---
title: "Bloomers"
description: "Bloomers are full, gathered trousers worn under a short skirt, or later alone for sport; the name comes from Amelia Bloomer, who publicized the 1851 costume."
type: Glossary
url: https://teazle.art/glossary/bloomers
published: 2026-10-16
updated: 2026-10-16
author: "The Teazle editors"
---

# Bloomers

*Bloomers are full, gathered trousers worn under a short skirt, or later alone for sport; the name comes from Amelia Bloomer, who publicized the 1851 costume.*

Bloomers are full, gathered trousers worn beneath a short skirt, or later on their own for sport. The name comes from Amelia Bloomer, who publicized the American costume of 1851 in her newspaper, although she did not design it and did not choose the name.

## Where does the word come from?

Elizabeth Smith Miller designed a costume of "Turkish trousers to the ankle" and a skirt a few inches below the knee, and wore it to Seneca Falls, New York, in early 1851. Her cousin Elizabeth Cady Stanton copied it, and then Amelia Bloomer, who edited the temperance paper *The Lily*, did the same and announced it to her readers. Newspapers headed their squibs "Bloomerism" and "Bloomers." Bloomer wrote in later life that the name clung to the short dress "in spite of my repeatedly disclaiming all right to it" and that Miller was its originator.

## How did the meaning change?

In the 1890s "bloomers" came to mean full gathered trousers for cycling, gymnastics and bathing, often cinched below the knee and worn under a skirt or tunic. The Henry Ford museum describes bicycle riders of about 1890 who wore "short bloomers that cinched below the knee," and the Metropolitan Museum catalogs a bathing costume of 1895–1900 in which full trousers show below a knee-length skirt, along with several "gym bloomers" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Writers of the 1890s used "bloomers," "knickerbockers" and "rationals" loosely, so the date and cut of any given "bloomer" depend on the sense a source intends.

## Related terms

See [divided skirt](https://teazle.art/glossary/divided-skirt.md) and [rational dress](https://teazle.art/glossary/rational-dress.md).


## Sources

1. [Life and Writings of Amelia Bloomer (1895), full text](https://archive.org/details/lifeandwritingso028876mbp). Internet Archive
2. [Dressing for Bicycling Success](https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/articles/dressing-for-bicycling-success). The Henry Ford
3. [Beachwear, 1895-1900, 2009.300.1331a-e](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/156035). The Metropolitan Museum of Art
4. [The Bloomer Movement (Susan Higginbotham)](https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/24140910-the-bloomer-movement). Susan Higginbotham, History Refreshed
5. [Amelia Bloomer](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Amelia-Bloomer). Encyclopaedia Britannica

Canonical: https://teazle.art/glossary/bloomers