CEIR speaker, 13 Nov 2012: Becky Munford on women, trousers and Modernism

Becky Munford (Cardiff) will be presenting her  paper, ‘ “An Unconquerable Thirst for Trousers”: Fashioning the Modernist Subject’, at 5.30pm on Tuesday, 13 November 2012. The talk will take place in the Cardiff Humanities Building, Room 2.48.

Abstract

The garment in which Vanessa was left sitting was her TROUSERS : Tρονδερς: trousers: trousers now, does the obtuse beast understand?
(Virginia Woolf, letter to Emma Vaughan, 20 April 1899)

On 27 May 1876, a New York Times article identified ‘an abnormal and unconquerable thirst for trousers’ as one of the most horrifying symptoms of dress reform, a ‘curious disease’ with a ‘near relation to hysteria’. As this gothic register suggests, the pathologisation of the ‘woman in trousers’ reflects broader cultural anxieties about the instability of gender and sexual identities. Linked with periods of social and political upheaval, women’s liberation, radical thought, aesthetic innovation and erotic freedom, trouser-wearing women have historically represented an illegitimate assumption of male authority and power that destabilises fixed notions of sexual difference and threatens the very fabric of the social order. Beginning with a brief literary and visual tour of the fraught history of trouser-wearing women, this paper will focus on the role played by trousers in fashioning modern subjects in the early decades of the twentieth century. With particular reference to the work of Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, it will analyse the complex, and often contradictory, meanings attached to trousers as symptomatic of modernist women’s broader fascination with sartorial and aesthetic styling.

Women in Trousers research update: Vogue and ‘The Case for Slacks’

by Becky Munford

British Vogue (17 May 1939). (c) Fashion Museum, Bath and North East Somerset Council.

On 1 February 1933, Women’s Wear Daily reported on the ‘controversial subject’ preoccupying the consumer press and the popular imagination: ‘Will women wear trousers?’ This enticing conundrum unravelled across newspaper columns and the pages of fashion and lifestyle magazines. Researching early editions of Vogue in the archives at the Gladys Marcus library at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York turned up a striking visual response to this question. Although the late 1930s are often identified as landmark years in terms of the magazine’s representation of women in trousers, references to and images of women wearing divided garments appear much earlier—from advertisements for riding habits and ‘equestrian breeches’ in October 1907 to regular images of women in beach pyjamas and ski trousers in the 1930s. The covers of Vogue also tell an intriguing story about the advance of trousers for women (or, more specifically, fashionable and affluent women). As early as 1917 a cover image (which appeared in both American and British Vogue) depicts an illustration of a woman, wrapped in furs and wearing tight trousers, killing a polar bear against an arctic backdrop. A few other (less disturbing) highlights include: Pierre Mourgue’s illustration of a woman in a ski-suit on the 15 December 1927 issue; Georges Lepape’s illustration of a woman in trousers for the 22 June 1929 ‘summer travel number’ (a copy of which is held at the Mid-Manhattan Picture Collection at the New York Public Library); and Eduardo Garcia Benito’s illustration of a woman in loose, blue trousers, running across a beach with a greyhound, on the 5 July 1930 cover.

By the end of the 1930s, slacks were making significant strides across the pages of Vogue. The 15 April 1939 edition of American Vogue featured on its cover a photograph of a model dressed in ‘sharkskin slacks and a buttonless jersey shirt (both of Celanese), a turban and Moroccan slippers’. Distinct from earlier covers portraying images of women wearing trousers for the beach, sailing and skiing, the April 1939 cover very conspicuously presents trousers as a more formal fashion garment (signalled partly by an Oriental aesthetic that harks back to Paul Poiret’s harem pants—an illustration of which, by Helen Dryden, appeared on the cover of the 1 July 1913 issue of the magazine).

Women in Trousers

Dr Becky Munford (Cardiff University) has been awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant to undertake research for her project ‘Women in Trousers: A Cultural History, 1789 to the Present’. Linked with periods of social and political upheaval, women’s liberation, radical thought, aesthetic innovation and erotic freedom, trouser-wearing women in the West have historically represented an illegitimate assumption of male authority and power—of ‘wearing the trousers’—that destabilises fixed notions of sexual difference and threatens the fabric of the social order. The aim of Becky’s research is to illuminate and analyse the complex meanings assigned to and by women in trousers in the British Isles, France and America since the French Revolution. As part of her research, she will be visiting archives in Bath, London, Paris and New York; she will be sharing some of her research findings on the CEIR blog in the coming months.