Editor’s Note: Examining clothes through the ages, Dress Codes is a new series investigating how the rules of fashion have influenced different cultural arenas — and your closet. “You do not lose your feminine qualities just because you are a prime minister,” Margaret Thatcher told British TV doctor Miriam Stoppard in a 1985 interview. “I often wear bows, they are rather softening .
.. (and) rather pretty.
” As the UK’s first female prime minister, Thatcher could be excused for conforming with her male peers and drawing as little attention to her gender as possible. But the so-called Iron Lady understood that politics is a careful dance between soft and hard power — and that clothes were tools that could cushion (even if only visually) the more abrasive sides of an 11-year term defined by conflict with trade unions, domestic power struggles and the Falklands war. Enter the pussy-bow.
Though the term was popularized in the 20th century (“Fashion calls them ‘pussy-cat bows’ as they fluff out most femininely from high-rising necklines,” read a 1955 article in the Newburgh News), the idea of attaching bows to blouses or bodices is far older. Sometimes the flourish is called the Lavalière tie, after Duchess Louise de La Valliére — King Louis XIV’s “official” mistress. According to an account on the history of ties, the duchess was so taken by the king’s cravat that she fashioned one herself out of ribbon.
The duchess could never have guessed tha.