Dyears the movie Woman of the Year, Katharine Hepburn embodies a columnist who wins this prestigious award. To the journalists who came to take a picture of her at home after the ceremony, she asked to wait for the time to put on a work outfit. And swapped her gala dress for a black velvet suit, flowing trousers and lapel jacket pulling towards the tuxedo.
If this silhouette, signed by the famous Hollywood costume designer Adrian, anticipates what will happen twenty years later, with Norman Norell or Yves Saint Laurent, it is obviously not the first time that Katharine Hepburn has worn the pants. Her name appears in the list of famous women who imposed her against fashion and propriety, following George Sand, Colette, Marlene Dietrich or the painter Rosa Bonheur, who found “this completely natural costume, nature having given two legs to all human beings, without gender difference”.
These famous names hide others who, in their time, took risks. In 1800, an ordinance from the Paris police headquarters (repealed only in 2013) prohibited women from wearing trousers. Christine Bard, author of a fascinating Political history of pants (Seuil, 2010), followed the trail of some of them in the archives.
Takeover
There is Mme Liberty, “ boss ” of printing, indicated by a letter of denunciation, which explains to the police that “the men’s costume allows women to engage in commercial work with more freedom”. Or Mher Foucaud, worker, who, realizing that men are better paid for the same task, decides to blend in with them, thus increasing her daily pay from 2.50 francs to 4 francs.
This is also what Katharine Hepburn does in Sylvia Scarlett (1935), by George Cukor. To escape the police who are looking for her crook father, she cuts her youthful pigtails and puts on a trouser suit. Sylvia becomes Sylvester, a young man with androgynous magnetism and such disturbing elegance that a painter insists on painting his portrait… in his costume. She can now meet men, drink and laugh. “Pants are not simply ‘practical’, an eminently fluctuating notion that depends on multiple variables of appreciation. It symbolizes the masculine as well as the powers and freedoms enjoyed by men.” writes Christine Bard.
When Yves Saint Laurent presented, in his fall-winter 1966-1967 haute couture collection, a tuxedo instead of an evening ensemble, only one model was sold. It has since become, in the words of the couturier, a “essential clothing” that the house will decline in more than 200 versions. In the 1980s, the pantsuit imposed itself as the uniform of enterprising women, we even speak then of power follows. But in terms of power, progress remains to be made.
In 2007, not so distant past, members of Minister Valérie Pécresse’s cabinet signed a petition regretting that she only wore pants and asking her “some efforts in terms of sartorial elegance”. She will continue to wear matching trousers and jackets, these coming, according to her, to underline “that we have the shoulders”. What Mme Liberty or MherFoucaud had already proved, in their own way.
