Sun.Star Essay: Who’s wearing what

Saturday, February 4, 2012

YOU sit in a pungko-pungko corner while waiting for what you ordered for this quick eat-and-go lunch and you have just a few minutes to watch people pass up and down the divergent sidewalk, to the roadside (quick!), then up and back to a swift sidewalk rise and a normal jump (ooops!) to get a sense of high noon in a populated spot in Cebu City.

Or you take a table in a restaurant in a mall and sit down by the window to watch people come in or go by. And what do you see?

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It struck me that almost all the female passersby were in pants.

One of the memories of my mother is a woman in light blue silk slacks in the ‘40s. The memory stays because there was no other woman I saw in pants. What they probably called slacks were loose pants few women dared to wear.

Trousers (or pants, or slacks) are “worn on the lower part of the body from the waist to the ankles, covering both legs separately.” This would differ from a skirt which is a “tube or cone-shaped garment that hangs from the waist and covers all or part of the legs.”

The story about skirts and women’s pants has something to do with gender roles. The wearing of pants came out as a protest to the mode of dress assigned to women during the Victorian era in England.

Later, I’d learn about the stories of women fighting to wear trousers or pants as one of their rights.

You could make a movie of cases dramatizing the right to wear pants for women. Like in West Virginia in the early 1920s where a 14-year-old girl was arrested for wearing pants. What the girl did was an act violating the law against women wearing “anything that impersonates male attires.” The girl, with two of her friends, paraded in the street on the next day, wearing forbidden clothing. It was election time and the matter of woman’s pants became an issue, the law against women wearing them was eventually repealed.

There were “dress-reform” movements in Western countries (although not so in the East where both genders could wear trousers). For women, there was a time when it was not even the right to vote and all the important social and human rights to fight for but just the simple right to wear trousers or pants.

There were brave women through the years of debate over the taboo on women wearing trousers. In some work places, women needed to wear pants to be able to work more freely in coal mines and ranches. There were even aviatrices wearing pants during World War II. There were also pants-wearing factory workers in war service doing “men’s work.”

Later, some women in the field of sports wore trousers in riding, cycling, hiking, playing golf. The entertainment field had strong women who dared to wear pants in their leisure hours, like actresses Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Katherine Hepburn.

But our time is different from some years back when there were actual debates for or against women in trousers in some parts of the world, an influence of which this country got from the West. Even in other aspects of the matter, fashion designers in such time said women shouldn’t wear trousers because the getup was not built for women—wrong width of hips (“too wide”), undesirable height of legs (“too short”), flabby thighs (“too plump”).

The feminist movement would eventually free the woman from Victorian corsets, heavy skirts, the hustle of petticoats and dresses with paddings here, paddings there.

In our community at this time, women wearing pants almost every day of their lives know that the pants bring comfort and convenience. These days, it has something to do with practicability.

Even the type of pants depends on the female age—clingy leggings and tights for the young, slacks for the oldish (when a woman grows much older, she goes back to skirts, perhaps).

As they pass where you now sit still watching passersby, women in pants move freely, in tights or slim jeans.

The one who wears the pants is just an idiom now, says a female friend.

(ecuizon@gmail.com)