Fashion has always been used to send messages, or to exhibit social status or wealth. In many cultures, black at a funeral shows you’re mourning, just as a bride in white at her wedding represents purity. Victorian women wore corsets to exemplify their high societal stature. During the Vietnam war, military uniforms were worn first by veterans, and then by non-veterans, as a form of protest. And recently, during Melania Trump’s notorious visit to detention camps, where she donned an Army-inspired jacket with the phrase “I Really Don’t Care Do U?” scrawled across the back, the same item spread a completely different message.

But perhaps no item of clothing has gone through as many semiotic changes as the bell bottom jean. The pants have been worn for their practicality, to make a political statement, simply for the sake of fashion, and, when they were shamefully out of style, not worn at all. These days, the humble flared pant seems to be enjoying something of a moment: Forever 21, the Mecca of all things trendy and popular, currently has a laundry list of bellbottom options on their site. The comeback of bellbottoms coincides with an intense political climate, and a particularly involved generation of youths. This year, bell bottoms were especially popular at Coachella—a festival where the main demographic is millennials, people roughly aged between 21 and 35.

For lack of a better word, bell bottom pants are loud. When you wear bell bottoms you can’t help but take up space, and people can’t help but notice you. In a time when young people feel unheard and underrepresented, it’s important for them to be seen.

Bell bottoms are so aggressively associated with the sixties and seventies, it’s nearly impossible to imagine their origins have un-hippie roots. According to Encyclopedia.com, bell bottom pants have actually been traced back to the 17th century, when wide-legged pants were intended to be practical uniforms for boat workers. The pants were then introduced to sailors in the U.S. Navy in 1817, and they still rock wide leg pants to this day. The extra loose fabric offered by bell-shaped legs serves as a safety measure—in the instance that a man fell overboard, he could easily take his pants off and allow the wide bottoms to inflate with air and used as a life preserver.

Messy jobs on board a ship, like washing the decks, also meant there was a need for a pant that could easily be rolled up and kept out of the way of water (a problem you know all too well if you’ve ever tried getting a pedicure in skinny jeans). Of course, sailors think of wide-legged pants in terms of practicality, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that bell bottoms started being rocked as socio-political symbols. 

While the fifties were (and still are, for some reason) remembered fondly as being a time of good old American wholesomeness, sixties’ fashion defied those virtues completely. Youth countered the buttoned up, conservative look of the decade before and opted for clothing that made a statement. 

The bell bottom pant worked as a symbol for two reasons. Politically, a lot was happening in the late sixties and early seventies that warranted the younger generation to sharply retract from the mainstream. The biggest offender was, of course, the Vietnam War—a war that left the country incredibly split in terms of opinion on whether or not the US should even be involved and, to make matters worse, this young generation was still being drafted and forced into the war they so despised. Naturally, this left people angered and upset, and if the fifties represented post-World War II, buttoned-up patriotism, then the decades that followed turned completely against it. Instead of opting for the fitted pencil skirts of the more conservative generation prior, young people chose to literally wear their distaste for the current social climate on their sleeves. Thus, bold pieces like wide-leg jeans were adopted—defying the mainstream as a statement against the very unpopular involvements of the government.

Of course, sailors think of wide-legged pants in terms of practicality, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that bell bottoms started being rocked as socio-political symbols.
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Fashion historian and educator Sarah Byrd hesitates to impart too much power on singular fashion choices, such as choosing to wear a bell bottom pant. Even though clothing has a very physical effect (like I said, they take up space), Byrd explains that “many factors go into the things we wear at any given time as a consumer: what’s available, your cultural lens, how you feel that day. Like the people wearing the clothing, it’s a nuanced and complicated statement.”  

But what is often forgotten about bell bottoms is their role in popularizing unisex (or simply, gender nonspecific) styles. Brands like Levi’s made flared jeans for both men and women (marketed separately, though they may as well have been the exact same pant) and they became a part of typical wardrobes for men and women alike.

Perhaps the greatest example of this gender non-conformity is Sonny and Cher. The duo didn’t have traditionally gender-specific personas on stage: Cher’s contralto vocal range often hummed below Sonny Bono’s softer singing voice (and the fact that Bono was four inches shorter than his wife played into their almost “gender-swapped” stage presence). And at the time, they both were known to wear bell bottom pants during performances. Increasing access to color TV allowed people like Sonny and Cher to wear brightly colored, eye-catching outfits, showing their fans that one style could be fit for them both.  

The previously harsh contrast between male and female threads began to blur, which also coincided with a boom in other social movements. The Stonewall Riots had just happened in 1969, launching the LGBT Movement into action full-force. The adoption of bell bottoms into the contemporary style of the flamboyant sixties and seventies paralleled this movement. Not only were they marketed toward both women and men, but they were also regularly in the style lineup of pop icons. David Bowie, Elton John, Liberace, and their contemporaries were redefining how (specifically men) dressed and represented themselves.

Even Elvis Presley, whose style adhered to traditional gender roles through the 1950s, found himself in bell bottoms. Previously, he was an all-American man who was drafted to war, donned suits when he dressed up, and despite his somewhat eclectic taste, managed to maintain his rugged, womanizing demeanor. But he adapted the newfound fluid style in the sixties and seventies, often wearing his iconic wide-legged, bedazzled jumpsuits. For many, seeing pop stars in gender-fluid clothing meant feeling comfortable with their own sexuality.

It meant that maybe men don’t have to dress traditionally masculine if they don’t want to, and women aren’t bound to skirts and dresses. It forced the general public to come to terms (or at least, more so than before) with the fluidity of it all. Instead of adhering to strict, specifically gendered clothes (ladies in skirts and men in suits) bell bottoms jeans were made for everyone. Even the straightest, greased up American man was now sharing pants with Liberace. 

Sarah Byrd agrees that the exposure of trends by means of the celebrity has always had an impact on fashion. She points out that in the early twentieth century, the fan culture around celebrities gave birth; theatrical actors and performers were followed and documented in magazines, just as celebrities and influencers are on social media today. Byrd explains: “In many cases [the celebrity] serve to ‘normalize’ more avant-garde styles to the public.”

Even the straightest, greased up American man was now sharing pants with Liberace.
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In a 1969 New York Times article, writer Judy Klemesrud discusses a conversation she overheard between two teenage girls on the New York City subway, regarding what they planned to wear to an upcoming Janis Joplin concert. From their conversation, she learned about the role bell bottoms played in teenage fashion:

There are the ‘safe’ fashions that can be worn without scorn anywhere. For the girls: bell-bottom blue jeans topped with an antique fur coat (never a new fur coat!). For boys: bell-bottom blue jeans worn with a suede fringed jacket.

Klemesrud notes the irony that the “rock crowd,” which shouts about individuality, tends to “march to the same drummer” when it comes to fashion.

But one could argue quite the contrary. Young people do tend to dress like each other or, in the case of the Joplin-loving girls, dress like one of their idols. The music one enjoys and the people one idolizes are clear reflections of their own ideologies. When someone mirrors a celebrity trend, it can also be an association with what the celebrity stands for.

A lot of current trends continue to ignore gender-made style, again seen in the ever-popular “boyfriend jean” and even the male romper. But more importantly: bell bottoms are back, and their resurgence in the midst of an unsettled generation is similar to that of the sixties and seventies.

On one hand, one could question whether the resurgence of the bell bottom is actually a conscious link to the seventies. Perhaps the revival of styles is the natural ebb and flow of the fashion world; in a May 1980 article for the New York Times titled “How Pants Shape Up: Something for Everyone; Question of Acceptance” Bernadine Morris writes:

…Any fashion loses its punch after a bit of exposure, and women who had felt like pathfinders when they first donned a pair of pants to go to lunch or to work were to discover the same sense of adventure when they returned to a skirt or dress. To stimulate the interest, trousers changed their shape over the decade, passing from straight-legged to low-flared or bell-bottomed.

But on the other hand, the popularity of bell bottoms once again could have a connection to the seventies, whether it’s a completely conscious connection or not. Byrd points out that millennials are not old enough to have “originally” worn the style and therefore have enough distance to romanticize the references into a narrative that suits their current culture.

While not everyone who dons bell bottoms in 2018 is trying to boldly demonstrate a political opinion, it makes sense that the trend would return in such politically radical times. Though unquestionably stylish, sporting a pair of bell bottoms echoes  an interest in the social climate and acceptance of an evolving revolution. After all, clothing is never just clothing.

Even with a heavy video camera I couldn’t resist walking straight into the aggressive waves with her.

I was filming Jalobayu (climate in Bengali), Monica Jahan Bose’s collective performance piece, at Select Art Fair in Miami Beach.  The performance started indoors with a group of women who all quietly carried 216 feet of sari to a ritual site outside on the beach. After a series of symbolic activities on the sand, Bose eventually wraps herself in a red sari and enters and battles the ocean in a breathtaking statement on climate change.

Bose uses the sari—18 feet of unstitched handwoven fabric that is commonly worn by women in South Asia—to represent women’s lives and the cycle of life on our planet.  The sari is perhaps the real star of the show. But not just any sari. The sari she uses in the show is written on and worn by the coastal women in Bangladesh. “JALOBAYU juxtaposes women’s words and their worn saris against the backdrop of the rising ocean in Miami Beach,” says Bose. “The intent is to raise awareness of climate change and link Miami Beach to coastal Bangladesh, both of which face devastation due to climate change.”

Bose uses the sari—18 feet of unstitched handwoven fabric that is commonly worn by women in South Asia—to represent women’s lives and the cycle of life on our planet.
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I was trying to do the math on how Bose went from 18 feet of fabric to 216 feet for the performance, and found out the sari that was communally carried is made up of 12 saris worn for 8 months by 12 women from her ancestral village—Katakhali Village in Barobaishdia Island.  “Those saris were covered in woodblock and handwriting done collaboratively by the 12 women and myself back in 2013. After they wore them and used them, they were brought to the US and my daughter, Tuli, helped me sew them together to make this massive sari,” she explained. This just made me even more curious how she got the sari over to the states. “The worn saris were actually transported from the village to Dhaka by boat, and then my mother brought them to me in the US in her luggage.”  That same 216-foot sari has been in performances at DUMBO arts festival (called Sublime Virtue), (e)merge art fair DC (Unwrapped), and more.

Bose was born in Britain to Bangladeshi parents, and uses participatory installation, film, printmaking, painting, advocacy, and performance to speak to women’s experiences, recently around the disparate impacts from climate change. It’s part of a larger collaborative art and advocacy project called Storytelling with Saris. Bose’s maternal roots are in Katakhali, an island community in Bangladesh on the frontlines of climate change. She collaborates with a dozen women in the community who have acquired literacy and climate adaptation skills to share their personal stories. These women have lost repeated homes to cyclones.  

The idea is by seeing and hearing these stories, via saris, people in the US and Europe will be inspired to act on climate change.  “Americans are learning about climate change through the project and making written commitments on saris to reduce their carbon footprint in an act of cross-border solidarity. The U.S. climate pledge saris will be returned to Bangladesh and worn by the women of Katakhali.”  Storytelling with Saris engagements have taken place in California, Hawai’i, Iowa, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Wisconsin in the U.S.; Dhaka and Katakhali in Bangladesh; Paris, France; and Athens, Greece. But of course the real power is connecting these stories back to the women’s lived experiences in Bangladesh.

The effects of rising sea levels disproportionally falls on the shoulders of poor, marginalized communities of color. According to a MercyCorps piece, one-third of the planet’s land is no longer fertile enough to grow food, but more than 1.3 billion people live on this deteriorating agricultural land. And they’re also the same communities facing more disasters than ever. The number of people affected by natural disasters doubled from approximately 102 million in 2015 to 204 million in 2016, although there were fewer natural disasters.

Women in these communities are particularly affected. We can see this in the climate survivors of Bangladesh Bose connects us with. Women disproportionately suffer the impacts of climate change because of cultural norms and the inequitable distribution of resources and power, especially in developing countries. One study also found that 90% of the dead from the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh were women. Women also at risk of sexual assault and trafficking after extreme weather events where they are rendered homeless.

Likewise, women’s leadership is also critical to addressing climate. The project presents and preserves women’s stories from a remote community (with negligible carbon footprint) that may disappear unless we take action. The project both informs and empowers them to be those leaders. One of the women in the community, Noor Sehera said, “Yes, it made us scared to hear about why the planet is hotter and why there is so much rain.  But we are glad to know, so that we can decide what to do about it. We have a right to know what is going on.”

Often under recognized in the climate change movement  is how artists are contributing to advance awareness of environmental issues.  Monica’s work around saris and climate change embrace symbols: the sari represents the female body, and women’s place in the world, and water speaks to life and renewal.  She also incorporates wind, sand, rice and water into the performance to represent cyclones, sea level rise, and the loss of heritage and food caused by climate change. They also reference narratives: Jaloboyu references the Indian myth of Draupadi, the eternal virgin who was married to five brothers, as well as the true story of Bose’s grandmother who was married at age seven and years later swept away by a cyclone.

Women disproportionately suffer the impacts of climate change because of cultural norms and the inequitable distribution of resources and power, especially in developing countries.
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One of the most impressive parts of her art is her ability to move across media and disciplines and incorporate science and policy into her work.  Her performance art makes a direct statement on the current state of climate change with the specific perspective of marginalized communities of color.  Since 2015, Bose has started making saris with women (and a few men) in the US, France and Greece as part of Sari Climate Pledge Workshops. The participants work on a sari with her for two hours while they learn about climate change and how women in Bangladesh are impacted.  She teaches woodblock technique and her participants make specific promises that will reduce their carbon footprint. The saris are first exhibited and then returned to Bangladesh for the women in her village to wear. 

While I will continue to be mesmerized by Bose’s ability to master so many different art forms and connect them to today’s issues, I’m most touched by how she’s been able to give a space for her community in Bangladesh to connect to this global issue. Like one of her participants, Zakia, said:  “Coming to the cooperative and working on the sari art and the performance is what I love most. We want to do more and more of it. It was the greatest joy of my life to be part of the performance by the Darchira River.” And that’s the only way we’ll ever be able to confront climate change—working cooperative with communities across the world.

One of these friends happened to live in Los Angeles, and a friend of hers happened to run a small boutique in Echo Park called Otherwild. This friend of a friend requested a few of the shirts to carry in her store, and I began mailing batches to L.A., each time in an odd selection of colors and sizes. I started screen-printing rather than spray-painting the shirts, so the text wouldn’t fade. But other than that, my production method changed not at all: I kept printing on shirts from thrift stores. The whole affair was casual, fun, and free of incongruities.

Then, during a single week in October 2015, two things happened in swift succession. First, Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot posted a picture of herself on Instagram wearing one of my shirts. Later in the week, Lena Dunham posted a picture of her hot, male chiropractor friend in one of the tees. 17,019 likes and 266 comments later, I was left wondering if I needed to scale up.

And here is where my quandary began. Everyone around me seemed certain I was sitting on top of a gold mine. They suggested I drop out of grad school. And why not? It was just a short leap to that prototypical 21st-century American elysium: contented early retirement following wildly successful social media-fueled entrepreneurship.

But the path between me and Matriarchy moguldom was cluttered with all kinds of historical, socio-political, and ecological undesirables. Because of the way the clothing-manufacturing industry works, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to make a T-shirt about the exploitation of women without, well, exploiting women.

My struggles began with the most basic of elements: what to use to make my shirts.

Having spent the last five years researching contemporary practices in the textile and clothing industry, I had no wish to make a product with conventional cotton. The global garment industry is basically a system that sucks water from the developing world and delivers it to rich countries (the U.S., Europe, and Japan) in the form of cotton — and this trend has accelerated exponentially since the fall of garment tariffs in 2005. And then there’s the widespread use of Paraquat in cotton farming, which is linked to Parkinson’s and leukemia in agricultural workers, and was banned in Europe but is used regularly here in the US of A.

Moreover, I had no interest in printing on shirts sewn by non-unionized child workers in factories where basic safety, let alone fair wages, could not be guaranteed.

In 2013, I visited spinning factories in Tamil Nadu, a major hub of knitwear production in Southern India, which has 1,600 textile mills with a workforce of more than 400,000 workers. Sixty percent of the total labor force consists of girls and young women. The mills employ what its critics call the “Sumangali scheme,” three-year “apprenticeships” that come with a lump sum payment at the end, aimed at rural girls in Tamil Nadu to help them pay for their dowries.

The term “apprenticeship” helps mask the fact that the women are paid radically less than India’s minimum wage. The lump sum payment also prevents women from leaving the mills before the contract ends, for fear of losing years of wages if they did — even in the case of injury or abuse.

Once the young women have signed on to a mill, abuses appear to be rampant. One recent report by an NGO gathered information on 93 workers in Tamil Nadu over a three-year period and documented several cases in which workers were paid only part or none of the promised lump sum at the end of their term.

It documented four deaths and numerous injuries ranging from the dramatic (“rods pierced neck,” “clothes/hair pulled into machines”) to the more mundane (cotton in stomach, cotton in lungs, tuberculosis, asthma, bronchitis, fainting spells, insomnia). The courts have, upon examination, declared the scheme to constitute “bonded labor,” an appellation the Southern Indian Mills Association is lobbying to have overturned.

The more I learned about the clothing industry’s history, the more I came to understand how patriarchal forces have enabled sustained abuse.

Industrial textile production emerged in England as a phenomenon powered by the underpaid labor of women and children. Today, the exploitation of women in textile and garment manufacture is the dual product of patriarchal control and the colonial legacy.

Some liberal economists argue that textile labor, no matter how exploitative, is a good thing for women in poor countries. In The Travels of a T-Shirt on the Global Economy, the economist Pietre Rivoli argues that the female textile and garment workers of the developing world are “sisters in time” with America’s own Lowell mill girls, those underpaid but ever-sassy heroes of America’s industrialization mythology.

What the two sets of women share, Rivoli writes, is “the cotton mill and the sweatshop as the ignition switch for the urbanization, industrialization, and economic diversification . . . as well as for the economic and social liberation of women from the farm.” In this problematic industrialization-as-superhero narrative, the women of Tamil Nadu are being saved by the spinning mill from starvation and abandonment.

The general pattern of women moving into industrialized labor is familiar: First, a seismic shift in land ownership or trade policy breaks the viability of the agricultural village (in this case, destruction of the traditional textile industry by the British). Then, factory work is offered to the dispossessed as a consolation prize.

This can happen in a scenario as militarized as that in Guatemala, where the widows left by the government’s war on the indigenous population streamed into garment factories in the 1980s, or as legalistic as that in England during the Enclosure Acts (primarily put into place in the late 18th and early 19th century), when peasant cultivators barred from access to ancestral common fields were forced into factory work in Lancashire.

But even if we assume, as Rivoli does, that countries with bitter post-colonial legacies will follow the U.S. along metamorphic phases as predictable as those of a monarch butterfly, it is still worth asking whether the ends justify the means. Or, more to the point, if whether there is any likelihood that a society that relies on cheap female labor to pull ahead in the global economic race will abruptly start valuing its women once some invisible threshold is crossed. In this respect, the United States, where economists note a distinct trend toward the “feminization of poverty,” should serve as a cautionary tale.

Given this history, it is going to be quite a journey to build my “Matriarchy Now” empire in a way that makes the Matriarchy proud. So far I have found two American companies I’d be willing to work with: one called Spiritex, based in Asheville, North Carolina, that manufactures clothing in the U.S. that exclusively uses organic cotton grown, spun, woven, and sewn in North Carolina; and another called Lunatic Fringe, comprised of two women and a spinning mill that use ecologically sound California cotton.

I recently ordered a batch of MATRIARCHY NOW baby onesies from Spiritx and put them up on an Etsy site. I have also planned a research trip to the Greensboro area this month to tour some new cut and sew facilities that are just beginning to reappear in that region almost a quarter century after NAFTA gutted its textile and garment industries.

For now, though, I am still screenprinting on shirts I find at thrift stores. And no, I’m not rich yet.