Wherever I live, an apron hangs on a hook in my kitchen. I use it to protect my clothes, wipe wet hands, lift hot lids, and pry open bottles of tomato juice or furniture polish that I suspect are planning to splash me with their contents. But without it, somehow, I can’t cook as well. When I put it on, I am choosing a role and making a statement, and so is anyone else. Aprons, in all their many forms, are more than just protective devices; they are full of meaning.
There are many kinds of aprons, of course. My mother wore full calico aprons in old-fashioned flower patterns, with pockets and a square upper bib and ties that crossed in the back and fastened around the waist in front. Mine are half-aprons in bright rural colors: barn red, delphinium and sky blue, sunflower yellow. I usually make them myself out of leftover dress material or my husband’s old shirts.
In the past most males never went near a stove unless they had to cook or starve, and most would almost rather starve than wear a woman’s apron, even in private. (The sad, inept husband Dagwood, in the comic strip “Blondie,” looked even more pathetic when he tied on one of his wife’s aprons.) When I was a child, the only things my father would ever cook were popovers and Yorkshire pudding. Sometimes, when my mother had made a roast, he would come into the kitchen to demonstrate this skill. Before he began, he would awkwardly tuck a dishtowel into the band of his trousers.
This, of course, was before culinary activity became respectable for men who were not professional chefs. Back then, they were able to cook without embarrassment only if the activity were carefully decontaminated to make sure that there was nothing feminine about it. Men couldn’t go into the kitchen, where getting dinner was easy and safe. They couldn’t boil, bake, or sauté, or have anything to do with inexpensive dishes like salads or casseroles.
If men were going to cook, the process had to seem difficult and dangerous; it had to resemble the end of a caveman’s successful big-game hunt. It had to take place outdoors, on a grill constructed of crude, masculine materials like rusty iron, smoke-smeared brick, and chunks of stone. It had to involve thick cuts of bloody meat and implements that suggested savage warfare: pitchforks and knives and griddles—and there had to be blazing flames, the more perilous-looking the better.
Of course, this kind of cooking was very messy. Since he wasn’t wearing the caveman’s costume of greasy animal skins, Dad’s clothing had to be protected, but by something with as little as possible resemblance to a woman’s apron. The solution was a garment that imitated medieval armor: a kind of extended breastplate made of heavy canvas or upholstery-strength plastic. These “barbecue aprons” are heavy, clumsy contraptions that fasten low around the hips and totally conceal the shape of the body beneath. The important thing about them is that they don’t look sissy. To make sure that everyone gets the message, barbecue aprons are often printed with symbolically macho designs (meat-cutting diagrams, big game, sports cars) or slogans (BARBECUE BOSS, MASTER CHEF). Today, when women are allowed to use the outdoor grill, you can buy his and hers versions of this apron with similar legends.
There are, of course, some aprons that do not embarrass men, including the leather ones worn by woodworkers and other craftsmen, and the carpenters’ aprons hung with tools. There are the aprons of grocery employees: the cashier’s tie-on vests, the butchers’ heavy-weight bloodied canvas, white or sometimes a light brown that helps to conceal the stains of dried blood. Gardeners may wear serious wrap-around aprons with high bibs and deep pockets for tools and seeds. As women took up these professions, they adopted the uniforms, or others like them: the light-weight gardening smock suitable for cutting flowers and bedding out plants, though not for serious digging, also suggests the working costume of a painter, and conveys the idea that gardening is an art form. Domestic cooks once always wore stiff, starched white aprons with high bibs and long straps that crossed in back; today they are mainly sold by firms that outfit servants and professional chefs.
All these costumes can also be seen on television shows, where their colors often vary according to the subject matter: TV gardeners favor green or tan aprons, suggesting leaves or earth, while TV cooks seem to prefer yellow and cream, suggesting butter and cheese, rather than the white of hired help, though Julia Child, who was supremely confident of her social status, used to wear a big white chef’s apron on her TV show.
Waiters and waitresses, both in real life and on TV, wear aprons that are carefully chosen to express the ambiance of the establishment from the bright gingham ruffles of the ice-cream parlor to the discreet dark rectangles, heavy with pockets for tips, of the expensive restaurant. Both men and women who work in hairdressing prefer smocks, color-coordinated to the ambiance of the establishment—black for the serious high-end establishment, pink for the friendly local beauty salon. But though they often look stylish, these garments are also practical: spot-resistant, hair-shedding, washable, and well-equipped with pockets.
At the other extreme from all this is what might be called the imitation apron, which doesn’t really protect its wearer from anything. Usually it is a kind of tiny, frilly creation of flounced silk or crisp ruffled cotton, with a big bow and sometimes flyaway streamers. These concoctions used to be known as “hostess aprons,” and were often worn by women who had played no part in preparing a meal. In other cases, they signaled a switch of roles; when one of my mother’s friends was cooking for a party, she would wear a big, practical bib apron; then, when guests were about to arrive, she would whip it off and put on a perfectly laundered and ironed miniature substitute. This wisp of cloth was not exactly a lie, because she really had made the dinner, but it suggested that she had done so effortlessly and without the slightest injury to her clothes.
Today, almost no hostess wears a hostess apron. If she did, it would be seen as a kind of camp gesture: a mock-assumption of old-fashioned femininity. Pretty, totally useless aprons are worn only by maids in French farces and soft-porn films, though they may perhaps be seen in the privacy of the home. If the separation of the sexes is seen as desirable and attractive, certain sorts of apron, not all completely useless from a practical point of view, may seem sexy. Back in the 1950s, one guide to pleasing and keeping a husband suggested that you meet him at the front door in the evening with his favorite alcoholic drink on a tray, wearing only high heels and a semi-transparent little apron. If a wife today were to try this trick, substituting her modern barbecue apron, the effect would be very different—though some might get away with it as a joke.
Like all clothes, aprons may have a symbolic as well as a practical function. To wear one over visible clothes allows you to say two things at once. The underlying getup makes a statement about who you are in “real life”; the apron announces that just for the moment you are also a cook, a gardener, or an artist, and it also says something about the value you assign to this temporary role. On TV cooking shows, not only are the aprons obviously carefully chosen and expensive, but expensive outfits are often visible underneath, to remind us that the presenter is not a servant but a highly paid professional performer.
Recently a friend told me that she never wears an apron; she just wraps “some old rag” around her waist. Is she saying that, for her, cooking is a ratty, unpleasant job? And, if so, would it really be a good idea to go to her house for dinner?