Feminine trousers and masculine skirts

 

            Did you know that, until 2013, French girls and women were technically legally obliged to ask the police prefecture a “cross dressing permission” to wear trousers? This was according to a decree promulgated in 1800 by the préfet of Paris which considered women wearing trousers as cross-dressed and guilty of breach of the established patriarchal order. Trousers gave women more comfort allowing them more freedom of movement than with a dress and a corset, causing fear among some men that women were taking their place. At this time, only a few women broke the rule such as Amelia Bloomer who became a symbol of women’s emancipation or the artist Mathilde de Morny also called marquis de Belbeuf now considered as one of the first transgender public figures.

It ‘s only during the 60s that famous women begin to wear trousers without any work or medical reason but because they just wanted to. Celebrities like Brigitte Bardot, Katharine Hepburn or Coco Chanel walked on red carpets wearing pants in an act of female empowerment and making a new fashion statement. Since the 70s, women wearing trousers, rompers and dungarees don’t shock anyone and nowadays nobody would think of asking a man if he’s for or against his wife wearing a pant.  At least jeans and denim have now become so standard that the skirt intent to “disappear” from our everyday cloths. The meaning of the skirt has also evolved. Today a girl wearing a mini skirt risks being slut-shamed. If she is the target of sexual harassment or assault while she is wearing a mini skirt, she might be blamed. The 2006 movie La Journée de la jupe directed by Jean-Paul Lilienfeld and starring Isabelle Adjani denounced this social reality.

Today, clothing still has a huge impact of on women’s lives since they are still judged by what they wear. Wherever they go, women often have to justify their top, their shorts, or their neckline. Currently girl can be excluded from her school because of her wearing. That’s why, one year ago, some boys decided to come to school wearing skirts in solidarity with their girl classmates. In the same way, since a couple of years, you have some designers have recently stared to create skirts for men to wear. Thereby you can find Harry Styles wearing a dress on the cover of the December number of Vogue or Billy Porter also wearing a dress at the Oscar ceremony. Gradually this leads to normalize the wearing of the skirt for men with initiatives like Sous les jupes des hommes new brand proposing lot of models for every taste.

            This last event created controversy with critics saying: “give us our manly men back!”, as if a skirt could take a man’s virility away, the same way trousers make women more masculine. This raises the question about the power we give to clothes to define ourselves and the freedom we should give to people to dress as they desired.

By Mathilde SALLA