HISTORY OF...TROUSERSUITS: Popularising the Trouser Suit - part 2

As a catalyst for historical fashion in women’s fashion, Schiaparelli’s pantsuit is now displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a permanent reminder of how the trouser suit enabled women to feel empowered. Decades later, we see the emergence of French designer, Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Le Smoking’ suit in 1966, which was a tuxedo specifically designed for women and which included a dinner jacket, white shirt and black bowtie paired with a satin side striped trouser and cummerbund. As a stereotypical formal evening suit for a man, Saint Laurent distorted gendered guidelines and heavily contributed to the intriguing rise of androgyny in fashion. As an article by a male columnist stated in the influential ‘Life’ magazine in 1968, Yves Saint Laurent were contributing to the destruction of gender norms – although intended as an insult, we will take that as a compliment!

As we have seen in contemporary times with Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, it is extremely influential when we see political leaders and First Ladies making controversial fashion choices such as the trouser suit. Asserting their feminine authority, we can trace the development of the trouser suit in political climates back to Illinois’s Representative in 1968, a woman named Charlotte Reid who was the first woman to wear trousers in US congress. Despite this achievement, it wasn’t until 1993 that Barbara Mikulski helped to lead the Pantsuit rebellion that paved the way for senators Mikulski and Carol Moseley-Braun to inspire change by being the first to wear trouser suits on senate floors. Following this, in 1972, Pat Nixon was the first American First Lady to model trousers in a national magazine. By popularising females wearing trousers in male dominated environments, these brave women demonstrated how risky fashion choices could empower women and represent wider attempts to equalise the genders.