The UK Telegraph reports that the French law forbidding women to wear pants in Paris may soon be repealed. Yes! But I shouldn’t spoil it for you, here’s how it went down: France’s #1 fashion cop -the chief of the Paris police- decreed in 1799 that any woman who wanted to “dress like a man” had to get his personal benediction. But 202 years later, a proposal to repeal the law has been filed in the French parliament. Oh, scoff you may but the law has survived various attempts to axe it, most recently in 2003 when the minister of gender equality ironically refused to intervene -shades of 1984? And I thought U.S. politics made for parody. All I can say is I’m so grateful I wasn’t cited on my last trip there.
Enough of silliness, here’s this week’s entry from the archives; I hope your weekend is happy, healthy and fun.
April 30, through May 6, 2005
How to get sizing and grading standards
WOATS
April 30, through May 6, 2006
Working as a freelance fashion designer
Why I Love Cotton Incorporated
How to issue style numbers pt.129
How to start a clothing line
April 30, through May 6, 2007
Apparel manufacturing in California
Training sewing machine operators pt 1
Training sewing machine operators pt 2
Training sewing machine operators pt 3
News from you 5/4/07
April 30, through May 6, 2008
Apparel Manufacturing in New Jersey
Pop Quiz #472 pt.2
Naming a product line pt.69
What is Private Label Branded Apparel?
Computational Couture 2008
Art Thread
The Skorpions are coming
April 30, through May 6, 2009
Review: Boiler iron & vacuum ironing board
Sewing Contracts
What is a sketch sheet
What is a Bill of Materials (BOM)
What is a cutting ticket
Especially funny is “Given that trousers are compulsory for Parisian policewomen, they are, in theory, all breaking the law.”
Happy Mother’s Day!
It’s easy to laugh a little at the ridiculousness of this law, but the French aren’t finished meddling in how women are allowed to dress. Hajib and niquib are being prohibited and a French governmental minister has taken to The New York Times editorial pages this week to defend the law.
It seems that women who cover are less than human because the cover prevents them from fully participating in human interaction. Also, criminals might disguise themselves as Muslim women to protect their identities in committing a crime. Note, however, that ski masks have not been outlawed.
During my stay in Connecticut, some poor guy landed in jail because his wife went to the police and demanded that they apply the law still on the books (since the 18th century or so) and arrest him for adultery. The state legislators, who previously had acted very leery of seeming immoral by voting to abolish such a family-friendly piece of legislation, just shut up and passed its annulation in something like a week.
Stuff like that is why it’s best to clean up the book periodically of legislation that nobody deems enforceable any more. Writer George Sand got one of those permits, so she could loiter in literary bars smoking cigars with her boyfriends.. Rosa Bonheur also famously got one, so as to wear pants while loitering in slaughterhouses, doing anatomical research for her monumental cattle-oriented paintings. The latter was a real lesbian, the kind of person the law was explicitly intended for, but she was rich. Needless to say by the time Jeanne Moreau and Jean Seberg were prancing through Nouvelle Vague movies in tight capris everyone was shocked but nobody considered either arresting them or a permit. However they were stars. My mother had till the end of her life scars on her thighs from the chilblains she got wearing short skirts at school in below-zero weather through the 30s. She bought me the very first wool tights in France 20 years later, since we still had the same dress codes..
Come to think of it, it’d be most delightful to demand the arrest of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy (our current First Bimbo) for pant wearing, and seeing how the boys react..
Speaking of Rosa Bonheur (she was an animal painter and I named one of my dogs after her) these kinds of laws had a distinctly sinister side. 1920s and 30s Berlin had a very active cultural/ gay scene because cross-dressing wasn’t illegal if you had a permit. So… there were a whole bunch of happy cross-dressers with permits… and an official list of people to round up when it was time to send them to the camps.