How Bicycles Changed Women's Clothing

BPAC (Princeton's Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee) made t-shirts with this inventive design using the numbers of Princeton's zip code.

This clever adaptation of five numbers to fit the shape of a bicycle came to mind after hearing about how another artist helped adapt women's clothes to better meet the demands of a bike. Not being the best fitted to blog on this issue, I will forge ahead nonetheless. In a recent Fresh Air interview of Patricia Volk, about her book "Shocked", she tells the story of how gas rationing in France during World War II prompted women to ride bicycles, which prompted a departure from traditional, high-maintenance, constrictive clothing. The shift was expedited by a surrealist-influenced but practically minded fashion designer named Elsa Shiaparelli.

What's interesting in this small example is how bicycles and sustainability, once brought more into the mainstream, began to influence culture, rather than having to constantly adapt to it from a peripheral position. Interesting, too, is how making fossil fuels harder to get actually led to an advance for freedom, in the form of a liberating clothing design. Ours being a culture hostile to the idea of limits, it's worth noting that freedom and the imposition of limits are not necessarily in opposition. Similarly, abundance does not necessarily lead to innovation.

The composer Igor Stravinski, perhaps stating it in the extreme to make the point, put it this way in his "Poetics of Music": "My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit."

Volk's telling of the rationing/bicycling/clothing story can be found by scrolling down at this link.

For more info on the t-shirt, the BPAC should be reachable through the town government, or through this local bicycle blog of one of the committee members.

On the wall at the Princeton Public Library.