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Bloomers are divided women's garments for the lower body.
FASHION BLOOMERS (SKIRTED)
Also called the "Turkish dress", "American dress", or simply "reform dress", bloomers were an innovation of readers of the Water-Cure Journal, a popular health periodical that in October 1849 began urging women to develop a style of dress that was not so harmful to their health as the current fashion. It also represented an unrestricted movement, unprecedented by previous women's fashions, that allowed for greater freedom—both metaphorical and physical—within the public sphere. The fashionable dress of that time consisted of a skirt that dragged several inches on the floor, worn over layers of starched petticoats stiffened with straw or horsehair sewn into the hems. In addition to the heavy skirts, prevailing fashion called for a "long waist" effect, achieved with a whale-bone-fitted corset that pushed the wearer’s internal organs out of their normal place. The result was a feminine population which, as one medical professor warned his students, was of no use as cadavers from which to study human anatomy.
Women responded with a variety of costumes, many inspired by the pantaloons of Turkey, and all including some form of pants. By the summer of 1850, various versions of a short skirt and trousers, or "Turkish dress", were being worn by readers of the Water-Cure Journal as well as women patients at the nation’s health resorts. After wearing the style in private, some began wearing it in public. In the winter and spring of 1851, newspapers across the country carried startled sightings of the dresses.
Bloomer craze of 1851
During the summer of 1851, the nation was seized by a "bloomer craze". Health reformer Mary Gove Nichols drafted a Declaration of Independence from the Despotism of Parisian Fashion and gathered signatures to it at lectures on woman’s dress. Managers of the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, gave a banquet for any of their female workers who adopted the safer dress before July 4. In Toledo, Ohio, sixty women turned out in Turkish costume at one of the city’s grandest social events. Bloomer balls and bloomer picnics were held; dress reform societies and bloomer institutes were formed. A grand festival in favour of the costume was held at New York City’s Broadway Tabernacle in September. In August, a woman who had spent six months sailing from Philadelphia around the Horn to California with the reform dress packed in her trunk disembarked to find that the dress had preceded her and was being displayed in the window of a San Francisco dress shop. Interest was sparked in England when Hannah Tracy Cutler and other women delegates wore the new dress to an international peace convention in London.
The “bloomer” was a physical and metaphorical representation of feminist reform, in the 1850s. This garment originated, in late 1849, for the purpose of developing a style of dress, for women that was less harmful to their health. Because it was less restricting than the previously popular attire, it provided more physical freedom for women.
Being a completely new and distinctively different form of dress, the bloomer garment also provided women with metaphorical freedom, in the sense that it gave women more diverse dress options and the opportunity and power to wear what they choose.
Some individuals, at the time, even argued that the Bloomer dress should be adopted for moral reasons. “A reporter noted that a group of “very intelligent appearing, lady-like women” met in Milford, Massachusetts, in July 1852. The purpose of their meeting was to consider the propriety of adopting bloomers. The women unanimously passed a resolution approving the costume, declaring the existing fashion to be “moral evils,” and arguing that the bloomer would facilitate women’s efforts to engage in good works.”
“And now I’m dressed like a little girl, in a dress both loose and short,
This poem, from The Sibyl (April 15,1859), beautifully and authentically depicted the type of freedom and power this simple garment provided women with, during this time. Although feminists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and numerous others, essentially, claimed that women within society who took on the “feminist dress” look without being fully knowledgeable of all the issues were imposters, individuals could demonstrate reform without being an expert in the issues. In The Sibyl poem, the feeling and element of reform was demonstrated through simplicity and the subtle appreciation of this small step in women’s fashion parallel to a small step for women, in general. During the 1850s, feminist reformers were fighting numerous battles to bring change and further equality to women everywhere. Although feminists believed that it was more important to focus on the issues, and that giving into fashionable trends was exactly what they were battling against, their popularized simple change in dress, symbolically, furthered women’s liberation.
Opposition to Bloomer dress
Bloomers in the West
Civil War nurses and the bloomer
Bloomers and bicycles
In 1909, fashion designer Paul Poiret attempted to popularize harem pants worn below a long flaring tunic, but this attempted revival of fashion bloomers under another name did not catch on.
ATHLETIC BLOOMERS (UNSKIRTED)
In the 19th and 20th centuries
During the late 19th century, athletic bloomers (also known as "rationals" or "knickerbockers") were skirtless baggy knee-length trousers, fastened to the leg a little below the knees; at that time, they were worn by women only in a few narrow contexts of athletic activity, such as bicycle-riding, gymnastics, and sports other than tennis (see 1890s in fashion). Bloomers were usually worn with stockings and after 1910 often with a sailor middy blouse.
Bloomers became shorter by the late 1920s. In the 1930s, when it become respectable for women to wear pants and shorts in a wider range of circumstances, styles imitating men's shorts were favoured, and bloomers tended to become less common. However, baggy knee-length gym shorts fastened at or above the knees continued to be worn by girls in school physical education classes through to the 1950s in some areas. Some schools in New York City and Sydney still wore them as part of their uniforms into the 1980s. In Japan their use persisted into the early 2000s.
The Bloomington, Illinois entry in the Three-I League of minor league baseball, despite being an all-male team, was tagged with the nickname "Bloomers" for several decades in the early 1900s.
Bloomers in Japan
GALLERY OF ATHLETIC BLOOMERS
Women's baggy underpants fastened to just below or above the knee are also known as "bloomers" (or as "knickers" or "directoire knickers"). They were most popular from the 1910s to the 1930s but continued to be worn by older women for several decades thereafter. Often the term "bloomers" has been used interchangeably with the pantalettes worn by women and girls in the mid 19th century and the open leg knee length drawers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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