About four years ago, I stopped wearing pants.
Sure, I’ll wear yoga pants to the gym or pajama bottoms for lounging around the house, but in public, I don’t think I’ve worn anything but skirts and dresses with tights or leggings since the autumn of 2010. One of the last photos of me in jeans is this promo shot of the original line-up of my old band, Tiny Magnets.
I can’t recall the way I explained it to myself at the time. I only remember that I executed the plan swiftly and resolutely. In seemingly no time at all, I had dredged up the few skirts I had stuffed in the backs of my drawers and purchased a handful of new-to-me pieces from the thrift store and put them all into immediate, daily rotation. Suddenly, I was a Girl Who Wore Skirts.
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I probably wouldn’t be described as fashionable or even very put-together by most people who pay attention to such things. Never have been. As a female-identified person who grew up middle class, in the Midwest, in the 80s and 90s, and has struggled with weight and body image almost as long as I can remember, clothing, while fascinating, has always also been fraught with mild terror.
Does this fit? Is it cute? Is it trendy? Will I fit in with the other girls? How much does it cost? How much wear will I be able to get out of it?
Being raised by a single father didn’t help matters either. When, as an awkward early adolescent, I wasn’t wearing the blousy tops left behind in my dead mother’s old closet, I was inevitably dressed in what can only be described as a kind of baby butch getup—oversized t-shirts to hide my pudgy tummy, or my dad’s cast-off suit vests, dress pants, button-down shirts, and even the occasional tie.
Even as I grew ever-so-slightly more comfortable with my female figure in my late teens and early twenties, occasionally wearing a more form-fitting dress for a special event or a shirt that showed the slightest bit of cleavage, my fall-back look mostly revolved around jeans and t-shirts, along with a few statement pieces, mostly tops in outlandish colors and bold patterns.
Even as recently as my late twenties, when my then-roommate suggested that shopping for clothes became easier when you could look for stuff that fit a self-designated Venn diagram (like “sporty”/ “sexy” / “sport-sexy”), I thought about it for a moment before declaring that my look was probably “little boy” / “circus” / “little boy at the circus.” It was a tongue-in-cheek response, and I always insisted that I liked the tension created by the visual of my very womanly curves dressed in, say, a stripy rugby shirt. But even then, there was always an element of my not quite feeling like I knew how to do “girl” right.
And so my complete switch to a no-pants wardrobe was an obvious attempt for me to reclaim my femininity on some level, even if it didn’t immediately read as such to anyone else. I figured I’d cracked some sort of code for myself, and didn’t give it much thought beyond that for quite some time.
Until I recently began reading Tess Whitehurst’s book Magical Fashionista. In her chapter on using specific articles of clothing to achieve specific, magical effects, she mentions that pants, obviously worn on the lower half of the body, in many ways align themselves symbolically with our ability to be grounded.
She points out three phrases that evoke other qualities as well:
“wears the pants” (determination and authority)
“flying by the sea of one’s pants” (intuition)
“fancy pants” (affluence)
It was that first one that really hit me, though.
As a child put in the position of being overly responsible, over-achieving, and over-vigilant about everyone’s needs and emotions but my own, I’d been wearing the pants in many different ways, in many different situations and relationships, for far too long. Thanks to that passage in the book, I suddenly saw my complete refusal to wear anything other than skirts and dresses as more than just a craving of femininity for its own sake—it was also a craving to be released from the burden of constant responsibility.
I didn’t want to be the one wearing the pants anymore!
I didn’t want to be in charge. I wanted to be doted on, to have someone fetch me the things I desired, to allow space for my silly whims and sudden cravings to not just be expressed but to be indulged. I wanted my female energy to be seen and prioritized and validated. I wanted to be worth more than just what I could do for other people. I wanted to be decorative, fanciful, flowing. I was exhausted by all the work required to keep up that facade of hyper-competence. I was ready to let it all go.
And so I’m doing my best to give that girly part of me room to breathe and play, to find freedom, and a very different kind of power, in femme expression.
Queen of Peaches 