FEW reality stars shock fans with their fashion choices more than the Duggars.
Their outfits are hardly scandalous, but even an exposed knee can make Jim Bob blush — and send social media users tittering about rebellion.
Since the Duggar family made their TLC debut with a TV special in 2004, they’ve preached a sort of radical modesty.
On 19 Kids and Counting and later Counting On, the girls and women of the family were almost entirely covered up, even layering extra shirts under dresses that exposed their collarbones.
“We avoid low-cut, cleavage-showing, gaping, or bare-shouldered tops; and when needed, we wear an undershirt,” Jana, Jill, Jessa, and Joy-Anna wrote in their book Growing Up Duggar.
“We try to make it a habit to always cover the top of our shirt with our hand when we bend over.
“We don’t want to play the peekaboo game with our neckline.”
Skirts and dresses, too, always reached below the knees, and more fitted frocks appeared to be banned from their wardrobes.
“We really wanted to see what the scriptures said about [modesty],” mom Michelle wrote in a 2013 blog post.
“Our interpretation was that from the neck down to the knee should be covered.
“By keeping those private areas covered, there’s not any ‘defrauding’ going on.”
“My kids are taught the definition of defrauding as stirring up desires that cannot be righteously fulfilled.
“We don’t believe in defrauding others by the way we dress.”
But over the years, some of the Duggar women have broken the rules, especially as the oldest daughters left the nest.
MICHELLE’S SORDID PAST AND NAUGHTY KNEES
Matriarch Michelle, 56, wasn’t always the picture of evangelical modesty.
Decades ago, she was just a regular teenager — one who wore figure-hugging pants and short skirts on the cheerleading squad.
Though there’s no photographic evidence, she even admitted to wearing bikinis on her front lawn.
“I had been known to mow my lawn in a bikini and not even a clue that that could cause someone else to stumble,” she confessed on Counting On.
Photos from her high school days show her in short pleated skirts, shoulder-baring tops, and pants.
All of those would be purged from her wardrobe shortly after she married Jim Bob when she was 17.
But she still had the capacity to shock: On a vacation filmed for TV in 2011, Michelle went wakeboarding in a skirt — that rode up in the wind.
Baring more skin than she wanted, she asked TLC’s producers to put black bars over her knees in the final televised footage.
JILL DARES TO BARE
Second-oldest sister Jill, 32, was the first Duggar daughter to break her parents’ wardrobe rules.
A few years after she married Derick Dillard, Jill’s style began to shift — and her figure began to see the light of day.
First, she was photographed wearing jeans and pants, and it only spiraled from there.
“For me growing up, I always wore a skirt or a dress or whatever,” she explained in a YouTube video.
But as she and Derick talked more as a couple, clothing “was very much something that we were just reevaluating and for me. I felt like I could be modest and wear pants.”
She now regularly shares photos in shorts, and in a jaw-dropping 2020 sponsored Instagram post, she modeled swimwear.
Of course, it was modest swimwear, including fitted swim shirts and tank tops, mid-thigh-length swim skirts, and tight swim shorts.
She shared more swimwear from the brand in 2021.
“I never thought I would see this much of Jill Duggar’s thigh,” one Redditor remarked.
“I never would have thought Jill would become a swimsuit model,” wrote another surprised fan.
JINGER GOES HOLLYWOOD
Like her sisters, Jinger, 29, was a long-skirts-only girl into her early 20s.
But out from her under her dad’s roof and married to husband Jeremy Vuolo, she got some new ideas.
“My mom had always dressed us girls in skirts and dresses, a standard that was taken from Deuteronomy 22:5, which says: ‘A woman shall not wear a man’s garment,’ and I never really questioned it,” she wrote in The Hope We Hold.
“Modesty was a huge topic in our house, and we believed that wearing skirts instead of pants was a central part of being modest.”
But out on her own, she “never found a passage specifically forbidding women from wearing pants.”
Out came the jeans and slacks, including a white pair Jinger wore on her first red carpet after moving to Los Angeles.
Soon came skirts that hit at mid-thigh and even shorts.
When she shared a snap in shorts on Instagram last year, a follower commented: “Those shorts are definitely not Jim Bob approved.”
JOY-ANNA
Though she was a self-proclaimed tomboy as a child, Joy-Anna, 25, was always in skirts — even while roughhousing with her brothers.
She only started wearing jeans and pants in the past few years.
But when she debuted a pair of shorts on Instagram in 2021, Redditors were not expecting it.
“What will Daddy Duggar have to say?” asked one. “Looks like Joy has officially joined the shorts, scandalous knee-showing club.”
“Well, there goes my purity for today. How could she so flagrantly disregard my manly weaknesses?” quipped another.
JESSA BUSTS OUT HER BELLY
Jessa, 30, was one of the last adult Duggar sisters to publicly give in to the sinful allure of pants.
But even while still clinging to her family’s modest dressing rules, she left Counting On fans’ jaws on the floor during her first pregnancy.
On a visit to New York City, Jessa wore a tight green top that clung to her baby bump.
Viewers who’d followed the Duggars for years were stunned that she’d be seen in something so figure-hugging.
She eventually came around to pants, too,
Though she hasn’t fallen for anything above-the-knee — at least not on social media — she did offer a peek at those knees.
In fact, the ripped jeans she’s worn on Instagram even show some thigh under the frayed fabric.
JANA
In what some Duggar-watchers consider the most surprising turn of all, oldest sister Jana, 33, has been photographed in pants and shorts in the past few years.
The style shift raised eyebrows for a couple of reasons — though mostly because Jana is still unmarried.
Jill, Jessa, Jinger, and Joy-Anna had only ever been seen in more revealing clothing after they’d gotten married and moved out.
Fans have argued that it’s because those women now have a new “headship” — their husbands — while Jana still falls under the authority of her father.
So when she departed from rules that Jim Bob and Michelle had set in their home, social media followers were astonished.
“I have never been so defrauded in my entire life,” joked one Redditor when Jana wore black pants in LA.
“I love she is setting her own rules,” a follower commented on an Instagram snap of Jana in light-wash skinny jeans.
But she really left jaws on the floor earlier this year when she was seen wearing a tank top and shorts to run a 5k with Jinger in July.
“[These] outfits would be deemed C-rated based on the time they ran a race in jeans skirts,” a Redditor remarked.
“Won’t someone please blur those knees?! What would Meech think?!” joked another.