pants |
- Sara Baras, the flamenco superstar wearing the pants - FRANCE 24
- Women And Pants: A Timeline Of Fashion Liberation - HuffPost
- Running pants help keep your legs warm, allow heat to escape - Reading Eagle
- The Perfect Pair of Pants Is Just a 3D Body Scan Away - WIRED
| Sara Baras, the flamenco superstar wearing the pants - FRANCE 24 Posted: 08 Mar 2019 05:42 PM PST  Date created : ADVERTISING New York (AFP) A seductive Spanish art form characterized in the popular imagination by a bright frilly dress, the tradition of flamenco is fast becoming an arena for innovation. And flamenco superstar Sara Baras is at the forefront, using her heels to pierce gender stereotypes by trading the ruffled gown for a pair of pants to dance "farruca" -- a style normally limited to men. The 47-year-old from the southwestern Spanish city of Cadiz, who is starring in New York's Flamenco Festival USA series this weekend, says she enjoys the traditionally masculine style farruca because she "likes the risk, it makes you grow." "It's an elegant, sober style; it's a trouser and a shirt, not your dress or your flowers or anything." "You cannot hide. You have to have truth." Baras begins her show in a shirt with black pants, before transitioning to a spectacular dress with undulating folds. Today, she says, the "farruca" belongs to both men and women. "It does not matter what the movement is," she told AFP. "Before men could not move their hips and women did not use their feet." But today, she said, "a man can move his hips beautifully without being feminine, and a woman can dance with her feet without being masculine." She even says dancing farruca allows her to tap into her femininity, citing "the sensuality of the movement in pants." "The body is more naked; therefore you have to be more careful with placement -- your hip, your legs, your waist, everything has to be in place." - 'Straight to the heart' - Spanish sensation Rosalia has earned global acclaim for her fusion of flamenco with electronica and trap, a style of hip hop born in the southern United States. But she's also stoked controversy: some accuse her of cultural appropriation, as the tradition comes from Spain's southern Andalusia region where the gypsy community created it to express their suffering. Baras dismisses those criticisms, saying flamenco belongs to everyone. "Anyone who feels and lives it can do it," she said. "Flamenco does not understand borders; it is an art that goes straight to the heart." "It has no passport, it has no schedule, it has no limitations," Baras continued. "Flamenco is free." The acclaimed dancer says her art has changed since she became a mother nearly eight years ago, seeing her place less emphasis on technical perfection and speed. "Silence, a gesture, a sweet moment," are now the goals, she said. "Being still and being able to express something almost without moving." Baras -- whose tour began in Switzerland and will soon visit Miami, Abu Dhabi, Valencia and Barcelona -- vows to keep dancing "as long as the body endures." "I do not know my life without dancing," she said. "You dance and release everything; you communicate with everyone as if you had an additional form of expression." "You wear your shoes and fly." © 2019 AFP  |
| Women And Pants: A Timeline Of Fashion Liberation - HuffPost Posted: 08 Mar 2019 02:45 AM PST To say women and pants have had a complicated relationship would be an understatement. As Cassidy Zachary, a fashion historian and co-host of the "Dressed" podcast, told HuffPost, "In Western European and American society, pants are one of the most gendered garments in history." But, she said, "it wasn't always that way." Pants have long been ― and often still are ― more associated with men, and subsequently, power. But for centuries, women have been breaking convention by wearing pants at times when they weren't considered acceptable women's attire. They were shamed, ridiculed and even arrested for wearing them. Both the United States and France had laws in place that made it illegal for women (and men) to go out in public wearing clothes that didn't "belong to his or her sex." Today, nearly all cultures and religions are accepting of women wearing pants, save a few, but it's taken a while to get here.
Let't go all the way back to the 14th and 15th centuries.Up until this time period, men and women in Western society were essentially wearing the same thing: long robes, or what we would call a dress, according to Zachary. Throughout the 14th and 15th centuries though, men's robes began to shorten, revealing more and more of their hose. Eventually, Zachary said, the tunic-like robe became shorter and shorter, and men were left wearing their hose ― connected to a codpiece, which covered their genital area ― as the outer garments. This garment would go on to evolve into what we now identify as pants, she added. Women, on the other hand, were still wearing long skirts during this time.
Fast forward to the 1800s ...
... and we start seeing a more clearly defined line between men's and women's clothing, Zachary said. In fact, she added, there was a law on the books in France making it illegal for both men and women to wear clothing that was not "societally assigned to their gender." (It was technically still illegal for women to wear trousers in France up until 2013, though the law wasn't enforced for decades.) To put it more bluntly, in the early 1800s, wearing pants just wasn't something women did, Lisa Santandrea, an adjunct professor of fashion history at Parsons The New School, told HuffPost. In this time period, womenswear in America was typically less about function and more about accentuating the curves of the body. Wardrobe staples included dresses or long skirts with blouses, corsets, petticoats and steel hoops or cages, which were meant to be worn under skirts for added volume, as noted by Molly Steckler in The Saturday Evening Post. These garments made even simple tasks, like sitting down, quite difficult.
In the 1850s, we see the emergence of bloomers.In 1851, a woman named Elizabeth Smith Miller became one of the first women to give pants a try publicly. She was inspired by women in Europe who were wearing "Turkish trousers" under knee-length skirts; in America, they became known as bloomers. Aside from their name, they aren't all that different from a typical pair of trousers. They featured a loose silhouette and were gathered at the waist and ankles. American women's rights activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Amelia Bloomer, with whom bloomers would largely become associated, followed suit. Bloomer championed bloomers by writing about them in her feminist newspaper, and encouraged other women to wear them too. Bloomers represented a sense of freedom in dressing that women didn't really experience up until that point. They also made it easier for women to participate in activities like cycling, which men had been doing for years. "These women just wanted a functional garment that they could wear to better their lives," Zachary said. 
"When the bloomers happened, of course women who were interested in living a comfortable and active life were very thrilled about [them]," Santandrea said, "but there was such a heavy backlash against them." Women who chose to wear this new style were ridiculed and shamed by society. And while the act of wearing pants wasn't necessarily illegal everywhere, some women might have faced major repercussions if spotted wearing them. "For example, newspapers reported that women wearing the infamous Bloomer costume of the 1850s were arrested in New York City," Sara Idacavage, fashion historian and instructor at Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute, told HuffPost. "The reason for their arrest was attributed to them doing 'indecent acts' instead of being based on wearing the actual garment," Idacavage added. "In other words, the garment itself wasn't necessarily seen as breaking the law, but it was assumed that any women who wore them was probably up to no good and should be arrested anyways."
In the 1900s, women's pants appear on high-fashion runways and made their way into casual settings.
One of the most notable designers to incorporate pants for women into his collections was the French couturier Paul Poiret, Idacavage said. He designed what were known as "jupe-culottes," or harem pants ― they resembled Middle Eastern attire, Zachary noted ― and debuted them around 1911. "They were only worn by the most daring of fashion followers," Idacavage added. In the 1920s, we saw the emergence of beach pajamas, an early form of resort wear. It was still edgy for women to wear pants, Santandrea said, but it was a little more accepted for casual activities, like a day at the beach. Some women also adopted lounging pajamas as part of their at-home attire, she noted. Around the same time and into the 1930s, actresses like Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn began wearing pants on a more regular basis. Thanks to women like Dietrich and Hepburn, new types of women were "entering into the social conversation and some of them wore pants, [which] helped to normalize the idea." 
But even though pants were becoming more acceptable as casual attire, it still wasn't acceptable for the average woman to wear them as an everyday wardrobe staple, Zachary said. Women were still punished for wearing pants in certain settings. For example, Zachary pointed to school teacher named Helen Hulick. In 1938, Hulick went to court to testify as a witness in a burglary case. She wore slacks for the occasion, prompting the judge to send her home and order her to return on another date wearing a dress. She returned on two separate occasions wearing her pants, which eventually led to a five-day jail sentence. As we moved into the World War II era, more women began wearing pants as they entered the workforce to fill in for their husbands who'd gone away to fight. Their clothing needed to be functional, Santandrea said.
Then we come to the 1950s, the era of Dior's New Look, and pants lose some ground.Santandrea explained that Dior's New Look, with the cinched waist and full-skirt silhouette "was really the antithesis of pants." "Dior wanted women to look like flowers, so he was putting them back into this very formalized way [of dressing]," she added. 
While the New Look was quite popular, not everyone hopped on board. Some people protested the trend, believing it represented a return back to restrictive dressing for women, Zachary said.
In the 1960s and '70s, women's pants finally seemed to stick.Up until this time period, there were so many women who had defied norms by wearing pants. Pants had become "a symbol of freedom that women hadn't had before," Santandrea said, and they were finally becoming more acceptable for women to wear. But it wasn't until the '60s that fashion really helped solidify pants for women, Zachary said. "For the first time, in the 1960s you have rebellious youth wearing clothing that is influencing fashion," she added. "You have a new generation of British designers such as Mary Quant, who is presenting both mini skirts and pants on the runway, and that rebellious new spirit influences high fashion." Designers like Courrèges and Yves Saint Laurent were incorporating suits, like the latter's Le Smoking suit, into their collections around this time. 
Fast forward to the 21st century ...... and pants are wardrobe staples for both men and women, worn in private and public spaces. But with that being said, pants ― especially pantsuits ― remain deeply connected to masculinity. As Zachary explained, "Despite women wearing pants for decades at this point, they still maintain this idea of power, of independence, control over your body. It can still be viewed as a very feminist statement, to this day." She brought up Lady Gaga's decision to wear an oversized Marc Jacobs suit for the Elle's annual Women in Hollywood celebration in 2018. Her decision to wear the suit was an act of self-empowerment, or as Zachary called it, "a feminist statement." "As a sexual assault survivor by someone in the entertainment industry, as a woman who is still not brave enough to say his name, as a woman who lives with chronic pain, as a woman who was conditioned at a very young age to listen to what men told me to do, I decided today I wanted to take the power back," Gaga told the crowd as she accepted an award. "Today I wear the pants." 
Pants and pantsuits seem increasingly popular among women in Hollywood, who wear them for major red carpets and film premieres. They're also popular among female politicians, like Hillary Clinton, whose crisp suits were a major talking point during her presidential campaign in 2016. Suits also proved to be a major trend for women on the recent fall 2019 runways, showing up at every major show from Balmain to Givenchy to Thom Browne. From the early bloomers to today's modern suits, pants have provided women with a huge sense of freedom, Idacavage said. Practically, they allowed for increased mobility and functionality. Symbolically, "pants can be seen as the material manifestation of women's desires to have different lives during times when they were greatly oppressed," she added. Pants alone can't and didn't give women greater lives, but their associations with masculine authority encouraged many women to make changes, Idacavage said. She continued, "It's important to remember just how important clothes are to how we view ourselves, which means that the power that some women have felt from wearing pants in certain cultural contexts should not be underestimated no matter how banal the act may seem today."  |
| Running pants help keep your legs warm, allow heat to escape - Reading Eagle Posted: 05 Mar 2019 05:45 PM PST They're made by On, a Swiss running shoe and apparel company. Written by Jeff Banowetz Runners who spend any time in the cold know all about having to layer and ventilate their clothing. You may be shivering at the start, but it doesn't take long for your body to warm up, and you're soon unzipping your top layer to cool off. While jackets are filled with options to help regulate your heat, the bottom half of your body is stuck with the same layer throughout your run. That didn't make a lot of sense to the designers at On, a Swiss running shoe and apparel company. Its aptly named Running Pants conquer the challenge of keeping your legs warm during a run while also allowing heat to escape once you get moving. The front panels covering the legs above the knee are windproof and water-repellent to ensure that they stay warm. At the knee, the panel covers a mesh vent that allows heat to escape while you're striding. But when you're standing still after a run, they close. The pants have a looser fit than traditional running tights, but the lightweight polyester blend is flexible enough to feel very comfortable while running. For added ventilation, you can open the ankle zipper to reveal a mesh lining that keeps your skin from being directly exposed to the air. The pants are pure function — and they look that way. They may be a bit pricey, but regular winter runners will be happy they splurged. They're $170 at on-running.com.  |
| The Perfect Pair of Pants Is Just a 3D Body Scan Away - WIRED Posted: 28 Feb 2019 12:00 AM PST  Like so many women, Meghan Litchfield dreaded shopping for jeans. There were the garden-variety complaints: inconsistent sizing between brands, the way back pockets stretched or sagged, the humiliation of walking into a dressing room with half a dozen options only to walk out empty-handed. Even the best candidates were ill-fitting. Most of the time, she'd buy jeans one size up to fit her hips, then ask a tailor take them in at the waist. Litchfield, formerly a vice president at GoPro, figured there must be a way to shop that wasn't so demoralizing. Instead of taking off-the-rack clothes to the tailor, what if she could buy her clothes tailor-made? And what if she could make that happen for other women, too? A solution arrived late last year with Redthread, the startup Litchfield created to make bespoke clothing for anyone with a smartphone. Customers choose an item from Redthread's website, fill out a "fit quiz," and capture a series of full-body photos with their phone. Redthread pulls 3D measurement data from those photos and, combined with a customer's fit preferences, creates a made-to-order item. The result, Litchfield hopes, will go beyond simply outfitting a more diverse set of body types. It will upend the way clothes are bought, sold, and designed in the future. Sewing SeedsDigital technology has given rise to an age of ultra-personalization. The radio, once the arbiter of musical tastes, has been replaced by Spotify's custom playlists. Our Facebook and Twitter feeds deliver news stories based on what we've read and liked in the past. Amazon's Kindle surfaces book recommendations you're actually likely to read. But our closets—filled with standard-issue, rank-and-file clothing—still reflect a mass-consumer mindset. A number of new startups hope to change that. Isabella Wren, a Hong Kong–based fashion brand, sells tailor-made jackets, dresses, and trousers with a proprietary body-scanning technology that lifts a woman's exact measurements from a few photos. Proper Cloth, a menswear brand, uses a similar technology to create custom dress shirts. Soma, a lingerie-maker, now sells a "smart bra" designed to find a woman's perfect bra size. A customer wears the garment—a sports bra with sensors and a Bluetooth chip sewn in—and the exact size and shape of her body is translated into a custom bra that fits perfectly. Size Me UpRedThread Standard sizing, as we know it today, didn't exist before the 20th century. People wore clothes they made themselves or commissioned from a tailor or dressmaker. But during the Civil War, both armies needed a better way to mass-produce uniforms. "They came up with what now is basically the algorithm," says Beth Dincuff, a fashion historian at the Parsons School of Design. "So, for soldiers with a 32-inch waist and a 40-inch shoulder span, what's the average sleeve length they need? They had such a large amount of measurements that they could start cutting uniforms in the same way." The formula then carried over into the consumer market, where clothing-makers began using "size models" to estimate measurements. Dressmakers began with items like shawls or capes, which didn't need to fit closely, and later began mass-producing items like corsets or hoop skirts, which did. "Standard sizing was driven by commercial interests," says Dincuff. Today, we find ourselves in a sizing shorthand crisis. It's hard to know what constitutes a "small" or a "medium" in exact terms, and varying proportions can make standard sizes feel off for most people. Dincuff points to the rise of "vanity sizing," where brands inflate the measurements on clothes to make customers feel better about squeezing into a smaller size. That can make the clothes-buying process more emotionally satisfying, but also more confusing. One investigation found that the actual waistband measurement for a pair of size 6 jeans could vary by more than five inches across brands. "We have this system that's broken," says Litchfield. "It assumes women's bodies are standard, it's become completely arbitrary, and at the end of the day, it makes women feel really bad about ourselves." Future FitRedthread licenses its photographic measurement technology from a company called Cala, which lifts 15 exact measurements from the pictures the customer sends in. The company then uses those measurements to tailor a garment in a dozen or so places before shipping it out. Other companies, like Isabella Wren, also let women customize certain aspects of the garment—like changing the neckline or adding pockets. This kind of customization represents "a huge shift in the industry," says Sophie Marchessou, a partner at McKinsey who consults on retail brands. A McKinsey report on "The State of Fashion in 2019" pointed to personalization as a key trend, especially among younger customers. "They have a desire to individualize products, and they're often willing to pay a premium for it." Litchfield agrees. Redthread sells four items: a T-shirt ($78), a jacket ($168), ankle-length pants, and wide-leg pants (each $148). While custom-made clothing might save retailers money on returns and overstock, Marchessou says it's not yet sustainable for most brands to ship out custom-produced single orders. Technologies like automated sewing and 3D printing for clothes could make it easier to scale up a bespoke garment business (and also drive down costs), but those technologies aren't widely accessible yet. On a smaller scale, though, some designers have experimented with 3D printing as a means to find better fit and give consumers more personalization. Israeli fashion designer Danit Peleg believes that in the future we'll be able to "download" our clothes and fabricate them at home using 3D printers that can spin soft materials. Peleg already sells a custom-made 3D-printed bomber jacket for $1,500 and hopes more people will print their own clothes one day. Litchfield, for her part, imagines a world "where stacks of apparel inventory and sizes are eliminated, everyone has their measurements in a digital wallet, and all clothing is created on-demand, personalized to each person." She thinks we'll get there, eventually—one pair of made-to-measure pants at a time. More Great WIRED Stories |
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