FEATURE
Dressing the Part
Creating historic costume allows for an even deeper insight into the context for their wearing. Photo by Chonda Morrison.
“They should have never given us uniforms if they didn't want us to be an army.”
-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
At her feet plays a little child, frolicking amongst the voluminous skirts held at bay by steel hoops. She is carefully tucking pins in place, fine tuning the darts in the waist line, examining the outfit with a critical eye. The little boy is diving under the petticoats and skirts, giggling that he can disappear completely beneath the cave of fabric. While he plays, she marks a change to the arm scythe, so that the shoulder might lay more flatteringly. This dress is nearly ready for its debut, and though it is the height of fashion of 1862, the year is 2025.
The sense of connection settled over me like a cloak while I was fitting my garment, the shared experience with women dead long before I was ever born, of the delight of little children as they played in their mother’s skirts. Their struggles and triumphs are a subject that is of acute interest to me today, particularly in the socio-political climate in which the role of women is being renegotiated and challenged. Fashion, often dismissed as frivolous, was as much a source of defiance as it was oppression. By reclaiming and reinterpreting these traditions today, we continue the fight for visibility, equality, and self-determination.
Women clad in suffragette white participate in a parade in New York City in 1912. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Historic Context
Women today, like people of all genders, show their resistance with hats, with clothing choices, with piercings, haircuts, and other methods of self expression. In eras past, they did the same thing, often within the bounds of social expectations but even more often pushing those boundaries to force evolution of their social roles. For example, women developed the riding habit, so that they could assert themselves into men’s spaces such as hunting on horseback. They created split skirts in the Victorian era so that they could ride bicycles and take part in sports. Often, these outfits would take on traits of more masculine clothing, such as military uniforms, with sharp lapels, suiting, or ties, while also keeping the distinctly feminine traits of their fashions of the time.
It comes as no surprise that, like a uniform, certain styles of dress come to be associated with different groups of people. When combined with an occupation, a uniform immediately informs an audience that the person wearing it is identified with a certain organization. Such is the same with different styles of clothing that have been embraced by different social movements. The suffragists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries visually defined their movement by their white “lingerie” dress and purple and yellow rosettes.
Riding habits drew heavily from men’s military uniform styles, harnessing masculine styles to increase the legitimacy of a woman’s place in male dominated spaces. Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
As recreation as a concept grew in the Victorian Era, women designed new styles of garments so they could participate in sports like archery, ice skating, and tennis. Photo by Jennifer Moss.
As illustrated by Camille Benda in her book Dressing the Resistance: The Visual Language of Protest, conformity, when exhibited en masse, becomes a uniform, a concept embraced by the Pussyhat Project movement in 2016. Co-creators Jayna Zweiman and Krista Suh created hand-made knitted caps from pink yarn with little ears that resembled those of a cat. The evocative name was chosen intentionally to combat the vulgar language used by then president-elect Trump, to reclaim and destigmatize the word. Further, most of the hats worn during the Women’s March of January 2017 were handmade. These handicrafts reclaimed a traditionally woman’s skill of knitting and crochet and harnessed them to make a global statement. Such “women’s work” has been historically devalued along with much of other domestic labor that women have performed for centuries. But when each individual craft transformed into a sea of pink Pussyhats, they became the pièce de résistance of a reignited women’s rights movement.
Early feminists seemed to be of two minds: that fashion was either a frivolous distraction or else a powerful symbol of femininity. Like so many things, perhaps both were true. As such, we saw the Rational Dress Movement in the late nineteenth century shy away from the decorated fashions, and the nineteenth-century feminist Amelia Bloomer advocated radical departure from heavy skirts—like the “bloomers" she championed. This style, first developed in 1851 by Elizabeth Smith Miller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton before Bloomer presented it in her magazine The Lily, rejected the skirts that defined western women’s wear and challenged ideas of femininity through the wearing of bifurcated clothing. Other suffragettes fought vigorously against the offensively masculine caricatures of feminists by newspaper cartoonists, by emphasizing feminine elegance to show the world that women need not sacrifice their femininity nor imitate men to claim their rights. While women’s clothing has often been a tool of oppression, by wearing and interpreting historical garments we confront the realities of past gender roles, acknowledge the hard-won freedoms of today, and highlight the ways in which those freedoms—for women and gender nonconforming people both—remain under threat.
Historic Costume as an Interpretive Tool
When I step into garments from another century, I am immediately recognizable as a person from the past. With it I carry many assumptions, some correct and some incorrect, regarding the ways that people perceive historical women. Some of those assumptions that I regularly hear people voice are that women of the past were delicate, or unable to take part actively in their lives because of what they wore. This assumption is no more accurate than assuming a woman is fragile because she is wearing a ballgown for a special occasion. When I wear historic costume, I emphasize the context for what I am wearing, be it work dress or dinner gown. Women today face assumptions based on what they are wearing, and this objectification can be an oversimplification at best or dehumanizing at worst. Providing context for the costume is critical to the understanding that a woman’s role in society is a complex evolution, and always a deeply personal interpretation of what it is to be a woman.
Even the physical wearing of historic garments transforms one's experience as an interpreter. Wearing corsetry and other silhouette altering garments like hoops, bustles, and panniers all transform not just one’s body, but also the way one navigates the world. The historic costume physically changes the way you move and the ways you interact with everyday objects. Research materials do not often cover these topics, but this information can be readily gained firsthand. The emotional connection to generations of women who wore and sewed these garments runs deep, and when you not only wear, but also make the garments, each stitch links you to the hands of women who came before—women who passed down these skills from mother to daughter or from dressmaker to apprentice. Today, those skills are preserved in fragments, scattered across old books, online tutorials, and historical societies. The modern historic seamstress becomes a virtual apprentice, decoding techniques once described cryptically in period sources as “the usual way”—a way that is now anything but usual.
Stays and corsets would be a staple of western women’s wardrobes for hundreds of years. Now, these garments often demonstrate the interplay between restrictions on and celebrations of femininity. Photo by Liz Boles Johnson, own work.
This protester wears the iconic red cloak and white bonnet of a Handmaid to stand against the erosion of bodily autonomy and warn of a future that mirrors fiction. Photo by Liz Boles Johnson.
In reviving these forgotten methods, I am not only preserving a skill but also reclaiming a part of women’s history that was often dismissed as mere domestic work. Much of this women’s work was taken for granted in their day, with much of the making and mending taking place during childrearing and in whatever quiet moments women could carve out. With each garment hand made either by the woman herself, her servants, or a local seamstress or tailor, each dress was an opportunity for personal expression. While society may have had strict dictates of modesty and properness, women would also assert their individuality through the creative control they had over their fashions.
It is in this personal experience that the power of historical costume as an interpretive device lies. Wearing historical garments is more than an exercise in historical accuracy—it is an invitation to dialogue. When I step into a costume from another century, the public’s response varies. Some see beauty and elegance; others see restriction and oppression. But the truth lies in the tension between these two interpretations. Did these garments confine women, or did they provide a means to assert power and claim space within the constraints of their time? This duality seems as relevant today as it was to the early feminists of the women's suffrage movements.
Audience reactions often reflect this tension between reverence and frivolity. Women that I interact with in costume so often tell me, “I could never wear all that.” But the truth is that, for much of history, they wouldn’t have had a choice. Before our mothers and grandmothers fought and won battles for bodily autonomy and self-expression, these garments were not simply fashion—they were a form of social control. Yet even within these confines, women found ways to assert themselves, shaping both their clothing and their roles in society.
By wearing these garments today, we reclaim not just the fabric and the form, but also the resilience and resistance they represent. In this opportunity for dialogue, I point out that women didn’t have the range of choices that we have today, but they adapted their wardrobe to their activities, and went about their lives despite what we would consider burdensome clothing. While working class women followed fashion conventions, they also designed more flexible corsets for riding and in eras when skirts were quite large, they eschewed the cumbersome crinolines. Our ability to wear pants, cut our hair, or reject fashion altogether is a privilege made possible by generations of women who pushed boundaries. Wearing historical clothing serves as a reminder that these freedoms are not guaranteed—they were fought for and could be lost. Political shifts, attacks on bodily autonomy, and ongoing gender-based discrimination remind us that progress is not linear. The act of reclaiming these garments becomes a form of resistance in itself—a declaration that the fight for visibility and self-determination is not over.
Demonstrators at the 2019 Boston Women’s March harnessed the iconic costumes of The Handmaid's Tale to make their statement about the dangerous loss of bodily autonomy. Photo by Kai Medina.
The Role of Historic Garments in Modern Resistance
Women’s rights face renewed challenges today, and historic garments provide a powerful way to bring visibility to resistance against the loss of those rights. The Handmaid’s Tale, written by Margaret Atwood in 1985 and brought to life in a 2017 Hulu series, is set in the fictional nation of Gilead in which fertile women are conscripted to give birth in the midst of a global infertility crisis. The brilliant and eerie Handmaid’s costume design by Ane Crabtree was so impactful that it has been worn by activists in demonstrations and is on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It is not a coincidence that the iconic red dress and white bonnet resemble an amalgamation of historic styles despite being set in the near future, immediately visually identifying the regression of women's rights.
Just as the Handmaid’s costume evokes the visual language of historical oppression, suffragette-inspired dress has also been embraced as a symbol of resistance in modern protests. Modern protesters have donned the historic dresses and sashes of the early 20th-century suffrage movement to draw a direct connection between the fight for women’s voting rights and the ongoing struggle for bodily autonomy and equal representation. Democratic congresswomen wore white in solidarity of the women's rights movements during 2019 and 2020 State of the Union addresses, embodying the spirit of the suffragettes who wore white 100 years earlier. Kamala Harris embraced suffragette white in her vice presidential acceptance speech as well, through her iconic white pantsuit and pussybow. This deliberate use of white in this context signals not only a tribute to the women who came before but also a reminder that the fight for gender equality is ongoing.
Conformity makes a statement when it is harnessed for solidarity, as in this image of the Women's March on Washington in January 2017. Photo by Jim Fry (Voice of America).
Conclusion
Women’s stories have long been overlooked or erased from mainstream history, but historical dress has the power to make them visible again. Costumed interpretation provides a tangible connection to the lives of women in the past, opening up conversations about their societal roles and the often-overlooked impact of their contributions. The act of wearing historic garments creates a visceral link to the women who sewed, mended, and wore them—reclaiming these overlooked narratives and giving them a presence in spaces where they have too often been silenced.
At first glance, wearing hyper-feminine styles from the past might seem at odds with modern women’s liberation. Yet it is precisely this tension that makes it so powerful. Stepping into corsets, petticoats, and tailored gowns is not about submission but about reclaiming the narrative of women’s history on our own terms. Clothing has long been a battleground where the questions of who decides what is powerful and who determines what is “appropriate” for women to wear are played out in fabric and thread.
Historic garments serve as both a mirror to the past and a call to continued resistance. When I wear these clothes, I embody the women who came before me—not just their restrictions, but also their quiet acts of defiance and strength. As a park ranger, I defy gender norms every day by working in a field where men have long been dominant. Yet when I wear the feminine styles of the Victorian era, I am connecting to femininity on my own terms. These garments become not just costumes, but declarations: that women’s work matters, that their stories deserve to be told, and that the fight for autonomy and self-expression—just like fashion itself—is always evolving.
For More Information
Benda, Camille. Dressing the Resistance: The Visual Language of Protest through History. Princeton Architectural Press, 2021.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Costume Institute, www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/the-costume-institute.
Strasdin, Kate. The Dress Diary: Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe. Tantor Media, Inc, 2023.
