Thread by @AuthorDelaneyW, Clothes don’t have a gender. Wear what makes YOU comfortable. If a [...]

Clothes don’t have a gender. Wear what makes YOU comfortable. If a man in a dress bothers you, I’d suggest you sit down with a history book, but I doubt your reading comprehension so this is a history of men is skirts #HarryStyles #TedTalk (1)

The tradition of men in cloth wraps, skirts, tunics, robes and other non-pant items is vast and ancient.
They were the standard dressing for men and women in all ancient cultures in the Near East and Egypt.

There is evidence of Prehistoric Homo sapiens and Neanderthals wore earliest, most rudimentary clothing that were essentially skirts -animal pelts tied or held together with animal teeth.

Forward ~30,000 yrs to the Kingdom of Sumer, in Mesopotamia. The Sumerians, whose greatest achievement was the invention of writing, documented their clothing. The ritual attire for men was a fur skirt tied to a belt called Kaunakes.

Gauzy wraps, tunics, & loincloths for Egyptians, togas denoting class & status for Greeks & Romans, ornate military costumes for Aztecs: many ancient costumes were based around the idea of the skirt, purely because they were easy to construct and created huge freedom of movement.

Men who were fighting, building, farming or engaging in some kind of religious ritual, all wore skirts simply because they were cheap & efficient. Short skirts among soldiers from the Roman Empire, were considered proof of virility, and allowed for swiftness while in combat.

Historically, two factors determined the use of pants, neither of which were gender; One was the cold and the other was horse-riding.

It wasn’t until the 14th and 15th century Europe that pants were mainstream due to the evolution of tailoring.

The pants for men came down to technology-tailoring from the 14th century that bifurcated garments gradually became associated with men’s dress and masculinity.

As men’s tunics became shorter and tighter-fitting in the 15th century, fashionable men began to wear hose or stockings as outer leg wear. By the 16th and 17th centuries men’s skirts (like culottes) were short enough to cause the necessity of leggings to retain modesty.

For a VERY long time, the tunic or short skirt was the main part of men’s clothing in medieval & Renaissance Europe; just going out with hose wasn't seen as acceptable. And even when the tunic overlay fell out of fashion, trousers themselves would swell to skirt-like proportions.

By the 16th & 17th century nobles in England, for for example, were sometimes expected to wear hose, perhaps a codpiece, and giant breeches puffed to high heaven.

It wasn’t until the 19th c that
the demarcation betw trousers-for-men and skirts-for-women bec standard. We can thank Beau Brummel, father of fashion and dandies, for this. His use of breeches popularized them; women esp loved them because they showed off the wearers assets.

And even then, skirted garments were still acceptable in many contexts in European society. Academics, monks and men of leisure, and all children, wore skirted clothing and leisure gowns.

Up to the 19th century, European children, regardless of their gender, were dress in elaborate gowns up until they reached an age considered to be reasonably "adult."

It wasn’t until the end of the 19th c that this tradition ended and was replaced with the practice of “breaching”; small boys, typically between the ages of 4 & 7, were given their first pair of trousers (breeches) to show that they'd gone beyond infancy.

While part of this shift to gendered clothing was due to new ideas about childhood, it was also due to the emergence of perspectives on what made a "man”. As the modern concept of “manliness” took hold, skirts & dresses for men became less and less accepted.

By the time the 20th c started, the idea that the skirt is inherently feminine was mainstream in Western cultures. The idea that a man wearing a skirt is feminine and therefore weakened, is still the prevailing norm for Western cultures.

All of this history and norms on clothing is specific to Western cultures. As Europe’s norms changed, the rest of the world’s did not.

In several cultures, from India to Japan and Southeast Asia, robes and skirts remain completely acceptable wear for adult men.

In fact, idea that skirts are entirely feminine is very Western-centric.

Not only is that idea a bad one, the fact that these western cultures expect the rest of the world to conform to their cultural norms is bullshit too.

Perhaps then, within western culture, those who buck the norms of gendered clothing aren’t being “avant-garde” but rather are showing an understanding that who can wear skirts is tied to a very specific culture, rather than some innate quality that skirts possess.

Men wearing skirts and women wearing pants is a very new idea specifically tied to western cultures.

It’s toxic masculinity wrapped up in misogyny, and it needs to go the way of the cod-piece- forgotten. It’s time we let people wear what they want.

If this was new to you, wait until you look up the history of high heels!

Anyway- For a vast majority of human’s existence, skirts were acceptable for everyone. It’s time for the ppl who push their gendered clothing norms on others to understand they are not only the minority,

but also showing a complete lack of the history of humanity and thus are completely wrong about their norms to begin with.

END #TedTalk #ClothingHasNoGender #YouBeYou

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