There comes a point in every New York summer when it’s simply too hot and sticky to wear real clothes. That means anything tight, high-waisted, or made of denim. That was this week. Recently, the girls of the internet have been making a case for a non-fuss undergarment: bloomers.
Think you can only wear them to bed? You are wrong. We’ve seen these play shorts of yore at the dive bar, on the beach, out to dinner, and in the streets; getting ready, picnicking in the park, vacationing in France (or Italy! or Portugal!), going fishing, going thirst-trapping, and even rotting in bed. “You can play in them, you can be cute and be out in the city as well,” artist and model Michelle Phanh says. “I find them incredibly versatile.”
The trend plays on the fact that we all want to toss our phones into the East River and move to the countryside, but also our desire to dress comfortably. In a recent Substack post called “What My Friends Wore at a Beach Town in Connecticut,” Phanh documented her love of L.A.-based label Charlie Beads and its poufy deadstock baby-doll bloomers. “Get yourself a pair. You will wake up in them, do life in between, then find yourself sleeping with them on to just repeat the cycle again tomorrow ad infinitum. Addiction is almost certain,” she wrote. After reading the piece, Leandra Medine Cohen bought a gray French terry-cotton pair and then shared some transitional styling tips: “I’d wear them into the fall when the heat beats off with cobalt-blue tights, brogues, and a cropped leather jacket.”
When the label’s founder, Charlie Brown Hourston, was a teenager, she started making bloomers with her mom to sell at local flea markets. Years later, during the pandemic, Hourston founded her nostalgia-inflected brand to create “future heirlooms” and decided to bring back the silhouette. Shortly after posting her first drop online, it sold out, and Hourston was hit with a slew of DMs asking when they’d be restocking. Since then, she’s done pop-ups in her home in Los Angeles and in New York. “When I did my first summer drop this June, I was like, ‘Perfect, I’m gonna sit back and relax for the rest,’” she said over Zoom. “No — we had to double production and do two more releases.”
Still unsure about bloomers and their seemingly unflattering shape, I called up Phanh to find out what exactly makes them so wearable. When it comes to casual, comfortable attire for your lower half, she says they fall somewhere between bike shorts and gym shorts — without all the tightness of spandex or gaping leg openings of the latter. “You can’t really sit down in gym shorts,” she explains. “When you sit down on the subway, you kind of have to pull them down because your butt is showing … I tend to sit like a boy sometimes; I’m always rolling my legs open. With the bloomers, they cinch at the thigh so it’s very easy to just sit wherever you like and do whatever you like.”
This freedom of movement led to the invention of bloomers in the first place. The 19th-century garment was designed to free women from the period’s highly restrictive Victorian corsets, bodices, and crinolines, as well as layers upon layers of petticoats in thick fabrics that became a health hazard in the heat. Early bloomers were loose pants that tied at the ankle and worn as undergarments beneath skirts and dresses. Amelia Jenks Bloomer, a newspaper editor and women’s rights advocate, was an early adopter of the style, so much so that they became named after her and associated with the women’s liberation movement.
“It’s widely believed that bloomers were the first time women were allowed to wear bifurcated pants — that’s pants with two legs instead of skirts,” Ruby Redstone, a writer and fashion historian who wears bloomers under skirts and dresses, explains.
Of course, the bloomer trend can be traced to the runways in the form of underwear as outerwear — from tiny sparkly Miu Miu briefs and boxers poking out of skirts to the Loewe logo. Unlike some of the garments on the runway, though, bloomers are not meant to be sexy. In fact, “they’re kind of diaperish,” Redstone says. “Especially as they keep getting shorter, which only makes them more babyish.”
This creates a challenge when styling them, but when wearing a garment with this much personality, it’s better to lean into the look than try to tone it down. Last week, for my birthday, I tossed on a pair of baby-doll bloomers in a blue-and-white check, a navy Cecilie Bahnsen matelassé top tied with a bow that grazes the floor, and pink-satin Miu Miu ballet flats and socks. My head was saying, “I’m baby,” and my heart kind of was too. I thought about what my friend Chloe Horseman, a photographer who bought her first bloomers six years ago, said: “Sometimes it’s nice to wear something that you know isn’t serious. It’s fun and silly, and that’s okay!”
