Pants for women. I think this is the one major change. In every other
period, men wear pants and women skirts. Of course, that really happened
in
the second part of the century...
Actually men didn't wear "pants" until their skirts got so short they
needed
to connect their hose to avoid a public display. At least that is my
understanding. Cheryl Odom
What I meant is that men wore visible separate leg coverings. In most
periods, you can actually see that their lower body is made of two separate
appendages (except monks, scholars, etc but they're not the norm). Women...
welllll... AFAIK, they didn't start wearing garments with separate legs
until the Regency, and even then, only as underwear. I know you're going to
pull out some images of riding outfits, but they're not the norm either. I'm
talking about normal, regular everyday wear here. In every period I know,
you couldn't even tell women had separate legs unless you lifted up their
skirts. The most daring it got was showing some *ankle* under the skirt
(some à la polonaise dresses were pretty short, some of Elizabeth's later
dresses too, and some Regency stuff as well - considered very daring at the
time, from what I read). Even under those, women wore hose, or stockings,
that didn't really go over the knee and were held by garters at knee level.
And, of course, you'd never see them as outer wear. They weren't wearing
anything like pants, with-or-without a crotch seam. True, in earlier
medieval times, men wore somewhat shorter hose, more like thigh-highs, but
the "skirt" in men's garments was almost always shorter than that of women -
you don't ever see women's hose, but men's hose quickly starts being used
more like outerwear. Even when men started wearing actual crotch-seamed
pants, women kept wearing long skirts. And it went on until somewhere in the
Victorian or Edwardian era (I'm no expert on those periods), where you start
seeing some sportswear and bathing suits with actual LEGS on the outer
garment. It only became acceptable for women to wear pants in most settings
in what, the '70s? Of course, they started wearing them before that, but
even today formal women's wear tends to be a dress or skirt of some kind.
I guess I'm really trying to say that I'm not talking about the actual pant
*pants* as of today, but of two-legged garments, as opposed to one-tubed
one.
Just think of the little male/female bathroom icons...
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