A 200-year-old law forbidding women to wear trousers in Paris has finally been revoked. On January 31, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, France’s minister of women’s rights, made it officially impossible to arrest a woman for wearing trousers in the French capital.

The law required women to ask police for special permission to ‘dress as men’ in Paris, or risk being taken into custody.u00a0In 1892 and 1909 the rule was amended to allow women to wear trousers, ‘if the woman is holding a bicycle handlebar or the reins of a horse’.