For much of modern American history, it was considered unacceptable for women to wear pants in public. When did that change? Most are aware that women wore pantaloons or “bloomers” under skirts from the mid-19th century. Then, jumping ahead to World War II, women entering the workforce donned Rosie the Riveter-style coveralls.
But the full origin story of women's slacks includes an often-overlooked early iteration of women’s pants known as “beach pajamas.”
Early Attempts at Pants for Women
It took several attempts for pants to catch on and be considered acceptable for women in the United States. “It wasn't a straight line,” fashion historian Sonya Abrego says of the progression towards pants, describing it as “a couple steps forward, a couple steps back.”
Some of the 19th-century American utopian communities were among the earliest adopters of pants for women. By 1825, the Owenites of New Harmony, Indiana were wearing a “practical, unisex outfit” consisting of pants and a tunic, while the women of the Oneida Community in upstate New York began sporting “bobbed hair, short skirts, and pantalettes” in 1848—the year the communal society was founded.
Three years later and 80 miles to the west, Elizabeth Smith Miller of Geneva, New York debuted a pair of ankle-length Turkish-style pantaloons worn under a full skirt which came to be known as “bloomers”: a reference to Amelia Jenks Bloomer, a journalist and dress reform activist who wrote about and wore the early trousers.
Bloomer and other proponents of dress reform, or “rational dress,” argued that clothing that was less confining and restrictive was not only healthier and safer to wear, but would also provide women with more freedom of movement, allowing them to become more active participants in society.
While many leaders of the women’s suffrage movement including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone were initially on board with bloomers, the garment largely fell out of fashion by 1854, and was all but abandoned by 1861. Wearing bloomers in public made women the target of ridicule, and suffragists didn’t want them to be a distraction from their primary goal of securing the right to vote for women.
Bloomers did, however, make a brief comeback in the 1890s during the so-called “bicycle craze,” when some women temporarily ditched their bustles and petticoats in favor of “divided skirts” that made riding safer and easier.
From there, women’s pants next made an entrance—not during World War II—but on the beaches of Europe.
Pajamas Move from the Bedroom to the Beach
Originally created for men but quickly adopted by women, sleeping pajamas consisting of a shirt and pants rose to popularity in the United States in the 1890s. They first made the leap from the bedroom to the beach in Europe in the late 1910s, at a time when it was illegal for women to wear trousers in public in more than 40 U.S. cities with anti-cross-dressing laws on the books, Claire Sears explains in Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco.
“Beach pajamas are the missing link in the cannon of fashion between women in the Western world wearing skirts in the public sphere and the introduction of pants as socially acceptable daywear,” says Hannah Schiff, a fashion historian and co-author (with Janine D'Agati) of From Sleepwear to Sportswear: How Beach Pajamas Reshaped Women's Fashion.
Beach pajamas were first worn in the years immediately following World War I by female beachgoers at exclusive European seaside resorts. “While there isn’t a clear single point or person of origin for the style, evidence points to Deauville, France as one of the first locales they were worn,” explains co-author D'Agati, a fashion historian specializing in 1920s-1940s women’s fashion.
“One of the earliest mentions in contemporary press of trousered pajamas worn on the beach is a 1919 Vogue article, which recounted theater star Andrée Spinelli’s black lace pajamas at Deauville.” Coco Chanel was also an early proponent of beach pajamas.
Initially, wearing pajamas on the beach was an “act of anti-fashion,” Schiff says, and a response to a lack of suitable garments available to women at the time. Not only did they provide a degree of modesty covering up a swimsuit, but beach pajamas were also worn for warmth on winter beaches, and to prevent sunburn.
Beach Pajamas Come to America
Wealthy American women were the first to don beach pajamas, adopting the fashion when vacationing in Deauville—a seaside resort town on the Côte Fleurie of France’s Normandy region—and the Lido, a barrier island in the Venetian Lagoon in Northern Italy and famous holiday destination since the mid-1800s. These women of leisure brough the concept of pajama dressing to American beaches, where they gained popularity in the United States in the mid-to-late 1920s, according to Schiff.
“The trend was widely reported on in newspapers and magazines at the time, which introduced the broader public to the pajamas still being worn on select and often private beaches,” she explains.
By this point, beach pajamas were available in one-piece and multi-piece sets, and “were made of virtually every material, with designs ranging from opulent to pragmatic,” Schiff says.
In addition to patterns for home sewers, various designs at a range of price points quickly became available on the ready-to-wear market, including through mail-order catalogs like Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Montgomery Ward and at department stores.
“As beach pajama styles became more streamlined and sporty in the late 1920s and early 1930s, they were even easier to distill into mass-produced attire and sewing patterns,” Schiff notes.
By that point, they were a common sight in both upscale beach resort towns, and on the boardwalks of Coney Island and Atlantic City. Around the same time, new types of pajamas were marketed and sold for uses other than the beach, including gardening pajamas, porch pajamas and kitchenette pajamas, according to D'Agati and Schiff.
Trend Began Among Upper Classes
So, why did beach pajamas succeed while earlier iterations of pants for women, like bloomers, failed to catch on? “To start, there was already a fashionable precedent in indoor pajamas for women, with Parisian couturiers such as Callot Souers creating luxurious pajama garments for private indoor wear since the 1910s,” D'Agati says. “By adapting a piece of already-fashionable dress—the ladies’ pajama—versus introducing a new garment altogether—such as the bloomer suit—for wear in public, much of the battle to acceptance was already won.”
Class was also a factor. Pants had previously been adopted by dress reformers, suffragists, female bicyclists and women in utopian communities who wore them to perform manual labor—who weren’t exactly arbiters of fashion. Beach pajamas, on the other hand, “began as an upper class phenomenon, as wealthy vacationers including heiresses, princesses, theater and silent film stars took to wearing their trousered pajamas in public at exclusive resorts,” D'Agati explains.
Plus, as D'Agati points out, these spaces were often somewhat private. “Many such resorts were known for their liberated atmosphere, and experimentation in dress was encouraged there more so than in one’s normal day to day life,” she explains.
Like sleeping pajamas, the first beach pajamas were mostly made out of soft, delicate fabrics like silk. There were also more formal versions for “visiting with other women [or] socializing at home,” Abrego says.
By the time beach pajamas were more mainstream at the end of the 1920s, sturdier, more practical fabrics like cotton and linen were introduced, further cementing them as garments worn outdoors and in public, D'Agati and Schiff write. “It's an interwar style,” Abrego says. “There was a lot of experimentation around that time with fashion, so they fit in with that.”
The height of beach pajamas’ popularity and influence, 1927 to 1935, coincided with the rise of the “outdoor lifestyle"—a confluence of sports, travel and resort culture—with nautical styles inspired by the clothing of laborers on the French Riviera like sailors, fisherman and mechanics.
“There’s a recurring vogue in fashion for ‘working class chic,’ in which blue collar aesthetics are fetishized and reinterpreted through an intentionally fashionable lens,” Schiff says. “Many young socialites even sourced their striped fisherman sweaters and mechanic’s jumpsuits from specialty shops that sold goods to local workers, pairing them with beach pajama pants and tailoring their coveralls to have more fashionable and feminine silhouettes.”
The Great Depression contributed to workwear—and, in turn, beach pajamas—becoming a desirable style for the elite: both because wearing opulent fashions was considered somewhat gauche at the time, and because the fashion industry was itself impacted by the financial crisis, Schiff says.
At the same time, the popularity of trouser-wearing female aviators like Amelia Earhart—who created her own sportswear line in 1933—also helped propel pants even further into the mainstream. Similarly, the golden age of travel, the rise of Hollywood, the rise of mass production and social disruption and shifting gender roles in the wake of World War I all contributed to the acceptance of beach pajamas, and trousers for women, D'Agati says.
Unsurprisingly, beach pajamas, like their pantaloon predecessors, weren’t without controversy. As a July 1924 article on the garment in a Lima, Ohio newspaper pointed out, “the most talked about bathing costumes of the season are not the most abbreviated,” noting that “the young girls who appear on the beaches this summer in these most uncoquettish of costumes will doubtless be looked upon as most daring.” Others, like the vicar of a church in Weymouth, England, saw beach pajamas as sinful, and denounced them in a sermon in the summer of 1931.
From Pajamas to Sportswear
Ultimately, beach pajamas gave women the opportunity to become familiarized and comfortable with wearing pants outside of the home—which, in turn, acclimated men to the sight of trousered women in public spaces.
During the 1920s and 1930s, “pajamas” was essentially a catch-all term for any kind of women's pants. But as they grew increasingly mainstream and were no longer confined to use on the seashore, the moniker gradually faded into obscurity, D'Agati explains.
“Once we get into the 1930s, they just become part of casual sportswear, and there seems to be less of an anxiety around or an emphasis on having to differentiate them,” Abrego says. “By that time they're just one of many options [for women].” Starting in the mid-1930s, garments once known as “pajamas” were referred to as “slacks,” “trousers” and—finally—“pants.”
