The Trouser Suit

Women had been wearing trousers for decades by the 1960s - for sport, war work, the beach, and relaxing at home. What they hadn't generally worn was trousers as smart, formal clothing, in town or at the office. The 1960s trouser suit changed that, and it's one of the most important garments of the decade for how women dress now.

The design world moved first. In 1964, André Courrèges showed trouser suits as part of his Space Age collections: slim, straight-legged trousers with neat, short jackets, often in white, worn with flat boots. They looked sleek, youthful, and futuristic, and they presented trousers as simply the modern, sensible way to dress. Other designers followed, and in 1966 Yves Saint Laurent showed "Le Smoking," the tuxedo for women, which took trousers into evening wear. Mid-1960s trouser suits came in many forms, from tailored wool jackets and trousers to long tunics worn over matching trousers, a softer version that looked more like a dress when standing still.

Society took longer. Many restaurants, hotels, offices, and schools still had rules or unwritten codes against women in trousers, and there are well-known stories from the late 1960s of fashionable women turned away from smart restaurants for wearing trouser suits - including one, possibly embellished in the retelling, of a socialite who responded by taking off her trousers and wearing the tunic alone as a very short dress. Those stories show how strongly people felt about trousers as a symbol of male authority.

What I find most interesting is how the trouser suit became a symbol. For younger women, it was modern and practical. For some, it was a statement of equality, borrowing the authority of men's clothing. And for designers, it was a new canvas. By the end of the decade, trouser suits were widely available in ready-to-wear, and they were ready to become a staple of women's working wardrobes in the 1970s. Without the 1960s trouser suit, the tailored working woman of the following decades would look very different.