar clothes, and every so often, traditionally feminine colors and silhouettes have a way of sneaking into menswear in almost imperceptible ways. Take, for instance, the work of Jordanian-Canadian designer Rad Hourani, whose work is on display in the exhibit. He describes his clothes as genderless, which means creating an aesthetic that doesn’t look particularly masculine or feminine. He’s known for his coats, which have a flowing drape and seem both reminiscent of a military trench coat and a gown. It’s neither here nor there.

The message is telegraphed from birth. Infant girls are swaddled in pink. Boys in blue. Girls wear skirts. Boys pants. The clichés fall easily from our lips. “Clothes make the man,” we say; “who wears the pants,” signals dominance. “A basic purpose of costume is to distinguish men from women,” Alison Lurie writes in “The Language of Clothes.” Dress, traditionally, is the membership card of gender.

In an era of gender fluidity, all bets are off. As the binary of male/female falls by the wayside, fashion follows suit—and has done so periodically since 1507-1458 BCE, when the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut ruled Egypt as pharaoh wearing male regalia and a false beard. More recently, the Italian designer Alessandro Trincone created an elegant ruffled dress that so captivated rapper Young Thug, he wore it on the cover of his 2016 album: No, My Name is Jeffery. The subject of gender and fashion takes on particular immediacy in the current setting of LGBTQIA+ rights and the impact of social media in community building and self-identification.

In “Gender Bending Fashion,” which runs from March 21 through August 25, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston explores the relationship between fashion and gender—the first time a major museum has addressed the subject (the Trincone dress is one of the costumes on display). Cathy Newman spoke with the show’s curator, Michelle Finamore, of the Museum’s Department of Textiles and Fashion Arts. (Read: A photographer explores the link between color and gender.)

CN : The scribed line separating gendered clothing has blurred. Target, the Wall Street Journal reports, has removed gender labels from in-store signage. Boyfriends and girlfriends raid each other’s closets. Let’s talk about the social zeitgeist that led to the exhibition.

MF :  Originally I was looking at what was going on in contemporary menswear, but then I realized something revolutionary was happening; there was a bigger picture. Designers are responsive to the moment. They respond to the street, to the Millennials and Generation Z ...so they are responding to the new energy of rethinking gender expression through clothing and the idea of not wanting to be boxed into a particular gender. You see this melding and blurring often in moments of youthful rebellion, like in the 20s, 60s, 70s and now.

CN : Let’s start with the proverbial question: “Who wears the pants?”

MF :  There have been blips in history when women have tried to wear pants and failed or were unable to shift the paradigm. In 1851, women’s rights activist Amelia Bloomer [who promoted pants for women inspired by Turkish attire, hence “bloomers.”] tries to offer a more rationale dress for women and failed. As women took up bicycling, tennis and golf, clothing for those sports affected the acceptability of pants. Civil War surgeon Dr. Mary Edwards Walker wore pants despite eight arrests for “inappropriate attire.” In 1993, Carol Moseley-Braun [also Barbara Mikulski] wore pants on the Senate floor. “Until I walked in the door I had no idea there was this unwritten rule,” Moseley-Braun said. Now we have Hillary Clinton’s white pantsuit as a political symbol.

CN : That unwritten rule persisted. In 1968, New York socialite Nan Kempner famously turned up at Le Cirque in pants. When refused entry, she shed the pants and wore her long jacket as a mini-dress. In the early 1980s, when I started at National Geographic, skirt and stockings were de rigueur.

MF :  A woman came up to me recently and said: “I worked on Wall Street in the 1990s and it was dresses and skirts only.” There are still judges who do not permit female attorneys to wear pants in the courtroom. (Discover the world's oldest dress.)

CN :  The show focuses on contemporary 20th and 21st century fashion—designers like Rei Kawakubo, Ikiré Jones and Freddie Burretti, who dressed David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust era—but includes historical context. For example, you display the top hat and tails Marlene Dietrich wore in the 1930 film Morocco.

MF :  The director Josef von Sternberg had to fight the studio for Dietrich to wear that. The studio thought it too radical. She wasn’t the first to do that on film. There are many silent film stars wearing the same thing in the teens and twenties, when the standard female body takes on a more boyish silhouette and bobbed hair. It was driven by a younger generation challenging convention, and women moving into the workplace achieving the right to vote. It’s related to social and cultural change.

CN : There’s an erotic charge to the Dietrich outfit. Didn’t Calvin Klein say: “There’s something incredibly sexy about a woman wearing her boyfriend’s t-shirt and underwear?”

MF :  It’s slightly transgressive—suiting yourself as a man. But it follows her curves and she still has the hair and make up. It mixed it up in a way that was uniquely sexy.

CN : Men wore heels in the 18th century. Not so much now. Elizabeth Semmelhack, a shoe historian, suggests that one might ask because of the implications of dominance, why men don’t wear heels more often?

MF :  It’s true. But then designer Rad Hourani makes the same high-heeled boot for men and women. Many years ago I saw comedian Eddie Izzard perform. He comes to the stage in jeans, make-up and heels. One of my favorite quotes is from him. An interviewer asked: Eddie why are you wearing a woman’s dress? “It’s not a woman’s dress,” he replied. “It’s my dress.” I think at the opening you’ll see a lot of men in heels.

CN :  Joan of Arc appears in the show’s timeline. Her male attire was contentious and factored in her conviction for heresy and execution in 1431.

MF :  “In women’s clothing many transgressions were done to me,” she said at her trial. When I saw that, it put her clothes in a different perspective. Of course men’s clothes would be more protective for her.

CN : Fast forward to February 2019 and Billy Porter in his tuxedo-gown on the red carpet at the Academy Awards. “His torso looked like it was smoking a cigar with a brandy...the skirt, ready for a gothic Victoria-era coronation,” the New Yorker reported.

MF :  That’s designed by Christian Siriano, who did the Janelle Monáe outfit we feature in the show. Porter is an actor who’s been pushing the envelope through dress. “My goal is to be a walking piece of political art every time I show up,” he wrote in Vogue. “To challenge expectations. What is masculinity? What does that mean.” It’s fascinating to me that it’s considered so newsworthy. You’d think we would be beyond that...yet we aren’t because there is something so deeply entrenched about a man in a skirt. There’s a longer history of women in pants than men in skirts. It will be interesting to see where we’ll be in ten years.

CN : What gender-bending clothes hang in your closet?

MF :  I have plenty of tailored suits. We will have a pop-up shop in the museum with Phluid Project, one of the first brick and mortar stores marketing clothes as gender neutral. When I went to talk to them in New York I bought a t-shirt that says gender bender and a long sequined unisex skirt. I’m trying to get my husband to wear a skirt to the opening.

CN : Adam Tessier, the MFA’s head of interpretation, says that most shows represent the end of a conversation. He suggests this will be the start of one. Are there indications that will happen?

MF :  I have a colleague who brought in a young member of the LBGTQ community for a sneak peak in the exhibit’s early stages. “You know,” they said. “I feel like I’ve finally been seen.”

Gender-bending fashion rewrites the rules of who wears what. By Cathy Newman. National Geographic , March 20, 2019. 

The show, titled Gender Bending Fashion, presents clothing over the past century that has "challenged rigid, binary definitions of dress" in Western society. Over 60 garments are on view, from haute couture to ready-to-wear pieces. Curated by Michelle Tolini Finamore, the exhibition also includes paintings, postcards, photographs and video footage.

The show is divided into three sections – Disrupt, Blur and Transcend. Each section features a mix of historical and contemporary pieces, underscoring how gender-bending fashion is not a new phenomena. "Boundary-pushing contemporary designs appear in dialogue with historical garments, exploring moments when people have disrupted, blurred and sought to transcend concepts gendered clothing over the last century," said the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) in a project description.

The show looks at historical movements such as the garçonne styles of the 1920s, in which womenswear took on a boyish look, and the 1960s peacock revolution, in which the traditional men's suit became more flamboyant. French couture designer Jean Paul Gaultier, Commes des Garçon's Rei Kawakubo and British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood are among well-known contemporary designers represented in the show. Others include Canada's Rad Hourani, who is known for gender neutral designs.

The museum's in-house architect, Chelsea Garunay, oversaw the exhibition's design, which makes use of sharp angles, black walls and streaks of colour. Mannequins donning a range of attire are dispersed throughout the show, with some standing atop pedestals and platforms and others set within prismatic, triangular cutouts. Elements such as coloured acrylic glass and vivid light projections onto fabric curtains give the show a dynamic feel.

As visitors move through the galleries, delineated colours and structures begin to break down and merge, just like the blurring of men and women's fashion. The show culminates in a space with flowing patterns and moving light, which are meant to embody "fashion beyond the gender binary".

The show, which runs through 25 August, does more than document styles and trends, according to the museum. "The garments on view speak broadly to societal shifts across the past century," the museum said. "Together, they open conversations on changing gender roles, ongoing efforts towards LGBTQIA+ rights and racial equality, the rise of social media as a powerful tool for self-expression, and much more."

Other recent fashion exhibitions include The Met's Heavenly Bodies show, which explored ties between fashion and the Catholic church, and a show at San Francisco's de Young Museum that surveyed contemporary Muslim attire, from luxury evening wear to the controversial Nike hijab.

Gender Bending Fashion exhibition in Boston challenges notions about clothing. By Jenna McKnight,  Dezeen ,  April 3, 2019

Gender Bending Fashion.  March 21, 2019 – August 25, 2019. Museum of Fine Arts Boston

What does she think she looks like?

This isn’t an essay about clothes, exactly, nor is it about fashion, quite. It is about women and clothes and something that happens between them that we could think of as a kind of third rail of female experience. I’ve thought about this for some time but my thoughts were focused when I saw Isabelle Huppert in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 film, Elle. The film begins with a rape about which the victim, Huppert, is ambivalent. This sent the critics, particularly male critics, scuttling to and fro wondering whether it was a feminist, post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or just in some baffling way French. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw went for ‘provocative’, before deciding it was a ‘startlingly strange rape-revenge black comedy’. I didn’t think it was as strange as all that and I did think it was funny, but what really struck me was that every woman I knew who had seen it was mesmerised not by the ‘issues’ but by Huppert, and not just for her acting – she’s always good – but for what she wore: ‘the clothes’, women said to one another, were ‘amazing’. Yet when you look at them in stills they aren’t amazing, they are the epitome of French ready-to-wear chic. So if it wasn’t the clothes or the actor that created the effect, it was some compound of the two that created a character, a presence able to walk the tightrope that carries the film over the fire pit of sexual violence and women’s agency.

There are many less extreme instances in real life where women dress to create a particular effect that isn’t principally or at all about attracting men, though men often think it is. There is, for example, the iron rule that north of Derby no woman can wear tights on a night out. Why? How did Liz Hurley launch an entire career by wearing a dress much less extreme than many that Versace has shown on the catwalks of Milan? What happens when it goes wrong? Did Diana overdo it on Panorama? Why do Melania and Ivanka, on a trip to the Vatican, look more Gothic than Catholic? And at what point do we draw the line between dress and costume, between life and art? Edith Sitwell was made to feel self-conscious about her appearance as a child. As an adult she made sure that everyone else would be conscious of it too; this was dress as the performance of personality.
My thoughts about women and their clothes, how they wear them and also how they write about them, led me to Virginia Woolf and the term she coined: ‘frock consciousness’. On 6 January 1925, at the beginning of her diary for that year, she wrote: ‘I want to begin to describe my own sex.’ That thought recurs in the diary as the months go on and it is cast, increasingly, in terms of clothes. ‘My love of clothes interests me profoundly,’ she wrote. ‘Only it is not love; and what it is I must discover.’ This was the year Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, which brought her to literary prominence; the previous year she had sat for her photograph in Vogue. For that she chose to wear a dress of her mother’s, which was too big for her and long out of fashion. To plant it in the most famous fashion magazine in Europe was to make a statement, however ambiguous. And the experience of the sitting prompted a further thought: ‘My present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness etc. These states are very difficult … I’m always coming back to it … Still I cannot get at what I mean.’ I don’t suppose that I shall get at it either, but I will revolve the question again and apply the advantage of nearly a century of hindsight to the idea of frock consciousness, an idea that I think was not born but at least much heightened in that period between the world wars just as Woolf was trying to put her finger on it.


If human character did, as she famously suggested, change in or about 1910, women’s clothes changed very soon afterwards. Another product of 1925 was the woman’s ‘pullover’. Not today the most exciting item in anyone’s wardrobe, it was in its way revolutionary. A pullover is pulled over the head both on and off and the person who does the pulling is the wearer. Yes, I know, but until then it had been, for more than a century, virtually impossible for a woman to get dressed – or undressed – by herself. The rich had ladies’ maids, the poor had one another, but the laces and hooks and eyes, the fastening behind, required assistance. This was not true for men. In the persisting convention that women’s clothes have buttons on the left, for the convenience of the average right-handed dresser, while men’s have them on the right, to suit themselves, there remains an archaeological trace, a fossil record, of the different history of women and men in their relation to their clothes. Fashion writers, who are apt to discuss new trends with the urgency of war reporters on a particularly dangerous front line and to misuse the word ‘iconic’ relentlessly, can be forgiven for idolising the Italian couturière Elsa Schiaparelli and her ‘cravat’ pullover. It stands for a new age in women’s clothes. Not only could you get in and out of it by yourself but the fiddly bits, the bow and ribbons, are knitted into the one piece. Schiaparelli, who was a surrealist and worked with Dalí, had made a satire, a cartoon of female dress.


                                                                    

Other events of 1925 included the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs, from which the phrase ‘art deco’ was coined: a style that favoured angles, shadows and faceted planes, machine-turned, bevel-edged furniture and teapots on the slant, a style in which the machine age met the jazz age. This was perhaps the only period in which women who looked like Schiaparelli and Wallis Simpson, with their hefty, dynamic profiles, could have been leaders of fashion. Women were prominent in the world of haute couture between the wars. As well as Schiap, as she was known, there were Coco Chanel and Jeanne Lanvin. Schiaparelli’s sporty, dress-yourself look suited women of action. Amy Johnson, who flew solo to Australia, was one, and, in a rather different vein, Mae West in Every Day’s a Holiday. West – whose billowing curves billowed a little more at each fitting, causing the somewhat snappish couturière considerable annoyance – was in appearance the antithesis of the deco style. But she was straining the limits of more than Schiaparelli’s seams. She challenged the censors and the film studios, she talked about sex in ways that women in general were not supposed to and she took control of her films and her image in a way that actresses in particular never had.

Yet the ambition for independence and the claims to effectiveness are not simply reflected in the clothes: they are also to some extent created by them. Neither of these women was in herself what Schiaparelli’s designs made her. Johnson was unhappily married to a classic 1930s cad and on her famous flight to Brisbane in 1930 her de Havilland Gipsy Moth touched down, in the words of her biographer, ‘too fast and too late. She landed upside down in front of an excited crowd of twenty thousand’ – not, we may assume, looking quite unruffled. West, who wrote a lot of the script for Every Day’s a Holiday and took credit for all of it, bowed in the end to the censors, as a result of which the film was not funny and it flopped. Clothes, for those who could afford to choose them freely, had always been to some extent an expression of the wearer – of their status, character and taste – but it was in the popular Modernism of the interwar years, when so many men had died and women consequently found themselves with more room to manoeuvre in society, that the particular compound of woman + clothes, Woolf’s ‘frock consciousness’, became a significant aspect of female experience, a colour on the writer’s palette, a possible agent in a narrative.

It is at about this time that frocks – and other garments, but frocks especially – begin to enter fiction as more than accessories, when frock consciousness breaks the surface of public awareness and emerges in literature. But nothing happens all at once. Human character didn’t really change in 1910. Looking back there are two significant lines of descent. On the one hand is Jane Austen, who certainly cared about clothes and talked about them in her letters, but who is interestingly uninterested in them in her novels; more than that, she is positively hostile. Women who talk about clothes mark themselves out as stupid, vulgar or malicious. In Mansfield Park the culpably inert Lady Bertram is ‘a woman who spent her days in sitting nicely dressed on a sofa’. Mrs Elton in Emma condemns herself when she asks Jane Fairfax’s opinion as to whether she should put a particular trim on her white and silver poplin. After such a lapse we hardly need to be told that she is ‘self-important, presuming, familiar, ignorant and ill-bred’. In the very last paragraph of the novel she is allowed to linger in the wings to highlight the all-round moral superiority of Emma and Mr Knightley with her disappointment that their wedding was in such restrained good taste, ‘very inferior to her own’ with ‘very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business’. The closest Austen comes to the question of frock consciousness is in Northanger Abbey, where she offers a rare direct comment on dress, but since the novel is a parody the remark is ironic, as defined by Christopher Ricks, in that it is both true and not true to the same extent at the same time. ‘Woman is fine for her satisfaction alone,’ Austen writes. ‘No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it.’ In parody the text works by being read in the reflected light of the other, known but unseen narrative. The satire bounces back and forth between the two in a comic hall of mirrors and that is where Austen leaves the woman who wants to be ‘fine’ but whose finery can get her nowhere, with nothing but her own reflection.
The conundrum of who women dress for, the unspoken question of why we mind about our clothes, as Austen herself did, when we know that the effect on other people is most often negligible at best and at worst deleterious, has never gone away. The correct answer today is that we dress for ourselves, but that isn’t quite true either. We dress to say something about ourselves and the question is: to whom are the remarks addressed? They can be, indeed often are, misinterpreted by men who think or pretend to think that it is for them or, worse, that ‘a woman who goes out looking like that is asking for it.’ The effect on other people is, however, one end of an arc, the point where it comes to earth in the outside world. The other end, the spring of the vault, is in the interior world of the wearer and it is somewhere between the two that frock consciousness happens. The other line of descent from the 19th century begins with Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë famously objected to Austen’s ‘Chinese fidelity’ to the external world of the real and material, and to ‘the smooth elegance’ of her narrative. However partial that view of Austen, she certainly understands dress entirely from the outside. Charlotte Brontë didn’t and in Jane Eyre frock consciousness springs fully formed into English literature as a bearer of narrative and emotional force.
On the night before her wedding, when Jane has her luggage ready for the honeymoon and the trunks are packed and corded, something stops her from attaching the labels written out for ‘Mrs Rochester’:

Mrs Rochester! She did not exist: she would not be born till tomorrow, some time after eight o’clock a.m.; and I would wait to be assured she had come into the world alive before I assigned to her all that property. It was enough that in yonder closet, opposite my dressing-table, garments said to be hers had already displaced my black stuff Lowood frock and straw bonnet: for not to me appertained that suit of wedding raiment; the pearl-coloured robe, the vapoury veil pendent from the usurped portmanteau. I shut the closet to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour – nine o’clock – gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment.

What hangs in the closet is a creature of limbo, unborn and undead, perhaps a chrysalis or a shroud: it exists outside narrative time. The white ghost is then followed by a black ghost, the dream by the nightmare, in the form of the actual Mrs Rochester, ‘tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back’ whose own status is similarly indeterminate. ‘I know not what dress she had on: it was white and straight; but whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell.’ Bertha Rochester fingers the wedding dress and then takes the veil and tears it, an action that has often been seen in Freudian terms as sexually symbolic, but that I think misses the point. The dress is not a metaphor, it’s a dress, doing what dresses can do, acting as a membrane through which ‘Mrs Rochester’ can pass. This at its most extreme is not so much frock consciousness as the conscious frock. It comes between one state of existence and another, as clothes themselves come between the naked self and the world, and it is also a channel of communication, semi-permeable, like the skin of an amphibian. Women have always had to be amphibious. No society has been designed for their comfort or convenience and as they move between the elements, the spheres of private and public, personal and professional, they must constantly adapt, assume disguise or camouflage. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the conscious frock in fiction is often seen in mid-air, being thrown from the roof of a New York hotel in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar or drifting, sometimes on fire, through the fables of Angela Carter.


                                                                         

London Review of Books

In her LRB Winter Lecture, Rosemary Hill looks at women and clothes, and what happens between them, in life and literature. Subjects include Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, E.M. Delafield, Schiaparelli and Mae West. Published March 28, 2018.

YouTube

Nearly a century ago, a lesbian couple took the helm of British Vogue, transforming the fledgling magazine into a tour-de-force of fashion, art, literature, and journalism. Dorothy Todd and Madge Garland masterminded it all, bringing the most luminous figures of the day into the fold; from Virginia Woolf, Edith Sitwell, and Gertrude Stein to Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Le Corbusier, the stellar line up of contributors was unparalleled. More here.

Dazed

How Constance and Oscar Wilde Helped Get Women Into Trousers

                                                           

The year was 1884, and Oscar Wilde was already something of a London celebrity. Though he had not yet published the plays that would earn him his spot among the Victorian literati, he had made a name for himself as aesthete, man-about-town, and lecturer—with public views on everything aesthetic, including clothes. At the beginning of the year, he announced his engagement to Constance Lloyd, who he had met in Ireland some years earlier. Newspapers frothed about the news, and appeared relieved that Wilde, and his new wife, would not be moving to Dublin: “there was some fear lest London should lose its lion and society its favorite source of admiration and ridicule. … Happily this danger is averted. We keep Oscar.”

But Wilde also appeared in the papers that year for another reason. In a series of letters published in the Pall Mall Gazette, he wrote about how women ought to dress. The following year, in the New York Tribune, he published his essay “The Philosophy of Dress,” in which he stressed the important relationship between clothing and one’s soul.

At that time, women commonly wore heavy, restrictive underwear, and long, cumbersome skirts with crinolines or bustles. Corsets were certainly uncomfortable, but they could also be lethal, deforming skeletons, compromising fertility and even driving internal organs into places they oughtn’t have been. Despite that, people continued to wear them, and to “tight-lace,” ignoring doctors’ concerns and claiming these devices improved posture.

It was in this climate that people began to call for dress reform, with some asserting that these corsets were immodest and promoted an objectifying take on women’s bodies. In time, “dress reform” would come to be seen as a crucial part of the fight for women’s equality. It’s ironic, then, that many of the “reformed” clothes suggested as an alternative were themselves deemed shocking and morally questionable.

Wilde’s letters were strongly in favor of simple, comfortable outfits for women, with minimal “fringes, flounces and kilting.” More radically, he expressed his fondness for the “divided skirt.” This controversial article of clothing was essentially an extremely wide-legged pair of trousers. It had caused some anxiety in the British press, amid concerns that two-legged clothing for women would promote immoral ideals. The divided skirt—a trouser posing as a skirt—was a compromise of sorts. In a public letter, Constance, Wilde’s wife, described it as trying to “look as though it were not divided, on account of the intolerance of the British public.” Those who did wear it loved the liberty it afforded them. One wearer described “the delightful sense of freedom that results from the removal of petticoats.”

Constance was propelled to stardom through her celebrity marriage. Even the New York Times reported on her wedding dress, which Wilde is alleged to have designed. (In his biography of Wilde, Richard Ellmann describes “rich creamy satin,” “a delicate cowslip tint … a high Medici collar; ample, puffed sleeves [and a] veil of saffron-colored Indian gauze.”)

On her honeymoon, the now-Constance Wilde ruminated on what to do, beyond being mother and wife, writing to a friend that she wanted a career: “I am thinking of becoming a correspondent to some paper, or else going on the stage.” Though she didn’t go on the stage, nor became a reporter, she was instead a star campaigner for multiple causes. Women’s dress reform, and the divided skirt, would be one of her most public targets.

                                                                   

A few years earlier, in 1881, Lady Frances Harberton had launched the British arm of the Rational Dress Society, an organization that later promised to “promote the adoption, according to individual taste and convenience, of a style of dress based on considerations of health, comfort and beauty.” Staggeringly, it advocated for underwear that weighed under seven pounds. The Society came four decades after the bloomers craze of the 1850s, but similarly promoted towards the liberation of bifurcated leg cladding: the “divided skirt.”

The satirical magazine Punch had plenty to say about the “divided skirt”: in June 1881, it published a not-inaccurate poem about what, exactly, the divided skirt was:

“Skirts be divided—oh, what an atrocity!

To ‘dual garmenture’ folks must attain.

True that another skirt hides this insanity

Miss Mary Walker in old days began;

Yet it should flatter our masculine vanity,

For this means simply the trousers of Man!”

The following month, they decried it simply as “revived Bloomerism,” and proposed that its proponents be nicknamed “Pantaloon-atics.” Bloomers were Turkish-style trousers popular in the early 1850s, for similar reasons to the “divided skirt”. It was short-lived, but the media furore it provoked continued, and it loomed large in the popular imagination.

Constance seems to have agreed with, and sought to propagate, Wilde’s strong views on women’s clothing. She dressed as much for him as herself: The actress Elizabeth Robins remembered meeting her at home, where she wore a white muslin dress, despite the relatively cold August day. Seeing Robins staring at her “midsummer frock”, Constance is said to have remarked: “My husband likes me to wear white.” On other occasions, onlookers remembered Constance’s “very peculiar and eccentric clothes,” which she wore apparently “to please Oscar, not herself.” At a private viewing, “instead of looking at the pictures on the walls, a great many people were asking each other if they had seen Mrs. Oscar Wilde.”

All of these things collided—Constance’s sudden shunt into the limelight; her readiness to wear unusual clothes; Wilde’s strong and supportive views on dress reform; her desire to do something beyond being Wilde’s wife and mother to their two sons. She quickly became one of the Rational Dress Society’s most vocal and visible advocates.

Atlas Obscura