Cumbersome Hoop Skirts Helped Put Pants In Women's Wardrobes

WASHINGTON - About the time Abraham Lincoln was running for president, a now-forgotten designer popularized the hoop skirt.

It could spread out a yard or more in all directions from a woman's feet. It was awkward, expensive and almost impossible to sit down in.

But it was fashion, and a new show put on by the Daughters of the American Revolution makes clear, it ironically helped create American women's love affair with long pants.

The hoop skirt consisted of heavy cloth draped over a wood or steel frame. Air circulated underneath, so it could be a lot cooler in summer than it looked. Stormy weather though, could raise the skirt and a problem.

"Women didn't wear drawers or underpants or anything like that until about 1800," said Alden O'Brien, a curator of costumes at the DAR's decorous headquarters near the White House.

"Now, initially a lot of women felt that pants were a male garment. It was very inappropriate (for women). But once the crinoline skirt - the hoop skirt - came in and you were in a high wind, all of a sudden drawers seemed like a very good idea."

Over the next generation the hoop skirt faded into the bustle, a framework attached behind the waist and under the skirt to produce a roll over the hips. Then such artificial draping disappeared altogether. And long pants for women had acquired respectability, at least as underwear.

But not as outerwear, said Richard Martin, curator of costume at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. He recalled that in the middle of the last century, the painter Rosa Bonheur got special permission from the city of Paris to wear men's clothes.

"Her excuse was that painting was a messy job, so she had to wear clothes like the boys," he said.

First worn as an outer garment in this country only by a few militant feminists, trousers grew popular by proving their practicality when more and more women went into the industrial workplaces of two world wars.

Rosie the Riveter of World War II couldn't do her job properly in a skirt, for much the same reason that pantaloons had to supplement the crinoline.

Early drawers, hoop skirts, elaborate corsets and a lot more appear in a show called "Costume Myths and Mysteries" that the museum is staging amid its display of paintings, silverware, flintlock muskets and other mementos of the Revolutionary period.

Pictures from the 1700s show little boys in both short and floor-length skirts - George Washington must have worn them until he was four or five, like the sons of all well-to-do colonial families,

O'Brien said.

Why did they dress boys like girls? They didn't, O'Brien says, they just dressed small children alike, regardless of gender.

"In portraits of the period . . . it is often impossible to determine the sex of the children," she wrote in an essay that accompanies the show.