[LMB] clothing was Programming, was: Re: OT: Afterlife

[alayne at twobikes.ottawa.on.ca]

On Sun, 1 Nov 2020, Eric Oppen wrote:
> I never have understood why so many people seem to dislike pantsuits.
> Personally, I've always thought that trousers were much more modest than
> skirts, and more practical.

It's sexism, pure and simple. When I was in elementary school -- in 
Winnipeg when winter temperatures could reach -40 -- girls were forbidden 
to wear pants to school. We had to wear skirts/dresses/jumpers instead. 
When it got really cold we wore the bottoms of snowsuits over our legs and 
crushed the skirts in round our waists - not very comfortable.

See for example, the case of Mary Tyler Moore and capris:
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/01/mary-tyler-moore-pants

or

https://qz.com/894961/mary-tyler-moores-clothes-especially-her-chic-pants-showed-how-modern-american-women-really-dressed/
Later, in her own show as character Mary Richards, who arrives in a big 
city from a small town and works her way up to become a successful news 
producer, Moore captured the look of a stylish, ambitious career woman—a 
precursor to characters such as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City.

Again, Moore was putting her own style on screen. She would go to designer 
Norman Todd’s showroom and select looks herself, which she got to keep 
once the show was done with them. “I try to stick to tailored styles for 
dresses and neat, chic fashions for pantsuits,” she said in one interview. 
“Off screen those are the styles I go for, too.”

or

https://www.bustle.com/p/why-mary-tyler-moores-capri-pants-may-have-been-the-most-important-costume-on-tv-33131 
"Just a quick glance back gives us plenty of examples. Take the Le Smoking 
suit, for instance. According to Business Insider, when Yves Saint Laurent 
came out with the first female tuxedo in 1966, socialite Nan Kempner was 
turned away from an upscale restaurant and had to take off her slacks and 
wear her blazer as a dress to be allowed in. The host would rather have 
Kempner walk to her table wearing a butt-skimming mini dress than black 
slacks. Later, women in the '80s often times chose to wear skirt suits so 
as not to piss the men off even more for sharing office space with them. 
They wore pinstripes and blazers to hide their femaleness, but wore skirts 
so as not to inch in on their coworkers' masculinity. To go even further, 
women in [the U.S.] Senate were banned from wearing pants until 1993 and 
Senator Barbara Mikulski's protest, Bloomberg Politics reported. Mikulski 
and her female staffers agreed to show up at a meeting in slacks, and that 
paved the way for the skirt rule to be struck down."

> But then, I've thought for many years that whoever designed women's clothes
> must have HATED women with a hatred that makes my worst furies look like
> gurgling oogly love.

Well, yes.

Not all of them, but a lot of them.

Alayne

-- 
Alayne McGregor
alayne at twobikes.ottawa.on.ca

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.
-- Toni Morrison