I have a good friend Maureen who is one of the most creative dressers I know. She puts together unusual combinations and always looks great. One of Maureen's signature looks, for many years, has been teaming funky vintage dresses with contemporary pants. Sometimes she shortens the dresses to tunic length other times she leaves them long. A great look either way. Recently I have noticed other women doing the same and I love it!
Trousers worn under "dresses" is not a new concept at all. In the East women have been doing this for centuries. For example Indian women wear the traditional Salwar (loose pants with drawstring waist and ankles) with a Kameez (tunic top) or Churidar (similar but tighter in the hip) with a tunic called a Kurta.
During the mid 1850s Amelia Bloomer, an early American feminist attempted to guide women's fashion in a more sensible direction. It was the style for Turkish women to wear ankle length trousers under short just-below the knee skirts. Amelia found this mode of dress to be so much more practical that the voluminous and cumbersome skirts of the day. Following an article her husband wrote on the subject for The Seneca County Courier she made it her mission to promote more functional clothing for women in her own temperance periodical The Lily.
In 1851 in Peterboro, N.Y. the daughter of an important local figure, Elizabeth Smith Miller appeared in public in Turkish style pantaloons with an overskirt which ended just below the knee. Amelia Bloomer soon adopted the look and the "new" trouser costume was immediately dubbed "Bloomers" by the press. It is amazing the furor this caused in society. Some people actually proclaimed the look to be immodest, this in an age when women bared half their bosom! Needless to say Bloomers were not embraced by Western society. They did achieve minor success in the 1890s when bicycle riding became the rage and women found them to be much more practical for that purpose. Jodhpurs were worn as early as 1917 for skiing but "fashion" pants were not in existence yet.
Finally in the 1920s CoCo Chanel sported her own androgynous look using menswear and by the 1930s she was designing loose flowing trousers for the seaside which were comfortable and chic. With the growing popularity of women's leisure sports, pants and split skirts became more and more popular for these activities. By the mid thirties they were an accepted form of casual dress. Little by little pants found their way into women's closets. In the 1940s the men were at war and women were working at all kinds of traditionally male jobs. They wore dungarees and chino pants to work as well as coveralls. I talked to my Mom who was a teenager in the 1940s and she told me she just about lived in pants at home. One of her favorite pass times (when all the chores were done) was to climb the cherry tree out behind her house and bury her nose in a good book. "You didn't do THAT in a dress!" she exclaimed.
The post war era saw a return to "feminine" attire and women wore pants less often. Not all women however, wanted to return to the restrictions of the skirt or dress and your more stylish ladies embraced the new slim capri pant introduced by Emilio Pucci in 1949. Stirrup pants as well as other forms of cropped pants (pedal pushers and clam diggers) were popular in the 1950s. Again almost exclusively for casual wear.
It wasn't until the late 1960s that pants began to migrate into other areas of womens lives. Yves Saint Laurent has been credited with creating the women's pant suit although many would argue there were other designers doing the same at the time. I have a wonderful early Valentino pant suit on the site from that time (Salon page).
Traditions die hard and during the 1960s there are numerous stories of women being turned away from restaurants in these nouveau chic pants suits. Some of the braver ladies of fashion just removed the offending pants and simply wore the jackets! We have come a long way since then and it is perfectly acceptable for women to wear pants for nearly any occasion. Yet there is still the shadow of resistance to ladies in pants. Did you know that Hillary Clinton was the FIRST first lady to attend a White House function in pants just a few short years ago? Like I said, tradition is slow to change.
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