Fashion is a Two-Faced Bitch: Dresses. Who’s to blame?

Every once  in awhile I like to play a game called “Creative History”.  Would you like to try your hand?

Here’s what you do:  You ask yourself a question.  Not an easy question.  A question  you don’t know the answer to. A question that has skimmed the surface of your mind here and again without ever rooting far enough down to fire neurons.

Next, you let the question seep down through your brain’s nooks and lobes and crannies and all those other places your brain has.  Maybe it settles down all the way to your medulla.  Wait.  Do brains have medullas?  I’m  pretty sure they do.  I believe I read that word in a brain book one fine day.

Hey, there you go, excellent question, right there, perfect example.  What the hell is a medulla,  where is it, and how many do I  have?  But I digress.  The second part of the game, after you’ve let your question settle down to your medullah and marinate awhile,  is to answer the question. There’s only one rule.You can’t look up anything.  Not even a word spelling.  You just write out your answer as it comes to you.

When you are done, you can look it all up and see how you did. That’s the glory of the internet. You wouldn’t be able to play fun games like this without the internet.  If you play this game, you will learn something and if you don’t learn anything, you didn’t ask yourself the right question.

HEY CHICKEN, NONE OF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH FASHION.

What? Did you say something?  Oh.  Fashion.  YES, thank you.  Here’s where I was going with that.

The question that popped into my head today, just in time for F=2FB Friday AND, as it turns out, Creative History Game day, is why do women wear dresses?

Who thought that would be a good idea?

I’ve been stewing on it for a couple of hours and this is what I think:

Would you like a glass of wine?  Beer?  No?  Okay…
How about tea? Would you like some  tea?
Pillow?

Touchy touchy.  Alright already.  Here we go.

It was all about sex and having babies in the beginning. The women had to wear dresses to keep their lady bits accessible, while pants were introduced for men to protect their manly bits from sharp teeth and claws and tree branches and other potentially emasculating devices.

So the women were accessible, the men were protected,  fire had been invented and evolution continued. But then what happened? Why did the women continue to wear dresses?  And why did they complicate them even further with multiple petticoats and corsets and hoops and bloomers and stockings….

Accessibility was getting to be a bit of a pain in the ass, I’d guess.  And the church wasn’t very fond of it either. So they threw some road blocks in the way to keep things seemly.  And evolution continued.

Then, I think there was a period where things got kind of loosey-goosey and flowy accessible garments had another moment. There was a population boom, an industrial revolution, a war, a particularly raucous prohibition, if  The Great Gatsby is to be believed, a great depression, another war, and finally it occurred to some riveters that if there were no hose available, they might as well wear pants.  So they did.  And then the war ended and the men came home, there was much celebrating and dress wearing, another population boom, a baby boomer rebellion, and finally, finally, despite the reign of free love, pants on women became sort of mainstream.  At least in America.  It was probably different everywhere else.

So women started wearing pants, people who like women appreciated the streamlined view, and pants were here to stay. A shift began, and it was a good one.

Or maybe it had something to do with peeing.

The end.

This is the fun part.  Now you research your question and find out just how well you did.

I did poorly. Very poorly. This is not surprising to me. But at least I am not the only one to have pondered the question.  Here’s an interesting chat thread I found on the very same subject.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=933691

Yeast infections?  Really? And so we all learned something today.  Isn’t that great?  Happy F=2FB Friday.

No yeast infections here