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The dress has been, since fashion was born - the French sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky places it in the 14th century within the European Court - an emblematic place of surveillance and control of the female body.
Much has been said about the profound damage that was caused to the women of the aristocracy by having their flesh embedded in corsets that tightened their waist and that fulfilled an essential function: disabling them for movement and, meanwhile, for work.
Constricting the female ribcage and viscera to extreme measures that for almost six centuries did not allow them to breathe well and affected their reproductive organs, is perhaps unquestionable evidence of the ways in which the narrow views of each era on the feminine have been played and reflected in the costumes that have dressed them.
But if women had to make ropes to walk together through the streets of any city due to the width of their skirts in the time of Queen Marie Antoinette, and if in more recent times, they still succumb to the inclemencies of 15-inch Louboutin heels centimeters, it is still very paradoxical and fascinating to show how women have also historically used that scaffolding that has oppressed them to carve out their conquests and revolutions.
Yes, dresses have been battlefields for the great conquests that women have made on the way to claiming their rights.
Before the great feminist movements for the vote at the end of the 19th century, women were challenged by something much more essential: gaining the freedom to move.
And that search was carried out mainly by dissidents who wanted to impose other forms of dress for women.
That is why we see how since 1850 there were cries to look for something that resembled men's trousers, a piece that, far from the skirts, petticoats and feminine
panniers
, allowed men to have their legs free and to be able to ride. horse, run and move.
It was a time when the crinoline cage had become popular, a technological revolution that allowed heavy layers of petticoats and skirts to be replaced by a light sweet wire structure to expand the volume of the female skirt.
This brought more freedom to women because their suits were lighter, but it had a side effect that would end up working against them.
Since the skirts were lighter, they swayed more in the streets and were more at the mercy of the wind moving them.
This brought an exhibition of bare calves that had never before been seen in public and which, in Victorian times, generated a real scandal.
The decision, then, was to force women to wear panties under their skirts that tied at their ankles, so that there was no risk of exposing the smooth and never before seen female legs.
Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894), in addition to creating the first American women's newspaper 'The Lily', revolutionized the establishment of American good dress.
Transcendental Graphics (Getty Images)
Taking advantage of this tension, Amelia Bloomer, one of those first conspirators who saw in the absurd turns that the dress took, a possibility to aesthetically conquer comfort, decided that it was better to simply wear the wide panties and cut the skirt.
Bloomers were
the
first women's pants.
However, the invention that quickly became popular among women was not going to have long life.
“This timid attempt to reform female dress caused incredible uproar, ridicule and vilification.
What we could call the 'trousers complex' came into play.
It seemed as if women were tempted to wear trousers and the Victorian gentleman came to see them as a scandalous attack on his privileged position,” recalls historian James Laver in his text A
Brief History of Suit and Dress
.
The vote was played on the dress
When the time of the suffrage movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries arrived, women faced the dilemma of whether or not to wear their dresses, which by then were long, cumbersome and highly decorated, to amplify their demand for the right to vote.
Although many insisted on a clothing reform and an urgency for practicality, the truth is that the movement opted to use the dress to build the entire campaign that united women.
Suffragettes dressed in white, in the funeral procession to farewell Emily Wilding Davison, in 1913.The Women's Library (LSE collection)
First, they popularized the silent mandate to wear white, a bet that was far from being a mere aesthetic whim and that was very strategic: all women had white dresses in their closet, so it was easy for the most regular of girls to wear white dresses. He would quietly join the cause with his clothes.
But perhaps even more essential: in times where journalistic coverage of vote marches was published in black and white photographs, wearing white had a radical impact.
In those images that remained for history, it was evident that a great whitish tide flooded the streets with its proclamations.
This mechanism of wearing a white uniform as a protest would be strategically replicated many decades later (2016) by the Democratic congresswomen who expressed their voice of disagreement through their suits in each Union Address given by President Donald Trump.
The suffragettes also capitalized on the use of three colors that symbolically summarized their political harangue of
Give women vote
!
(Give women the vote!)
each word was embodied by a color that shared its same initial.
Green
, green in English,
white
, white and finally
violet
was the way in which the colors symbolically became an acronym of what they were demanding.
“Despite the tensions within the movement, the suffragettes of the time demanded for the first time to paint their lips red, a gesture that until then was linked only to women who worked on the streets and that they decided to integrate as a way to echo their claim that everyone had the right to live on the streets and be safe in public spaces,” explains Nelly Lara, doctor in political science and researcher at the Center for Research and Gender Studies at UNAM, in Mexico.
Elegance as a protection strategy
Women in the following decades will use the transformations of their dresses to continue threatening in some way the mandates that oppressed them.
Coco Chanel and Madeleine Vionnet freed them forever from the corset by imposing for the first time a loose waist whose thinness was no longer read as a sign of what was feminine and desirable at the end of the 1920s. Something similar happened when the emblematic French designer put a chain on it. to the bag and freed for the first time the hands of women who until then were always busy with cumbersome
clutches.
Women who could breathe, walk and had their hands free were women who were conjuring new existential and work possibilities for everyone.
Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta Scott King lead a voting rights march in Selma, Alabama.
Ruth Harris Bunche also appears in the image.William Lovelace (Getty Images)
In the 1950s, African-American women who were part of the movement in the United States to demand the rights of Afro-Americans adopted an unexpected tactic that has lasted even to the times of the emblematic Black
Lives
Matter
marches
.
.
To go out to protest and ask for radical reform that would recognize their most essential rights, black women dressed in Sunday suits.
Their best A-line skirts, hats, cardigans, gloves and heels were protective accoutrements: a police officer was less likely to violently restrain a woman who looked like a respectable lady.
Their elegant dresses also served to make it visible that they deserved the same “respectability” as white women.
The slogan seemed simple: elegance to confront violence.
This diverse and unexpected use of clothing that women have made throughout history, despite the very inclemencies of fashion, reaches our days in a forceful way in each pink woven hood used in the protests in Washington against Donald Trump, in the violet t-shirts of the Mexican women who have come out to shout “not one less” and the green scarves that have become a new clear and powerful uniform in the search for abortion rights.
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