Posted by:
Mother Who Knows
(
)
Date: August 14, 2018 06:11AM
No. It's against the rules to alter the garments in any way. I think there's a choice of fabric, but not of style, which are all the same these days. I don't think they make maternity garments or nursing garments or garments for summertime.
LDS women hardly ever get to "exercise personal preference" in the cult.
I gotta admit to some female bonding with the garments. It was back in the day when the garments were all one-piece, and impossible to wear, for all the obvious reasons. When I got engaged, my mother took me into her bedroom and showed me her garments--embarrassing and awkward--until she showed me her lace. She did a lot of sewing, and found some nice lace, at a special bargain price.
OK, some of you younger people won't believe this, but they used to make "flare leg" one-piece garments. The one other choice was the "open crotch" which was flaps that never closed like they were supposed to, and got in the way of everything, and usually ended up goosing the wearer. If TBM women like my friend's mother would cross their legs in a short skirt, these garments offered an unobstructed view of everything up there. The flare leg didn't cover anything either, but the bad thing about those is that you had to pee out one leg! That's right. Unless you wanted to take off all your clothes and the garment completely, going through the garment leg was the only way. Mormon women in my mother's day didn't wear pants, except for camping and hiking.
Anyway, my mother invented a way of undoing the center seam between the legs, and making the garment into a slip. Then she would put her special lace on the bottom. I was shocked, and told my RS president, GA Mormon Royalty mother that altering the garment was against the rules, and she said that it didn't make any difference, if nobody knew about it.
Many years later, I was in Provo, for my TBM aunt's funeral, and my ex-Mormon girl cousins and I were talking about our two mothers, and how liberal they were, compared to most Mormon women. I told my cousins about my mother's lacy garments. They burst out laughing! They said, "We've got to show you this." They took me into my aunts bedroom, and in her drawer were those flare leg garments with the identical lace on them. My mother had secretly sewn those for my aunt. I don't know why we thought it was so hilarious.