The Elements of a Woman's Dress, Part 1

Some reflections on why these elements endure and why they are still needed.

Apologies to my male readers once again, but I think this is an important post for culture recovery, since much of the reasoning of why women throughout the ages have chosen to wear elements of clothing that distinguished them from men has been buried, misunderstood, and largely forgotten.

When a girl asks why she has to wear a skirt, the answer is often “Because I (parent) said so!” or “Because God said so,” or most unhelpfully, “Because society says so! That’s just what women wear!”

But obviously an appeal to authority is not really enough in the dissolving social constructs we are living under, and so I think it’s worth understanding the why. I’m not doing this because I’m grasping at straws to stand upon to pursue some agenda, but because I honestly want to know. Also, as a woman interested in culture creation, who’s lived in intentional community, who has raised six daughters, and who teaches teens and young adults, I really need to know.

I honestly have no strong objections to a woman’s dress, but I’d like to understand those who do have them. For myself, I freely admit to being a girly girl in many ways. I love pink, nail polish, earrings, shopping, and swirly skirts. But I also like intellectual and questioning women, and since many of the women I admire have questioned why women are expected to dress the way they do, I began to ponder the question years ago.

I also was forced to contemplate it by sewing my own clothing and clothes for my family. Nothing brings you nose-close to a reality than striving to create it. This was to bear fruit in the years ahead as I had to explain to each of my daughters the meaning of womanhood and why as women we tend to dress distinctively. It also helped give me some guidance as I grew up within the throes of clothing controversy. I have seen the gradual dissolution of what constitutes a societal standard for a woman’s dress even in “conservative” and religious circles. I have heard arguments for and against women wearing pants, for and against bare shoulders and miniskirts. Sometimes as a school staff member, I have had to enforce (and explain) dress codes. I was born into a society that had overthrown all the rules, which has resulted in my lifetime into the “casualization” of everything clothing: starting with dress down workdays, continuing with pajamas being worn in public, and finally with elites giving up on trying to do anything interesting with fashion at all. And fashion itself seemed to be deconstructing: I remember the first time when a high school volleyball team wore flipflops to the White House, Ann Coulter becoming the first conservative woman to be photographed with bare arms, and more recently, when the very meaning of womanhood itself came into question.

So I think it is good to ask why of traditional woman’s clothing. Why did so many women choose, in every culture around the world, to dress in certain distinctive ways that individuated them from men? Why is it that women are far more interested in clothing than the average man, and why do we vary our styles so frequently, compared to men (whose dress hasn’t really changed significantly since the late 1800s)?

Certainly there have been intellectual and technological movements determined to mold women like plasticine in the shape of their preconceived ideas. For instance, both pants and miniskirts were ushered into the wardrobe by a radical idea and a radical technology. But I believe that by and large, women have retained certain fashions—without signing on to the ideas embedded in them—because those fashions work for the modern lifestyle.

I’m going to attempt a survey of the various pieces of a woman’s wardrobe to ponder their meaning and dive a bit deeper than culture wars or social tropes in an attempt to recover the meaning and culture of dress, and specifically to look at fashion.

Fashion in the Bible is used as a verb, and it is first used to describe how God created woman. He fashioned her from a man’s rib: the Scripture uses a verb that describes a complex shaping of a rare or precious material: a similar verb is used for the process by which ornaments such as golden lampstands were made for the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple. (In sharp and humorous contrast, the verb used to describe how God made the man is the same used for the making of mud bricks.) It’s not surprising that woman also fashions herself and her fellow women, given that she is a cooperator with God in bringing new life into the world. In a spiritual way, a woman can bring about life in a family, a circle of friends, her local community and beyond by exercising her creativity and ingenuity to fashion herself and the world around her.

The Skirt

Why do women wear skirts when men wear trousers?

Well, for most of human history, there was a very simple reason: a lack of indoor plumbing.

Today it’s become trope-ish for novelists writing of olden days to have their rebellious heroine change into pants as soon as she escapes from the confines of her home and embarks on some fantastic adventure, rejoicing in the freedom of leather-clad legs, especially since she’s on a grand mission to save the kingdom—

Actually, no. A real medieval/colonial/fantasy girl would keep her skirts on, especially when on said mission, because of the quick and easy access to heed nature’s call that skirts allow, and which pants, for women, do not. Urination has always required discretion in the eras when most of it was done outside, and nothing is more discreet than a woman taking a turn in a corner of the fields to do her business, sometimes with a friend or two to keep watch. (This may be where the tendency of women to go to the restroom in twos and threes came from…) And the super-full poufed-out skirts beloved by the Victorians and women of any time who could afford the extra fabric made this aspect of life a little easier—and cleaner.

Once indoor plumbing became more universal and efficient and easy to use, it’s not too surprising that the skirt went from a necessity to an option—an option many women still choose to use, because the language of the skirt goes beyond the needs of physiology.

A skirt is essentially an upside-down flower. This is very obvious when it comes to the formal skirts women still enjoy wearing, which are sometimes consciously designed to imitate the petals and shading of actual flowers. But whereas the sexual organs of a flower are put on display for pollinators, those of a woman are veiled and covered by her body. Given God can create a new human soul in the body of a woman, this physical veiling of the sacred is appropriate. The womb is an entry point, a tabernacle for the divine, and it is no wonder that women throughout the ages have veiled those parts with material whenever they are free to do so, and have ornamented them as well—with sashes, belts, patterned and/or dyed fabric, and the like—to underline this significance.

Historically, when a culture wants to indicate that a man has special competence or excellence, or has attained a superior cultural power, that man is allowed to dress in a cape. Consider the difference in meaning between a cape and a skirt. A cape emphasizes the chest, shoulders, and arms: it emphasizes that the person wearing it is being honored because they have done something. It heralds and honors action.

Skirts emphasizes the waist, the hips, the parts of the body that readily identify, even from a distance, that the person is a woman. The skirt honors a woman because of who she is. She does not need to do anything to prove she is a woman: she is a woman because God made her so. Boys need to do something to become men: all a girl needs to do to become a woman is … wait. In our action-honoring and work-worshipping society, it’s not surprising young women are puzzled at times about what it means to be a woman, but if they can recover that sense of identity that requires no action on their part but mere acceptance of being female, they will understand.

This is not to say that women don’t do actions involving respect. Many women do! And historically women who have achieved excellence and honor or inherited the responsibility to attain such have also worn capes, from ruling queens to Joan of Arc. The point is, a woman need not do any of these things in order to have the privilege of wearing a skirt. It is enough that she exists.

The length of the skirt varies according to the needs of the environment, the height and proportion of the woman, and what she needs to do while wearing it, but generally speaking, especially in the days where skirts were bodily necessities, the longer and fuller the skirt, the more important the role of the woman wearing it. This is one reason why a bride may wear a very large skirt, which underlines her importance on that day. In the imaginative and theatrical realms, a large skirt shows the importance of the queen and her royal ladies, underscores the beauty of Cinderella, or visually identifies the prima ballerina, the prima soprano, the lead singer, the starring performer, or the climax of a visual story (think of Grace Kelly’s show-stopping gold lamé ballgown in To Catch a Thief).

Personally I’ve found skirts to be the most versatile of clothing: with the right material and styling, they are warmer in the winter than pants and cooler in the summer than shorts. They are easy to sew or make out of any length of cloth, and can tweaked to exhibit personal style quite easily. In today’s too-informal culture, skirts elevate casual dress and enhance a public outfit, and once a girl or woman is used to wearing them, it can give them a self-confidence in presentation.

I’ve met too many young and old women who dislike skirts because they never learned how to wear them or never found ones that suited them. (Short tight skirts are uncomfortable especially for young girls and off-putting in this regard.) My practice as a parent was to dress my daughters in full skirts and dresses until they asked to wear pants (usually when they were eight or ten). Skirts are more tricky—but not impossible—to crawl, walk, run, and climb trees in but once the skill is mastered, it’s lifelong, and I think it actually teaches the girls gracefulness. Several of my girls still wear skirts more often than pants because they find them comfortable and like how they feel while wearing them.

The Question of Pants

I personally have no philosophical difficulty with women wearing pants. Again, I’ve heard the arguments against it, usually made by Christian counter-culturalists, citing a Scriptural prohibition against women wearing men’s clothing in Deuteronomy 22:5 (the reverse is also forbidden, incidentally). I have no real problem with counter-cultural living voluntarily embraced and persuasively offered. Groups from cloistered nuns to the Amish have embraced a different mode of dress to delineate their radically different ways of life, which is fine, but I quibble with extrapolating a universal standard out of a personal call, particularly one that does not hold up to scrutiny.

Those arguing from Scripture fail to note that in many ancient cultures it was common for women to wear trousers, particularly women who were servants, slaves, or lower class, because these women worked, and trousers are working clothes of a very old origin, as seen from illustrations of Chinese peasants or Indian servants. Yet when women in these cultures wore trousers, they styled them differently because they were women. And of course, the necessity of heeding nature’s call was still apparent in the design.

I have also heard the argument made by more educated Christian counter-culturalists that getting Western women to wear pants was specifically promoted by the Communists to underscore their belief that all difference between the sexes are social constructs, and particularly as part of their effort to dismantle marriage so that women would be free to be manipulated by the State. While I can’t find evidence of this Commie-pants promotion online, I admit I’ve heard this argument made in conversation over the years, and it does seem to line up with what I recall of Communist dress codes under the Iron Curtain that mandated plain, sexless clothing and proscribed anything remotely stylish or Western, whether 1950s silk stockings or 1980s Jordache jeans.

As someone who finds Communism stupefyingly wrong in so many directions, I agree that we are probably correct in questioning anything promoted by them. However, pants are older than Communism, plus the Church can baptize human culture, and I believe there is enough flexibility here to do so. While a few indoctrinated women may have begun wearing pants to promote communist/feminism (the Communists admit in their source documents that they promoted feminism basically just to make more women into communists), the time was right in history for women to adopt wearing pants because of indoor plumbing and convenience—I’ll discuss this more later. Pants were safer than trailing skirts when it came to driving automobiles or working in factories (labor-saving devices enabled more women to do industrial work).

So my response is that I do wear pants—because after all, we do have indoor plumbing—but I wear pants as a woman, especially traditional styles, and style them in a feminine way. This is the same rule I gave my daughters. I enjoyed flare pants when they were in style, and I like the loose blousy pants currently in vogue, especially Indian palazzos. Some ladies can look feminine even in cargo pants like the cool blue cords pictured above: I certainly can’t.

Despite the current fad for slouchy maxi skirts, most skirts women wear today are not ground level, and I (and other women) speculate that this is because of the rise of automobiles. Driving can make long cumbersome skirts dangerous since you need to move your feet to shift and brake.

But it was another technology that gave us the miniskirt, and here I have a harder time with the origins. Whereas the origins of Western women wearing pants were tied up with Communist activists, the modern popularity of the miniskirt — meaning a short skirt far above the knee and close to the crotch—are very much tied to the advent of birth control and the philosophy of sexual liberation. The miniskirt was meant to proclaim that a woman was now expressing her availability for sex without concern about results, shearing the petals off the flower, and discarding any sense of the sacred in the act. Sex, cut off from childbirth, was now merely one of the four biological activities shared with all living beings, and meant no more or less than defecation.

Obviously, as a Catholic and a woman, I disagree with all of this. I think it’s bad for women to believe this, let alone dress like it. But so embedded is this attitude in our culture that even women who believe sex is the sacred seal of the covenant of marriage still think it’s fine to wear miniskirts. Personally, I think this just shows how disembodied our culture has become and how little our grand ideas affect the way even we Christians actually live.

Once I realized the language of a miniskirt, I stopped wearing mini-skirts in public, except with a swimsuit, because skirts—or shorts—on swimsuits are thankfully much more kind to the middle-aged figure. But the purpose of a swimsuit is to get in the water and swim in it, not to lounge around, right? (Especially if you dislike sitting in the sun, as I do.)

I once argued with a feminist friend who claimed that large skirts were cages designed by society to keep women chained in place and prevent them from going out into the world and working. Post-industrial nonsense, if you ask me. Trousers are work clothes, since work is the lot of most men. Again, a skirt underlines that a woman is not intrinsically to be measured by the value of her labor, but by who she is. Men earn respect by their deeds: women require respect because they are women. That is what the language of the skirt says, and I love that our culture, as wayward as it is, still retains this incarnated idea, however fragmented. The skirt remains the woman’s prerogative to wear as a sign that she is precious because of her very being. As a woman, I like to choose to exercise that prerogative as often as I can. I like to encourage my fellow women to do the same.

Since this post is getting too long, I’ve decided to separate it into two parts. Part 2 on the Bodice, Veil, and Ornamentation will appear next week. Thanks for reading, and I welcome your comments: I’m opening up comments to all subscribers.