Dresses vs trousers

Hi there

I've often wondered about women moving away from skirts and dresses and how people nowadays don't think that anything is weird about a woman wearing trousers.  Yet ... if a man walked down the street in, say, a floral pleated skirt, there would be such a to-do.   When was it decided, I wonder,  that the two sexes would move into trousers instead of dresses?  And who was the fashion innovator who started it for women?  Coco Chanel, maybe?  But what if Hardy Amies, or some such designer,  had suddenly come up with dress patterns for men?:  the world, today, would be so much different.

You know, there's something noble about a man in a kilt.  It may raise a few giggles from 8 year olds but a kilt is not thought of as too outlandish.  And a gentleman from the Pacific Islands wearing a tropical wrap-around still manages to look macho.

When I was about ten, my mother made me some slacks.  I came home crying after the first wearing because my friends had told me how stupid I looked.  I was a girl, they said, so what was I doing in boys' clothes?

I can see the time coming, maybe fifty years from now, when everybody will be in trousers.  People will look at pictures from The Olden Days and laugh at the look of dresses.  Women will snigger at the skirts like we, today, smirk over crinolines and masses of stiff petticoats....