Trouser dress

A trouser dress is usually a long dress that is not open at the bottom, but ends in two trouser legs like harem pants ; it should not be confused with the culottes . The first models of this kind were designed around 1910 by Parisian designers as an alternative to the then fashionable hobble skirt , including Paul Poiret and Christoph Drecoll .

In the spring of 1911 , a number of elegant Parisian women appeared in these trouser dresses, known in French as jupe-culottes , at the horse race in Auteuil , which caused quite a stir in the press. The models were often inspired by the Orient, mostly very elegant, and either had very wide legs or ended in a kind of harem pants that were held together over the ankles. In Germany this fashion was also known as harem dress . At least in Paris and also in London it was worn by a number of women, but mostly only for social occasions and rarely on the street. In Berlin there were crowds of people and traffic jams as soon as a lady in a trouser dress appeared.

The cultural historian Eugen Isolani stated in 1911 that no new clothing fashion had caused such a stir, although he had forgotten the American bloomers : women who dare to split their skirt deep above their feet into two parts are pursued (... ) to run out, so that you can hardly notice this novelty and call it pants, with mocking hoots in the streets, so that the unfortunate culottes have to flee into houses. And that happened in cosmopolitan cities whose residents are used to being shown some extravaganzas of fashion (...) .

The satirical papers, but also serious newspapers fell upon the new fashion of trousers by the dozen. An example of this is the polemical article by Hermann Harry Schmitz, which appeared on March 12, 1911 in the Düsseldorfer Generalanzeiger . An excerpt: "Jupe culotte (pronounced schüpp külott) is the French name for the culottes or skirt trousers. (...) I also realized something else, namely the fact that this jupe culotte is the most appalling lack of taste that has ever produced a fashion. It is terrible: since I saw this fashion freak, I have suffered from the most horrific ideas. (...) Under the compulsion of a terrible mania, I imagine every female I meet in (...) The crown of creation in this senseless costume turns into a great grotesque, a caricature. (...) Or does someone want to claim that a trouser architecture such as that popular with Dutch farmers is feminine Puts shapes in a favorable light? (...) I understand the anger of the crowd who opposed the previously isolated wearers of culottes in a hostile way. In Madrid and London even the police had to intervene to prevent this Protect the lives of the up-to-date fashion fanatics concerned. "

literature

• Gundula Wolter : Pants, female. Cultural history of women's pants. Jonas-Verlag, Marburg 1994, ISBN 3-89445-176-9 (also: Berlin, Freie Universität, dissertation, 1993).

See also

Pants (on the history of women's pants)