Hold on to your rage, Lilla. As popular as it had become, the pert, professional white dress—even a transparent one—was about to be upstaged by the next style wave in nurse uniforms: the pantsuit.

Ordered to wear white, nurses at 15 area hospitals ... Staten Island University Hospital and the rest of the North Shore LIJ Health System are griping about a dress code overhaul that will ...

Similarly, the white nurse’s dress, once a symbol of purity and sanitation (handily, it could also be bleached between uses), was changed to a darker shade of gray to conceal blood and mud.

Photos of nurses uniforms from the 1880s show the structured white dresses they wore. Since then, uniforms have come a long way to accommodate function and comfort, giving way to loose-fitting scrubs.