Six young women model six classic skirt lengths
ranging from micro-mini to maxi
I.
One of the things that Roland Barthes doesn't like is women wearing trousers: and he's not alone in this; many men prefer to see women in skirts. But it depends on the woman. And it depends on the skirt or slacks in question ...
For some skirts are very ugly, whilst some trousers - such as a classic cut pair of Capri pants as worn by Grace Kelly - are very beautiful.
Indeed, some women look so sexy and stylish in trousers that this is how they are best remembered within the cultural imagination; Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Katharine Hepburn are very obvious examples - and who can deny that Sydney Sweeney has great jeans? [1]
Here, however, we're going to briefly comment on the rise and fall of hemlines during the last 125 years or so and say a bit about the politics of the skirt.
II.
According to the Cole Porter song, in olden days even a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking [2], but now, for better or for worse, most people prefer bare limbs to old hymns [3] and don't want dress codes to be enforced by the morality police (or even the fashion police).
I don't know when exactly the sun set on the olden days, but we should probably mention the introduction of the rainy daisy skirt in the 1890s, which had a significantly raised hemline - as much as six inches off the ground - and would later influence the introduction of ever-shorter skirts in the 20th century [4] (although it should be noted that, up until 1914, most skirts still touched the ground, including the infamous hobble skirt that had its brief fashion moment in the Edwardian period).
Before we continue, it's important to remember that there's no progress in the world of fashion; a short skirt is not an improvement nor an advance on a long one. And fashion is not even a striving after beauty. The logic of fashion - if we may call it such - isn't tied to aesthetic criteria, but to an obsessive desire for novelty, innovation, and constant change as a value in and of itself; there is no goal or ultimate look [5].
Thus, what we witness throughout the 20th century is hemlines going up and down like a whore's drawers: fashionable skirts were short in the Roaring Twenties (at or just below the knee, thereby allowing flappers [6] greater freedom of movement on the dance floor); long again in the more austere - but also more sophisticated - 1930s (typically reaching mid-calf) [7]; and shortest of all in the Swinging Sixties, when bright young things favoured the mini-skirt (6" above the knee), although some hippie chicks preferred to wear long flowing bohemian-style maxi skirts as the decade drifted toward and into the 1970s.
III.
And today, in a post-Covid era; "skirt styles are more varied than ever, reflecting a world of
interconnected cultures which can no longer be defined by a single [...] narrative" [8].
In other words - and returning to the Cole Porter song - anything goes ...
Because of this, some commentators are suggesting that the asymmetric hemline is the defining style of the decade, "while
others believe the rise in sheer and lace maxis is emblematic of our
increasingly obfuscated society" [9].
As we move into the second quarter of the 21st century perhaps the only thing that can be said for certain is that the skirt "is no longer simply rising or falling with GDP, but splintering and mirroring a world of fragmented economies, aesthetics and identities" [10].
In an age of chaos and diversity - when no one really knows what the fuck is going on and no single style dominates - we find skirts of every shape, length, and material appearing side by side on the catwalks and in highstreet stores.
Now, of course, some think this a good thing; either a triumph of individualism and the freedom to wear whatever one wants; or of multiculturalism - the great ideal of the motley-spotted who pride themselves of the fact that they have embraced all peoples and value all customs, beliefs, and outfits equally.
Others, however, of a more Nietzschean bent who don't wish to skirt around the issue, see in this barbarism of tastes and fashions a type of systematic anarchy and the destruction of genuine culture, which requires unity of style in all the expressions of a people - including hemlines.
Notes
[1] I have written two posts on women in trousers; one discussing the case of Katharine Hepburn (9 May 2018) - click here - and one outlining a brief history of Capri pants (featuring Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn (10 May 2018): click here.
And for my tuppence ha'penny's worth on the case of Sydney Sweeney (31 July 2025), click here and/or here (the latter giving a Nietzschean take on the controversial American Eagle campaign featuring Miss Sweeney).
[2] Cole Porter, 'Anything Goes', from his 1934 musical of the same title. Click here to play the version recorded by Sinatra for his 1956 album Songs for Swingin' Lovers (remastered in 1998).
[3] This is an extremely anti-Lawrentian position. For Lawrence not only loved old hymns, but he hated bare arms and legs.
See the essay 'Hymns in a Man's Life' (Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, Cambridge University Press, 2004), in which Lawrence writes how the hymns he learned as a child have more value to him than the finest poetry.
And see 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' (published as one volume with Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, Cambridge University Press, 1993) in which he writes disapprovingly of the half-naked women of the 1920s who think it very chic and a sign of their independence to expose their limbs in public, describing it as a form of cynical vulgarity.
Ironically, when in the Cole Porter song referred to above he writes of good authors who once knew better words, now only using four-letter words, he is very likely thinking of Lawrence and James Joyce.
[4] A rainy daisy is a style of walking skirt originally designed in the United States for use on wet days and was usually just two or three inches off the ground. The origins of the name are uncertain, but it has been suggested that they were named after the flirtatious fictious figure of Daisy Miller, who features in the short novel of that name by Henry James (1879).
[5] As Lars Svendsen notes: "Fashion does not have any telos, any final
purpose, in the sense of striving for a state of perfection [...] The aim
of fashion is rather to be potentially endless, that is it creates new
forms and constellations ad infinitum."
See Fashion: A Philosophy,
trans. John Irons (Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 29.
[6] For a post written in praise of the flappers (1 January 2016), please click here.
[7] Interestingly, economist George Taylor noted in a 1929 book entitled Significant Post-War Changes in the Full-Fashioned Hosiery Industry, that following an increase in sales of fine silk stockings, skirts got shorter (and, presumably, as skirts got shorter, the demand for fashionable stockings increased still further).
This contributed to a theory known as the hemline index which posited that the length of a skirt will rise when the economy is booming and fall when the stock market is in trouble - thus helping to explain why skirts were longer in the 1930s, for example.
Finally, it might be noted that whilst many economists at the end of the 20th century were sceptical about the so-called hemline index, in 2010, two academics at the Erasmus School of Economics (Marjolein van Baardwijk and Philip Hans Franses) examined data from fashion magazines against measures of GDP from 1921 to 2009 and they found that the hemline lengths were an accurate indicator of economic fluctuation, even if changing trends in skirt length typically lag three years behind market shifts.
[8-10] 'In History: The evolution of the skirt through the decades', TheIndustry.fashion (16 June 2025): click here.
This excellent short piece - which comes with some fantastic photos - also describes skirts in the decades I chose to skip (i.e., the 1980s - 2010s).
