I want to be a Bloomer: The Impact of Print Culture on the Public Perception of the Bloomer Costume, 1851-1860

In 1851 American women’s social reformers adopted an outfit consisting of a shortened skirt and trousers, which was dubbed the bloomer costume after one of its supporters.  The bloomer costume was adopted as the uniform of the women’s dress reform movement in the United States and in 1851 American reformers travelled to the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London to promote a British dress reform movement. During 1851 and 1852 the bloomer costume inspired sentimental images of beautiful women wearing the costume in fashion plates, lithographs, sheet music, and British Staffordshire Portrait Figurines in both the United States and Great Britain suggesting that it achieved some level of popularity.  At the same time, however, both American and British news, humor and illustrated periodicals portrayed bloomer-wearing women as masculine and ugly.  Transnationally these periodicals fed into one another as popular American magazines such as Harper’s reprinted articles from British satirical periodicals such as Punch.  The contradiction between romanticized depictions of bloomer-wearing women and comic interpretations makes it difficult to ascertain whether the bloomer costume was ever popular or if it was always viewed with disdain.  This paper argues that sentimental images of the bloomer costume appealed to a middle-class sense of whimsy associated with women’s magazines and popular theater.  When it became evident that the bloomer costume was not simply a new fashion but associated with the women’s rights movement, however, middle class periodicals geared at both men and women began to portray the bloomer costume as threatening to society.