Way before businesswomen wore shoulder pads in the 1980s to shove their way into the male-dominated business world, Empress Elizabeth of Russia and her niece-in-law Catherine the Great pushed 18th-century sartorial gender norms to cement their authority. “The Empress [Elizabeth] had a fancy to have all men appear at the Court balls dressed as women and the women as men, without masks,” Catherine wrote in her memoirs. These “metamorphosis balls” became a weekly occurrence at the Russian court. Elizabeth dressed as a Cossack to one ball, a French carpenter to…
