How Did We Get Here? A Letter to the American Fashion Industry

To the American fashion industry: I am both amazed and appalled.

Somehow, you have managed to make America clothed and nude at the same time. And you convinced mainstream culture that it is acceptable.

You glorify and splash across the front pages the women who wear see-through dresses to the Met Gala. The men who dress femininely. The revealing wardrobes that display power and individuality. The mesh bathing suits and thong swim bottoms declared an arrestable offense a century ago.

You proclaim that everyone should have a right to their own self-expression and individuality through their clothing…as long as they go along with the agenda of becoming less clothed.

Mission accomplished.

But, American fashion industry, how did you allow this to happen? How did we go from the classy, elegant fashions of yesteryear to the clothes (if I can call them that) of today?

And to my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, we need to know this. We cannot simply accept today’s trends. We need to pull back the curtain and find the motives hiding behind it.

Let’s jump into a time machine and find out.

How Did We Get Here?

Describe the fashion prior to the twentieth century in one word.

Fabric. Lots and lots of fabric.

Though styles have changed over the centuries and social etiquette dictated the type, amount, and color of an individual’s wardrobe, it wasn’t hard to decide what to put on in the morning. Men wore shirts, waistcoats, and pants or breeches. Women wore full-length dresses. End of story.

Describe the major catalyst for the lack of fabric and abundance of styles today in one word.

Rebellion.

Fashion history shows three major periods where societal norms were challenged. And each one only built on top of the last.

Pants for Women? The Bloomers of the 1850s

The first started not long after the first women’s rights movement in Seneca Falls in 1848, with the appearance of “bloomers.” The outfit consisted of a tunic-like dress with a hem that came just below the knee and billowed out, revealing a baggy pantaloon tied with lace at the ankles. Meet the first pants for American women.

The look got its name from Amelia Bloomer, our equivalent of an 1850s fashion influencer. She promoted the look in her influential women’s newspaper called The Lily, frequently used to advocate women’s rights. Amelia claimed to do so in a spirit of sensibility: “The costume of women should be suited to their wants and necessities…conduce to her health, comfort, and usefulness.”[1] However, her activism led to bloomers becoming a symbol of the women’s rights movement, known as “the freedom dress.”[2] The exposed ankles that were seen in that day as sexually suggestive only added to the controversy.[3]

The press heavily mocked and ridiculed “bloomerism,” depicting it as “a dangerous precedent to adopting other male-only habits and as an affront to the sensibilities of a genteel Englishwoman.”[4] Therefore, despite her earnest promotion, Amelia’s creation would not catch on for another forty years when middle-class women used them to be able to modestly ride bicycles.

Key Observation: Early feminism motivated the first women’s pants in America. And men saw it as a dangerous first step into blurring gender lines.

(P.S. Apparently bloomers are making a comeback with a significantly shorter style that symbolizes liberation even more than Amelia’s original style.[5])

Free Women’s Bodies! The Flappers of the 1920s

The Roaring Twenties was the era of the flapper, the jazz age, the Charleston, and nationwide prosperity. “The Great War” had given American women a taste of freedom from Victorian standards, filling the men’s shoes on the home front and wearing simpler clothing. Then, the 19^th Amendment gave them the right to vote. Consequently, they wanted clothing that helped them embrace their new emancipation and independence.

As the decade progressed, fashion began to adopt sleeveless dresses, high V-shaped necklines, knee-length, fringed skirts, and gave way to an almost universal acceptance of the bare neck, shoulders, and arms. The result: “With shorter skirts, bare arms, and cropped shingle-cut hair covered by helmet-like cloche hats came a suggestion of freer sexuality and speech and greater expectations from life.”[6]

Designer Coco Chanel played a significant role in this, developing a “less constricted approach, creating clothes that were comfortable and easy for ‘new’ women to wear.”[7] She declared “I liberated the body,” with her new jersey fabric dress, a material previously only used for men’s underwear. [8]

Again, culture did not take to these new independent expressions. Churches denounced the exposure of skin and police arrested anyone wearing a swimsuit deemed too short. Eventually, the Great Depression and World War II brought back a more feminine look as Americans fought for personal and national survival. At least for a time.

Key Observation: Women wanted greater ability to express sexuality and make greater strides in the world. They accomplished that by wearing less fabric to display their body.

Black Leather, Flower Power, and Gender Neutrality: The Rebellious Outburst of the Baby Boomers

Did you know we have World War II to thank for the birth of the American fashion industry? Cut off from Parisian fashion, America started to create its own styles out of necessity. They started listening to their own people and created mass-produced truly American styles, including a line for the new “American teenager.”

And here is where it starts (and continues) to go downhill fast.

Since its beginning in the 1920s, Hollywood had played a major role in fashion, but it began to influence for the worse in the mid-1950s. Actors Marlon Brando and James Dean ignited rebellious attitudes in men with their iconic, scandalous denim jeans, white t-shirts, and black leather jackets.[9] The style took the men’s t-shirt from an undergarment to an everyday item of clothing that exuded sexiness and societal rebellion against polite 1950s society.

The 1960s further transformed clothing into a rebellious statement of self as the decade took America through the days of the feminist revolution, the sexual revolution, and the hippies. The Smithsonian summarizes this period well:

Hippie dress conveyed new beliefs: peace, interest in other cultures, and experimentation--especially with psychedelic drugs; bright clothing patterns attempted to reflect the LSD experience. The trend was anti-fashion and individuality…The fashion for unisex blossomed, and clothes were gender neutral with couples often wearing the same outfits.[10]

Men began wearing jeans regularly, bell-bottoms for a hippie’s free lifestyle or skinny jeans for rock enthusiasts. The mini-dress and skirt became the female symbol of the sexual revolution, cultivating pride in the sexy display of their legs. Gender-blurring “unisex” fashion brought trousers to female mainstream fashion, “ousting skirts for top glamour…women wearing them when they want to look their most seductive.”[11] Yves Saint Laurent contributed the most to developing unisex fashion, popularizing pantsuits and see-through, backless, and topless blouses for women as well as the first cross-gender tuxedo suit and other androgynous clothing. Laurent’s “revolutionary genderless daytime pant suits and evening tuxedos reflected a modern society in which feminists had earned a place for women in a man’s world.”[12]

Key Observation: Everything new about fashion had to do with drugs, sexuality, and rebellion, all in the name of self-expression, individuality, and freedom. In other words, “anything goes.”[13]

Rebellion’s Legacy

Space does not allow for a comprehensive overview of how fashion has changed and evolved. Believe me, this was a full thirteen-page single-spaced pages before I cut it down. We have not even touched on female power dressing, spandex, androgynous clothing, and the public display of “unmentionables.” The unmistakable truth, though, is believers do not have reason to celebrate these developments.

As we wrap up, what have we seen in the decades that followed the 1960s? An unending number of clothing choices that allow everyone to express themselves according to how they want, just with less and less fabric. Instead of focusing on beauty, clothing choices often have an underlying social, political, or sexual expression. Today, the fashion industry has made expressing diversity, inclusivity, and environmental sustainability its main goals (which I find extremely ironic when you look at what’s coming off the runways today. It seems to me they are the ones wasting fabric in the name of shock value.)

To the American fashion industry: congratulations. You achieved your goal of making clothes a means of self-expression.

However, that’s not the only reason you deserve my accolades. Thanks to your slow slide into over-exposure, you have proven what an utterly depraved Romans 1 culture America has become.

To understand why, we need to shift from building the historical-cultural foundation to renewing our minds with a biblical theology of clothing. You ask, “Does the Bible really talk about it that much?” Yes, it does. And it all starts in the garden.