THE MYSTERY Of BLOOMERS

Evening Star, Issue 21743, 11 June 1934, Page 1

THE MYSTERY Of BLOOMERS

When our grandmothers were young, the most shocking thing they could do was to adopt Bloomers—the newfangled trouser costume invented by Mrs Amelia Bloomer, of Boston, United States, as the “ emancipated woman’s” protest against the crinoline, writes Margaret Lane in the ‘ Daily Mail.’ They were taken up a little in this country, though never by fashionable women. They were “ strong-minded females ’ ’ who adopted Bloomers, and made themselves the butt of innumerable jokes and jeers by walking about the streets of London in them.

The mystery of the Bloomer costume is, that nobody’s grandmother seems to have preserved hors; no cupboard or old chest can produce this' pioneer of women’s trousers.

The widest search on the part of the organisers of the coming Exhibition 1 of Women’s Clothing of the Nineteenth Century has failed to locate an existing specimen of Bloomers. Perhaps the reason for this is that the fury of public opinion really had its effect on the wearers in the end. Outraged fathers and husbands, never dreaming of the days when the lean bare knees of young - women would be seen on every tennis court, insisted on the destruction of the “masculine” abominations.

■ Whatever the 1 reason, there appears to be no genuine 1851 Bloomer costume in the country. Those incessant ‘ Punch’ jokes about Bloomerism must have killed it even more completely than might have been supposed. Even the London Museum, with its excellent collection of all the oddities of female dress, cannot produce a specimen- of Bloomers —only a doll dressed in a miniature of the “ emancipated ” costume. The wearers must indeed, have been very ashamed of their passing fancy for trousers, and cut them up lor dusters.

There are several items of nine-teenth-century dress that are hard to find, because our grandmothers thought it not worth while to preserve them. Women’s underclothing is extremely scarce. Victorian brides made their chemises and nightgowns of linen and calico, and when they were worn .out they were cut uj) for a thousand household purposes. They were not made of satin and lace, and so were never thought good enough to put by. Men’s suits of the mid and late Victorian years are hard to come by too, and for almost the same reason. Unlike the embroidered coats and waistcoats of the previous century, which never wore out and were preserved for their beauty even when they had seen years of wear, our grandfathers’ pepper-and-salt suits had a hard life rf undistinguished wear, and then, were passed on to the younger sons and then on to the gardener’s boy. Victorian thrift and the failure of the Bloomer movement in this country have made these articles from the wardrobe of our grandparents far more scarce than the most splendid suits and dresses of earlier centuries.