Dressing Wounds: The Skirt as Medicine and Fashion

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag argued that a new mobility in the eighteenth century unsettled established ideas of worth and station. These were reasserted “through new notions about clothes (‘fashions’) and new attitudes about illness. Both clothes (the outer garment of the body) and illness (a kind of interior décor of the body) became tropes for new attitudes toward the self.” Fashion studies and the history of medicine have productively investigated the relationship of clothes and illness, respectively, to the self. But the connection between clothing and illness has been under-analyzed. While most work in this overlap focuses on clothing’s ill effects, physical and psychological, this paper seeks to open another area of inquiry, using the skirt as case study to articulate a theory of clothing as medicine. In the early twentieth century, shorter skirts were offered as prophylaxis against the dangers of the “trailing” skirt uncovered by the germ theory, while psychiatrists began to look to clothing to understand people’s inner lives. In his study of “transvestites,” Magnus Hirschfeld described the soothing effects of clothing: While clothed as their own sex his patients felt “confined, bound up, [and] oppressed...on the other hand, they cannot find enough words to describe the feeling of peace, security and exaltation, happiness and well-being that overcomes them when in the clothing of the other sex.” This paper seeks to mine this disciplinary boundary to unsettle these aspects of the clinical encounter and to add new language to clothes.