“Why are you all dressed up?“
For those of us who love skirts, dresses, all things long and fluttery or clean and sleek, that’s a question that gets asked a lot. This book is chock full of fun facts to quash the impertinent questioner.
Pants are a relatively recent addition to western women’s wardrobes, their 20th century invocation aided by fabric shortages during the world wars. Their adoption was not fast or easy. While Coco Chanel popularized 'beach trousers' in the 1920s, in 1961 Mary Tyler Moore was permitted to show Capri pants only, in only one scene per episode, on the Dick Van Dyke show.
These are only a couple of the many thought-provoking historical tidbits about pants, skirts, fabrics, and all manner of women’s fashion, including laws and customs around the world, that feature in the pages of this fascinating fashion history.
And yet, for all that pants were claimed as serious wear for professional women and especially feminists, the skirt (or dress) remained popular throughout the 20th century, not only on ordinary women but on those who changed the world for women.
“The heroines of the civil rights movement—Rosa Parks, ruby bridges, 2/3 of the Little Rock Nine, the bloody Sunday marchers in their church clothes—took a stand in skirts. Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe revolutionized modern art in skirts. Marie Curie won two Nobel prizes in a skirt. When NASA put a man on the moon, “the computer wore a skirt,“ in the words of one of those computers, mathematician Catherine G Johnson.”
As the decades of the 20th century marched on, women’s dress called back to earlier eras, especially the classical and neoclassical. Having just read the detailed explication of early chiton pleating in 'Skirts', I immediately recognized the style's roots when I encountered it this week in the new fantasy epic series, 'Rings of Power,' on Prime (one costume's a lovely indigo hue, too, which probably wouldn't have survived long in in its full vividness while being scrubbed on stones with whatever harsh soap was used in that relatively primitive rural village. Faded indigo only looks good in jeans).
The discussion of evolution in women's sports clothing was all the more interesting considering tennis great Serena Williams' recent contretemps over her court wear at Wimbledon. Here's a great early-1900s description from American women’s tennis. Violet Sutton complained, “It’s a wonder we could move at all. Do you want to know what we wore? A long undershirt, pair of drawers, two petticoats, white linen corset cover, duck shirt, shirt waist, long white silk stockings, and a floppy hat. We were soaking wet when we finished a match.“ That all began to change as French women followed American and British women into more sporting activities, and their fashion houses followed suit. Soon women's sporting and leisure attire sprouted a wider range of colours, fabrics, and styles, although skirts have stuck for sports like tennis despite the occasional introduction of bloomers and divided skirts and even (for amateurs) shorts.
Anecdotes skip between the recurring Taxi or 'wrap' dress for working women and the strapless prom gown as the ultimate debutante play wear that any suburban interwar teenager could aspire to.
A strength of this book is the ways it links changes in fashion to changes in wider society, not simply whether there was a war on and fabric needed rationing but where women spent their days, and their evenings. Office wear, sports wear, afternoon wear, and evenings from casual nights out to the Met Gala all get their due.
Despite many references to English aristocracy and French fashion houses, the book maintains its distinctly American lens. While the anecdotes are entertaining and the famous names drop with aplomb, there are a lot of both. It’s a book you won’t want to rush but rather dip into for a chapter or two, to whirl yourself away from modern fashion to the fashions in your youth, your grandmother's, even your great-great grandmother's.
Fair warning: you will yearn for illustrations of all the fabulous gowns worn to fabulous parties. I ended up searching online to see for myself the iconic evening wear of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and other great women of the 20th century. It's fashionista heaven.
Publisher
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St. Martin's Press (September 6, 2022)
Language
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English Hardcover
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272 pages ISBN-10
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1250275792 ISBN-13
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978-1250275790 #NetGalley #Skirts #Fashion #20thCentury #clothing #gowns #tennis #LOTR #SerenaWilliams #RingsOfPower #Indigo #chiton #sportingwear #StMartinsPress
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Reviewed by Jayne Barnard, author of the Maddie Hatter Adventures, whose parasol-dueling fashion reporter tangles with industrial spies in Gilded Age New York City during "Gilded Gauge"
