History of "Dressing Up"

As a lot of men did when they were young, I spent a lot of my adolescence playing dress-up with my mother's clothes. Growing up in a religious family, I always had to rationalize my attraction to men. Once I got older, "Dressing Up" went by the wayside. I started dressing again long after I had come to terms with myself.

Not so recently, I separated from my wife and my love for tights re-emerged.  At first, I bought tights for men, mostly ordering compression tights. I learned that they helped after sports, and that was my excuse.  Eventually,  I noticed that my sneakers looked odd when I wore my tights.  So, I ordered heels. Then, my shorts looked odd with my tights and heels. I decided to order some skirts. I tried to coordinate my t-shirts with my skirts, but sometimes they were mismatched, so I started ordering dresses.

You would think this was easy to do. It wasn't, so I had to rationalize it. I first started with the simple question of "Why could women wear menswear, but men couldn't wear womenswear, even if they were designed for men. Sure, some people did, but they were usually rich, famous, trendsetters, or trying to be.  Having studied some Latin in high school and Art History at University, I knew the Greeks and Romans wore what the modern man would now call a skirt or a dress (Yes, I know the Romans wore other clothes under the toga, but you know what I mean.)  Even before I started feeling gender fluid, I had studied fashion during the ages, usually the medieval and Renaissance ages.  That's when I noticed that men in paintings were wearing clothing that would now be considered feminine: tights/leggings, wigs, makeup, heels.

At this point, I want to mention that people, until the Industrial Revolution, either made their own clothes or had someone make them by hand.  This affected the cost of what people wore.

We'll start with skirts and dresses first. I mentioned earlier that the Greeks and Romans were known for men wearing what could be attributed in modern times as being dresses or skirts. They were long or short and flowed, in other words, there was no meeting of the material in the crotch area.  Even the Roman cohort was depicted as wearing plated (not pleated) skirts. The Romans incorporated the Greek culture into the Roman Empire, so what caused "skirts" to disappear from clothing men could wear?

Well, the Romans had a few problems with a few tribal barbarians that in the end overran the Empire.  Guess what they wore?  Trousers.  In Roman sculpture, the Germanic tribes were always depicted as wearing trousers.  Once they overran the Roman Empire, Roman clothing was viewed as decadent and weak.  As an example of the remnants of Roman male clothing, look at any Roman Catholic priest, as they are a remnant of that era.

Next, we'll discuss tights and hose, my original weakness.  Prior to the age of fashion, cloth tubes or animal wrappings around the legs were the best way of keeping the legs warm.  So, the Germanic barbarians that removed skirts from clothing that men could wear, introduced wrapped cloth around the legs.  Over time, as cloth from the East and methods of sewing cloth improved, the wrappings started looking more like modern tights.  The Renaissance has many paintings that depict men in tights.  As the Renaissance progressed into the Enlightenment, stockings became the preferred legwear of choice for men.  With stockings, they used their knee-length trousers as garters or in some cases they
actually wore garters.

Source: https://bit.ly/38fYDpN

Next, we move on to heels. Heels are currently the epitome of female sexuality.  However, did you know that heels were originally reserved for men? Heels were a weapon that warriors originally wore as the invention that allowed horse riding cultures to rise up in their stirrups and shoot their enemy with their bows without dismounting from their horses.  Over time, when wars depended less on archers on horseback, heels were still reserved for the nobility as a sign of their past warrior history.

Wigs are something that has always been worn by both genders since time immemorial.  Why would I say that?  Well, humans have been plagued by many parasites that tend to live in our hair.  Lice were the major ones.  Body lice, hair lice, and pubic lice have been a source of annoyance for as long as man has existed.  One of the ways humans have combated this foe has been through the shaving of hair on the head and body.  However, humans still use hair as a social tool, for both men and women.  Humanity created wigs to cover the removal of their hair.  However, wigs tended to be very expensive, and most cost an average person a couple of year's wages to purchase.  Those who could afford good wigs were usually wealthy.

Let's go back to the Renaissance.  This was the time when the middle class was starting to grow in a lot of countries. They were merchants, adventurers, mercenaries, or craftsmen that were able to take advantage of the new economy.  To show their wealth, they began to emulate the nobility.  The middle class began to wear heels, wigs, and hose as they gained the wealth to afford them.

After the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution began.  The poor couldn't emulate the rich and mighty, as they were just trying to survive.  The middle class found that supervising their workers in wigs and heels could lead to death or injury if said garments were caught in the machinery.  But, even during the Industrial Revolution, men were still portrayed wearing clothing that we now consider reserved for women, usually at social functions.  And, women continued to adapt clothing from men so much that items men used to wear (and weren't for safety reasons usually) were beginning to be associated more with women.

But, what was the event that defined what was masculine and what was feminine?  It was the Victorian Age and the reach of the British Empire at the time. This one era defined what respectable men and women could wear.  The "Sense and Sensibility" of propriety came to the forefront. Men could not wear what women wore, and women couldn't wear what men wore. It was the "idea" of crossdressing that became an issue, along with other LGBTQ+ hate crimes.  This was the death and the knell of men wearing "fashionable" clothes for over a century.

I hope you enjoyed this brief, rambly history lesson.

Cheers,
Histrionics