Bloomers

In the spring of 1851 a small circle of American women's-rights activists adopted a startling costume: a skirt shortened to just below the knee, worn over loose trousers gathered at the ankle — the 'Turkish dress'. It was designed by Elizabeth Smith Miller, taken up by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and then championed in print by Amelia Bloomer, editor of the temperance journal The Lily. The press promptly named the whole outfit after Bloomer, though she had invented none of it.

The bloomer craze of 1851 was a sensation. Bloomer balls and picnics were held, dress-reform societies formed, and factory managers offered banquets to any mill girl brave enough to adopt the safer dress. But the costume drew mockery in the press and harassment in the street — trousers were an exclusively male garment, and a woman in them was read as a challenge to the whole order of things.

Within a few years most reformers, Bloomer included, had abandoned the costume for conventional dress, and the first bloomer moment died. But the idea refused to stay buried: in the 1890s bloomers returned in modified form as the rational costume for the woman cyclist and athlete, and the divided skirt's descendants are still with us.