Once upon a time I was visiting the city of Prague and staying with a Finn whom I had met while on the road elsewhere. She was there for a EU sponsored youth work program, as this was during a time when the whole idea of intracontinental collaboration was truly very romantic and blossoming. She had me meeting one of her friends, who had just returned from a wedding wearing a full-grown dress. He said it was one of those weddings where the bride and bridesmaids were in suits, and the groom and his best men were in gowns. So I laughed and said, “Well, that’s weird.” Not sooner did I find myself sitting in a full-octave lecture about how it was perfectly swell for a man to wear a dress.
Well, silly me! I was too otherworldly to get it then, but it is true that the dress code for men and women have been shifting throughout the history of fashion. For example, lace, which in modern day is made into bridal gowns and lingeries, was a costly textile worn by both sexes in Renaissance Europe. During this era, a luxurious garment called ruff, or the millstone collar, was made with lace. In the early 16th century, ruff was made with starched linen cambric and edged with lace, but as the century wore on, the lace came in abundance as the ruff became more voluminous. “Ten yards is enough for the ruffs of the neck and hand” for a New Year’s gift made by her ladies for Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1565, but the adoption of Dutch starch techniques allowed ruffs to be made wider without losing their shape. By the 1580s, “cartwheel ruffs” were a foot or more wide, which required a wire frame called a supportasse or underpropper to hold them at the fashionable angle.
Ruffs could take hours to set, and could only be worn once as body heat and the weather would cause them to droop and lose shape. As a symbol of status and wealth, they were worn by noble men and women alike, evidenced by the numerous portraits of public figures of those days. Some examples include the portrait of Elizabeth I’s Principal Secretary Sir Francis Walsingham painted by John De Critz the Elder, Sir Walter Raleigh donning a linen cartwheel ruff with lace edging painted by the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard in 1585, and Sir Arthur Slingsby, who belonged to the aristocratic Slingsby family in the north of England, in the 1588 late Elizabethan style.
Similarly, high heels today signify femininity and glamour, but they were once essential accessories for men. They were worn for centuries throughout the Near East as a form of riding footwear and were brought to Europe by Persian emissaries of Abbas the Great in the early 17th century. On the muddy streets of 17th century Europe, these new shoes had little utility value, but it was to convey status through impracticality. As they became trendy, the elite class ordered their heels to be made even higher in order to distinguish themselves from the rest.
The Imelda Marcos of the day was arguably King Louis XIV of France, who supplemented his 5ft 4in stature with 4-inch heels, often elaborately decorated with depictions of battle scenes, as seen in his 1701 portrait by Hyacinthe Rigaud. The heels and soles were always red, as the dye was expensive and carried a martial overtone. The fashion soon spread overseas. Charles II of England’s coronation portrait of 1661 features him wearing a pair of enormous red, French style heels even though he was over 6ft tall.
Even colors associated with gender were not so until the turn of the 20th century. Particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, famous figures’ taste in fashion influenced the public’s discerning for gendered colors. The First Lady Eisenhower was well known for preferring pink both in clothing and home decoration that a particular shade, called “Mamie Pink,” was named after her. When she took up residence in the White House in January 1953 she brought her favorite color with her, wearing a pink gown covered in pink rhinestones to the inaugural balls, and redecorating the White House in pink that it became known among the press corps as “The Pink Palace”. Since the early 2000s, pink shirts for men have become trendy as an indication of confidence and modernity, whether he is headed to the office, out on a date, or dressing for a weekend brunch. If he wants to refine his business wardrobe, a pink shirt apparently reads smart, intentional, and elegant without trying too hard.
Beside the gendered fashion of the time, cross-dressing for professional purposes was also common throughout the ages. Acting in particular was an all-male activity in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in medieval Europe. Thus men who played female roles dressed up according to the gendered dress code of the time. It was not until the 1560s when Italian theater companies introduced actresses, among the first listed was a certain Lucrese Senese to appear in a troupe in 1564. The innovation was not welcomed everywhere, as women were forbidden to act professionally in the Papal States well into the 18th century. In Spain, an Italian troupe petitioned the authorities for permission to use actresses in 1587, and the practice was then adopted by competing Spanish companies, not without clerical opposition, and it was outlawed between 1596 and 1600.
At the lower end of the social scale, women were accused of cross-dressing in order to conceal their identities while conducting prostitution. In London, the extant Repertories of the Court of Aldermen and Minute Books for the Court at Bridewell Hospital recorded a dozen of such cases. Male attire, such as “a mans cape and cloke” and “a peare of mens hose and a dublett,” was considered standard garb for some prostitutes. Two women found wearing male apparel, Dorothy Clayton and Hellen Balsen, were charged, respectively, with “incontynancy of Lyfe” and with being “a notorious whore.” Punishment included whipping and confinement to Bridewell Hospital for a time, where inmates were forced to wear special blue gowns and set to hard labor.
In the rare case of female cross-dressing for high-end purposes, the most famous is that of the 15th-century BC Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, or professionally Pharaoh Hatshepsut. Traditionally, a king was male, identified as a manifestation of a male god, the falcon-headed Horus. Hatshepsut was most often depicted publicly as a male king in the prime of life. She rarely appears as a woman in either statuary or relief carving. Wearing the traditional kilts of a king and a variety of crowns, she is shown in her reliefs striding forward and reaching out, whereas a female figure would have stood passively, feet held close together by an ankle-length dress, usually with her arms at her sides or bent back toward her body. To attach her own female identity to the generic depictions of a male king, Hatshepsut used the hieroglyphic labels that were normally placed adjacent to relief images or on the sides and back of statues. Here the traditional male royal names, titles, and epithets were replaced by feminine variants, liberally sprinkled with feminine endings. This projection of her gender has been interpreted as an assertion of androgyny, a characteristic of fertility gods and creator gods. But it was also a way of ensuring that both kingly identity and feminine gender were attached to the images, allowing them to function as intermediaries with the gods, just as Hatshepsut herself did.
Times have changed. Women in our era can dress in male-like fashion without discrimination or punishment, and they certainly do. I have changed as well, having progressed from being otherworldly to being sufficiently worldly that the phrase “Well, that’s weird.” needs not ever be uttered out of my mouth again.
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