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Skirts Are Here To Stay by Callum Asterman
Where and when the fabled alien lands on earth will determine whether skirts are an entirely female garment or a unisex item.. Nowadays it is mainly seen on men during official and formal ceremonies such as weddings, funerals and football away games. The Romans conquered most of Europe with soldiers dressed in skirts, and before them the Greeks saw the item as a manly and noble part of the military outfit, although even in those days, turning up in chiffon was seen as a faux pas. But throughout the modern period, the skirt in the western world has been almost exclusively worn by women. Despite fashion designers continually trying to persuade us that men can look good in a skirt, it never seems to catch on, for a host of cultural reasons.
If you were to take pictures of skirts of the ages and runthrough them like a film, you’d witness an item of clothing whose lengths, widths and waistlines were never still or constant as fashions, tastes, accepted styles and availability of materials vary. During wartime, for example, to provide a balance between functionality (women are more likely to perform manual labour when the men are away fighting), availability of materials (which will naturally be stretched during wartime) and, to a certain extent, public modesty and respectability.
During the buttoned-up nineteenth century, skirts were so long they dragged along in the dirt and be made of heavy, hard-wearing materials. But as early as 1934, Cole Porter was writing “In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, but now Lord knows, anything goes!” so even by then the idea that little of the female form should peer from below the neckline was long-gone. As the song reflects a time of great social upheaval, for women in particular, the lyrics were probably embracing the new fashions rather than seeing them as an issue of the day.
The high water mark of skirt-wearing must have been the 1960s, when the mini skirt was introduced by Mary Quant. It is amusing nowadays to watch footage of people’s reactions to seeing the mini skirt out in the wild, a mixture of admiration and shock, but proof that nothing like it had been seen before. The micro-skirt, the even shorter sister of the mini of more recent times, has thankfully never really caught on in popular culture for modesty reasons we suppose. It would seem that Mary went as short as would be acceptable in her original design.
The mini skirt was almost a revolt against the glamorous but difficult-to-wear skirts of the fifties, which required a feat of engineering to keep them perfectly flouncy and bell-shaped. Whilst these skirts were welcomeed with open arms as such after many years of war and dressingly conservatively and with events of the day in mind, they were hardly suitable for day to day life.
Nowadays, Cole Porter’s lyrics can be taken to mean exactly the way they were written, as anything really does go. A walk down any city centre street will reveal skirts of a multitude of designs, colours, shapes and lengths. Formal, businesslike skirts mix with the crazy, the tight and the free-flowing, and probably more than half the women will be wearing trousers. It’s too early to say whether skirts will go the way of the Romans, but it seems reasonable to guess that the skirt is here to stay.
About the Author
Callum Asterman reports for Rokit vintage clothing and illustrates how vintage skirts came to be the style garments they are today.
Mini skirt bowling
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