Pants

Filene’s in Boston installed three “Slack Bars.” Detroit’s J. L. Hudson was forced to open a Trouser Shop for Women. In Chicago, Marshall Field’s, The Fair, and Goldblatt Bros, (seven stores) reported trouser sales from five to ten times greater than last year’s, and zooming all the time. Countrywide sales average 500% over all previous records.

In short, U.S. women, by the million, have renounced skirts in favor of slacks. They are also renouncing less visible femininities: panties, brassières, slips, and even bloomers and petticoats. They have taken to chemises—not the kind that served as slipcovers under corsets—but a combination one-piece garment combining built-in bra, streamlined shorts, slip-like middles.

The women pants-purchasers are not just the perfect 36s, but 40s, even 42s. Unbelieving manufacturers, who heretofore had made slacks mainly in Garbo and Hepburn sizes, were caught short by unprecedented orders for large sizes.

Not since Mrs. Amelia Bloomer created an international uproar in 1849 by appearing in public in voluminous Turkish trousers had such a feminine trouser sensation swept the country. High-school girls in Brooklyn’s big Abraham Lincoln High School struck for the right to wear slacks. In Detroit Mayor Edward Jeffries grudgingly admitted that a female employe of the city, forced by priorities to bicycle to work, might do her job in slacks. Pants made good sense for wartime. Lieut. Commander Roy R. Darron ordered women employed in the machine shops of the Alameda Naval Air Station in California to wear pants to work.

To reassure nervous pants-prospects, Vogue printed “A Primer on Pants,” specifying: When to Wear Slacks (in the country, war service duty, other hard work); How to Buy Them (snug-fitting or closely woven fabrics to hold shape; with fly front to camouflage breadth through middle); How to Wear Them (with simple jewelry, low-heeled shoes, and unself-consciously); then destructively summed up: “Slacks look wonderfully well when they’re right, incredibly bad when they’re wrong. . . . A skirt is never wrong.”