Exhibit A (Trousers)

It is historically misleading to suggest that women only began wearing trousers in the twentieth century and short-sighted to say the least, that through that they became liberated. Archaeological and textual evidence from Eurasian steppe societies shows that divided-leg garments were already in use by at least the early first millennium BCE, primarily as practical adaptations to the horseback riding mobility of the highlands. In these contexts, trousers were not inherently gendered symbols of rebellion or masculinity, but functional clothing embedded in a broader system. 

There is not an extensive amount of female representation from those days. Accordingly, little is known of their costume in the Median and Achaemenid periods. However, there are a few examples from Anatolia. Therefore, we are sure of the usage of a divided-leg garment for women of Asia Minor.  The later symbolic meanings attached to trousers in societies such as Greece, Rome, and much of early modern Europe were therefore not inherent to the garment itself, but produced through cultural systems that encoded foreignness and social order into dress. In these contexts, trousers became markers of “otherness” or deviation from elite civic norms, rather than functional clothing.

From this perspective, identity is not expressed through garments as fixed meanings, but constructed through the interpretive frameworks imposed by societies that define what clothing signifies. In the modern period, designers such as Emilio Pucci, who popularized Capri pants in the early 1950s, and Yves Saint Laurent, whose 1966 “Le Smoking” redefined the tuxedo for women, did not invent trousers for women, nor liberated them, but contextualized a much older global history of divided-leg garments within new Western fashion and the gender system that they had created.