4 minute read
Dressing Down
Mary O’Regan explains why she only wears skirts and dresses
Nearly two years ago I held my last pair of shabby jeans over the bin, I took a deep breath and thrust them among the rubbish. This marked the moment that I became a full-time wearer of skirts and dresses. Trust me, no one could have been more surprised than me. For years I had been an obstinate wearer of jeans. Finally, after much prayer I have been realised why it is better to wear traditional feminine clothes and I followed a call to address my previous lack of charity in dress.
To be sure, in the past when I wore jeans, I had been very confused. I had not been raised a Traditional Catholic and in my late teens and early 20s, when I mixed with other Trads, there were a few occasions when I was treated with hostility and even called the "s" word because I sometimes wore trousers. All this did was hurt me and I felt that to do as they wished me to do was to agree with their rash assessment of me. Also, I felt I was caught between two worlds. When I was in liberal education settings and going to classes and taking my exams I was treated as odd and suspect if I wore skirts. There was even a time a rumour suggested I had been involved with an older man. The rumour was quashed quickly because, unlike the girl who spread the lie, I had never met him and he didn’t even know my name. But what really stung was that others suggested the scandal took hold because I had started wearing glamorous (albeit modest) dresses that attracted the attention of men.
I felt I couldn’t win: In one setting I was shamed for wearing trousers and in another I was shamed for wearing dresses.
When I was much younger, I had no special reason for wearing dresses, but now that I do, I’d like to share them. Skirts and dresses have an unsurpassed elegance. Even in our times, the choices of most women prove this is so. The vast majority of women wear dresses or skirt-and-bodice on their wedding days. Just ask an average woman who has been told that dresses and trousers are equally elegant if she will wear trousers on her wedding day and she will say ‘no’.
When a woman is presented with the choice of what to wear at weddings, balls and formal dinners, trousers don’t even get a look in. But, where the majority of people always wear jeans and trousers, elegance becomes something of an oddity, making it harder for individual women to go against the herd.
But why do we relegate the modes of dress that make women look their best to special occasions? Why not bring beauty in dress back to everyday life? Why not promote the best forms of dress for women? My argument may seem superficial, but not when you consider that women have much less time in which to find a loving spouse, settle down and have children, and unlike men they have to make the most of their precious younger years, and for this alone, I advocate that we women start electing to make skirts and dresses the norm again, so that the form of dress that makes women more attractive becomes the standard.
Women do not have the same biological clocks as men; why is it good for them to dress like men?
The feminists have long championed the idea that women should wear whatever they choose. But often feminists champion jeans and trousers because of their dislike of men; the whole thing becomes a means of begrudging men the sight of women at their most beautiful. As a result, there are women who never find a husband.
My argument extends to women who are called to religious life, too, because in a society where most wear jeans and trousers all the time, the sanctified elegance of the nun’s traditional habit seems almost freakish.
I knew many Irish Catholics who were all for “Church reform,” but they were unnerved by the sight of nuns in jeans; still they could not see that we all have a hand in creating a society where skirts and dresses become uncommon, and so why are we surprised when we have so few female religious, and those that are nuns chose trousers rather than embrace the attire of a bride of Christ?
It would be hypocritical for me to say I want the best for my fellow women and at the same time not play my part in making skirts and dresses customary.
