bloomer: [19] Bloomers, long loose trousers worn by women, were not actually invented by someone called Bloomer – the credit for that seems to go to a Mrs Elizabeth Smith Miller of New York – but their first advocate was Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818–94), a US feminist who strongly promoted their use in the early 1850s as a liberated garment for women. The extent to which this became a cause célèbre can be gauged by the fact that it gave rise to so-called Bloomerism, a movement for ‘rationalizing’ women’s dress; in 1882 Lady Harberton wrote in Macmillan’s Magazine ‘“Bloomerism” still lurks in many a memory’. Bloomer ‘mistake’ is late 19th-century, and apparently originally Australian.
Early commentators derived it, not altogether convincingly, from ‘blooming error’.
