Nearly two years ago I held my last pair of shabby jeans over the bin, I took a deep breath and thrust them among the rubbish. This marked the moment that I became a full-time wearer of skirts and dresses. Trust me, no one could have been more surprised than me. For years I had been an obstinate wearer of jeans. Finally, after much prayer I have been edified as to why it is better to wear traditional feminine clothes and I followed a call to address my previous lack of charity in dress.
To be sure, in the past when I wore jeans I had been very confused. I had not been raised a Traditional Catholic and in my late teens and early 20s when I mixed with other Trads, there were a tiny few occasions when I was treated with hostility and even called the "s" word because I sometimes wore trousers. All this did was hurt me and I felt to do as they wished me to do was to agree with their rash assessment of me. Also, I felt I was caught between two worlds. When I was in liberal education settings and going to classes and taking my exams I was treated as odd and suspect if I wore skirts. There was even a time when a peer aided a rumour that I had been involved with a rather unsavory older man. The rumour was quashed quickly because unlike the girl who spread the lie, I had never met him and he didn’t even know my name. But what really stung was that others suggested to me that the scandal took hold because I had started wearing glamorous (albeit modest) dresses that attracted the attention of men.
I felt I couldn’t win: In one setting I was shamed for wearing trousers and in another I was shamed for wearing dresses.
In my younger years I did not have good reasons to motivate my will towards wearing dresses, but now that I do, I’d like to share them. Skirts and dresses have an unsurpassed elegance. Even in our times, the choices of most women prove this is so. The vast majority of women wear dresses or skirt-and-bodice on their wedding days. Just ask an average woman who has been instructed that dresses and trousers are equally elegant if she will wear trousers on her wedding day and she will say no, because she wants to look her best.
The trouser suit is often mendaciously billed as being as elegant as dresses or skirts, but this suit makes women look like bus conductors. And if the average woman is asked if she would rather wear a trouser suit or a ball gown to a ball, then she will more than likely opt for the dress every time. When a woman is presented with the choice of what to wear at weddings, balls and formal dinners it does have the result of sharpening the mind as to which is the most elegant -- if she wears trousers in a setting where most other women are in dresses than she will be not be as well-dressed. But in a society where the majority of people always wear slacks, jeans and trousers, elegance becomes something of an oddity, making it harder for individual women to go against the herd.
But why do we relegate the modes of dress that make women look their best to special occasions? Why not bring beauty in dress back to everyday life? Why not promote the best forms of dress for women? My argument may seem superficial, but not when you consider that women have much less time in which to find a loving spouse, settle down and have children, and unlike men they have to make the most of their precious younger years, and for this alone, I advocate that we women start electing to make skirts and dresses the norm again, so that the form of dress that makes women more attractive becomes the standard. Women do not have the same biological clocks as men, why is it good for them to dress as men? This is why women have charity for other women when they wear skirts and dresses; they are helping to make the best forms of dress for women the usual forms of dress.
The feminists have long championed that women may wear whatever they want. But often feminists champion trousers because of their hatred for men; they wish for women to dress in less than beautiful ways as a means of begrudging men the sight of women at their most beautiful. There are women who are of this spiteful mindset, and there are women who are unconsciously begrudging men of beauty, but tragically they may unknowingly begrudge themselves of a husband who would otherwise be attracted to them.
Yet my argument also extends to women who are called to religious life, too, because in a society where most wear trousers all the time it means the sanctified elegance of the nun’s traditional habit seems almost freakish. I knew many Irish Catholics who were all for “Church reform,” but they were unnerved by the sight of nuns in jeans, and still they could not see that we all have a hand in creating a society where skirts and dresses become uncommon, and so why are we surprised when we have so few female religious, and those that are nuns chose trousers rather than embrace the attire of a bride of Christ?
In my heart, the reason I wear skirts all the time is that I wish to model the best form of dress for other women. It would be hypocritical for me to say I want the best for my fellow women and at the same time not play my part in making skirts and dresses customary.
I wrote this column for Mass of Ages, the magazine of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales. You may read the entire Autumn edition here.