Counting On’s Jinger Duggar Reveals Why She Started Wearing Pants: ‘Modesty Isn’t Only What You Wear’

Setting her own standard. Jinger Vuolo (née Duggar) revealed how she redefined her views on wearing pants after growing up from a conservative background.

In an excerpt of her and husband Jeremy Vuolo’s new memoir, The Hope We Hold, the mom of two, 27, details her religious upbringing and the guidelines she had instilled by her parents, Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar, at a young age. 

“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,” Jinger penned in a chapter. “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 I wanted to discover for myself what the Bible had to say.”

The Los Angeles resident has continued to forge her own path after becoming a household name on her family’s TV shows, 19 Kids and Counting — which was canceled in 2015 — and Counting On, which remains on air.  

Jinger, Jeremy, 33, and their daughter Felicity, 2, relocated from Laredo, Texas, to start a life together in California in 2019, and the couple has since welcomed another baby girl, 5-month-old Evangeline Jo. 

The Arkansas native said after tying the knot in 2016, she and Jeremy began diving deeper into their own definition of faith and started closer examining certain passages in the Bible. “Since Jeremy and I had begun studying Scripture together, I had become more aware of the different beliefs and doctrines Christians held,” she explained. “I realized that not everyone interpreted different passages of Scripture the way I always had, and I wanted to find out why.” 

“Growing up, I had a set of standards that I took as givens … [But] my convictions were changing,” the TLC personality added. 

Jinger revealed that she felt confident in being able to change up her style after giving it more thought. “Modesty isn’t only about what you wear. It’s about the position of your heart,” the reality star shared, adding that she also “never found a passage specifically forbidding women from wearing pants.” 

Because she also got support from Jeremy to follow her heart, Jinger said the “inner conflict” she once felt disappeared and she was able to embrace her new fashion sense. “I felt emotional as I worried that my parents would think I didn’t appreciate how I was raised,” Jinger confessed. “We could come to different conclusions about Scripture but still love one another.”