Fun Fad Facts: Capris
Welcome back to Fun Fad Facts! This week I will be exploring the emerging trend of capris. This week's topic is dedicated to a dear friend with a flair for capris (this one’s for you, Peter Pan).
The term “capri pants” generally refers to a pant with a hem that lies mid-calf, typically within women's wear. The origin of capris is somewhat contested, but I would like to focus on the story tied to 20th century fashion designer Sonja de Lennart, born in Prussia in 1920. De Lennart was a proud pants-wearer, and designed men’s pants that she herself wore during a time when women wearing men's clothes was unconventional and even sometimes an arrestable offense. The idea behind capris came to be after World War I when de Lennart went on a trip to Capri, Italy. The culture of Capri at the time included turning away pants-wearing women at certain establishments. De Lennart described walking into the ocean while wearing men's pants and having the legs of her pants turn into a sopping mess. This experience inspired her light bulb “eureka” moment for designing capris. She took her design of men’s pants, but adapted them by shortening the hem to a classic mid-calf length. In order to bring the style into fashion, she slimmed the legs, creating what would soon become iconic to the 1950s image of Audrey Hepburn in Funny Girl wearing tightly fitted, high-waisted, slightly flared capris.
De Lennart’s “invention” of capris was, in some ways, an adaptation of men's practical wear into women's wardrobes. The creation of capris made wearing pants acceptable and stylish for women. However, the act of making capris fit into the silhouette of typical womenswear does comprise the radical nature of women demanding equal claim over wearing pants. The shifts that were made to capris comprised the comfort, practicality, and warmth of what men’s pants at the time offered, in exchange for pushing the form-fitting hourglass silhouette that dominated women's aesthetic desirability in the 1950s. That being said, the radical nature of women wearing pants was complicated, change doesn't always happen overnight. Eventually women had the freedom to don pants in public without scrutiny or arrest. This style pioneered fashion to flow between gendered styles, making way for androgynous sensibilities to emerge in high fashion many years down the line.
With their reemergence in the fashion scene today, capris have become most defined by their characteristic length rather than their inherent form-fittedness. Capris are also worn by all genders, and are usually made of stretchy material that promotes comfort, even when they are form-fitted. With today's modern textile and fabric technology, restriction is far less inherent in the recycling of vintage styles. Today, capris have largely come back into style in the ten to twenty year pattern of recycling trends. The recycling of capris represents an old Hollywood nostalgia for the 1950 and ’60s, while expanding this vintage association to include all genders with a broader appeal for comfort.