Miniskirt
Encyclopedia
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Skirt
A skirt is a tube- or cone-shaped garment that hangs from the waist and covers all or part of the legs.In the western world, skirts are usually considered women's clothing. However, there are exceptions...
with a hemline well above the knees – generally no longer than 10 cm (4 in) below the buttocks; and a minidress is a dress
Dress
A dress is a garment consisting of a skirt with an attached bodice or with a matching bodice giving the effect of a one-piece garment.Dress may also refer to:*Clothing in general*Costume, fancy dress...
with a similar meaning. A micro-miniskirt or microskirt
Microskirt
A microskirt or micro-miniskirt is a very short skirt. It is shorter than a miniskirt, being less than in length. At that length, the microskirt exposes the thighs and the lower portion of the buttocks, as well as part of the underwear...
is a further abbreviation of the miniskirt and short shorts are the shortened versions of the shorts
Shorts
Shorts are a bifurcated garment worn by both men and women over their pelvic area, circling the waist, and covering the upper part of the legs, sometimes extending down to or even below the knee, but not covering the entire length of the leg. They are called "shorts" because they are a shortened...
.
The popularity of miniskirts peaked in the "Swinging London
Swinging London
Swinging London is a catch-all term applied to the fashion and cultural scene that flourished in London, in the 1960s.It was a youth-oriented phenomenon that emphasised the new and modern. It was a period of optimism and hedonism, and a cultural revolution. One catalyst was the recovery of the...
" of the 1960s, but its popularity is since still commonplace among many women, mostly teenagers, preteens, and young adults. Before that time, short skirts were only seen in sport clothing, such as skirts worn by female tennis players.
Until 1960s
From the ancient Greek tunicTunic
A tunic is any of several types of clothing for the body, of various lengths reaching from the shoulders to somewhere between the hips and the ankles...
until the military tunic of Roman times, the very short tunic was exclusively worn by slaves and fighters. In the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
they were worn under the armour
Armour
Armour or armor is protective covering used to prevent damage from being inflicted to an object, individual or a vehicle through use of direct contact weapons or projectiles, usually during combat, or from damage caused by a potentially dangerous environment or action...
.
During her theatre performances in the Folies Bergère in Paris in 1926, Joséphine Baker
Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker was an American dancer, singer, and actress who found fame in her adopted homeland of France. She was given such nicknames as the "Bronze Venus", the "Black Pearl", and the "Créole Goddess"....
wore a sort of miniskirt made from banana
Banana
Banana is the common name for herbaceous plants of the genus Musa and for the fruit they produce. Bananas come in a variety of sizes and colors when ripe, including yellow, purple, and red....
s.
In the 1950s, they could be seen in the science fiction film
Science fiction film
Science fiction film is a film genre that uses science fiction: speculative, science-based depictions of phenomena that are not necessarily accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial life forms, alien worlds, extrasensory perception, and time travel, often along with futuristic...
s Devil Girl from Mars
Devil Girl from Mars
Devil Girl from Mars is a black and white 1954 British science fiction film, directed by David MacDonald. It was adapted from a stage play and became a cult favorite.-Synopsis:...
and Forbidden Planet
Forbidden Planet
Forbidden Planet is a 1956 science fiction film directed by Fred M. Wilcox, with a screenplay by Cyril Hume. It stars Leslie Nielsen, Walter Pidgeon, and Anne Francis. The characters and its setting have been compared to those in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, and its plot contains certain...
.
1960s
Mary Quant
Mary Quant OBE FCSD is a British] fashion designer and British fashion icon, who was instrumental in the mod fashion movement. She was one of the designers who took credit for inventing the miniskirt and hot pants. Born in Blackheath, London, to Welsh parents, Quant brought fun and fantasy to...
ran a popular clothes shop in Kings Road
Kings Road
King's Road or Kings Road, known popularly as The King's Road or The KR, is a major, well-known street stretching through Chelsea and Fulham, both in west London, England...
, Chelsea, London
Chelsea, London
Chelsea is an area of West London, England, bounded to the south by the River Thames, where its frontage runs from Chelsea Bridge along the Chelsea Embankment, Cheyne Walk, Lots Road and Chelsea Harbour. Its eastern boundary was once defined by the River Westbourne, which is now in a pipe above...
, called Bazaar, from which she sold her own designs. In the late 1950s she began experimenting with shorter skirts, culminating in the creation of the miniskirt in 1964—one of the defining fashion
Fashion
Fashion, a general term for a currently popular style or practice, especially in clothing, foot wear, or accessories. Fashion references to anything that is the current trend in look and dress up of a person...
s of the decade. Quant named the miniskirt after her favourite make of car, the Mini
Mini
The Mini is a small car that was made by the British Motor Corporation and its successors from 1959 until 2000. The original is considered a British icon of the 1960s, and its space-saving front-wheel-drive layout influenced a generation of car-makers...
.
Owing to Quant's position in the heart of fashionable "Swinging London
Swinging London
Swinging London is a catch-all term applied to the fashion and cultural scene that flourished in London, in the 1960s.It was a youth-oriented phenomenon that emphasised the new and modern. It was a period of optimism and hedonism, and a cultural revolution. One catalyst was the recovery of the...
", the miniskirt was able to spread beyond a simple street fashion into a major international trend. The style came into prominence when Jean Shrimpton
Jean Shrimpton
Jean Rosemary Shrimpton is an English model and actress. She was an icon of Swinging London and is considered to be one of the world's first supermodels....
wore a short white shift dress, made by Colin Rolfe, on 30 October 1965 at Derby Day, first day of the annual Melbourne Cup
Melbourne Cup
The Melbourne Cup is Australia's major Thoroughbred horse race. Marketed as "the race that stops a nation", it is a 3,200 metre race for three-year-olds and over. It is the richest "two-mile" handicap in the world, and one of the richest turf races...
Carnival in Australia, where it caused a sensation. According to Shrimpton, who claimed that the brevity of the skirt was due mainly to Rolfe's having insufficient material, the ensuing controversy was as much as anything to do with her having dispensed with a hat and gloves, seen as the essential accessories in such conservative society.
The miniskirt was further popularized by André Courrèges
André Courrèges
André Courrèges is a French fashion designer, known for his ultra-modern designs. At the age of 25, after studying to be a civil engineer, he went to Paris to work at Geanne Lafaurie fashion design house...
who developed it separately and incorporated it into his Mod look, for spring/summer 1965. His miniskirts were less body-hugging, and worn with the white "Courrèges boots
Go-go boots
Go-go boots are a low-heeled style of women's fashion boot worn since the mid-sixties when fashion silhouettes focused on accentuating the leg...
" that became a trademark. By introducing the miniskirt into the haute couture
Haute couture
Haute couture refers to the creation of exclusive custom-fitted clothing. Haute couture is made to order for a specific customer, and it is usually made from high-quality, expensive fabric and sewn with extreme attention to detail and finished by the most experienced and capable seamstresses,...
of the fashion industry, Courrèges gave it a greater degree of respectability than might otherwise have been expected of a street fashion.. An even more prominent French fashion designer, Yves St. Laurent, began to show shorter skirts in his fall/winter 1965 collection, including his famous "Mondrian" dress (inspired by the work of painter Piet Mondrian
Piet Mondrian
Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian , was a Dutch painter.He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism...
), a trend that he continued with throughout the 1960s, although he became more famous during this period for introducing the concept of the formal trouser suit for women into haute couture. Paco Rabanne
Paco Rabanne
Francisco "Paco" Rabaneda Cuervo, more commonly known as Paco Rabanne is a Franco-Spanish fashion designer. He fled Spain for France with his mother when the Spanish Civil War broke out...
's designs were on the extreme edge of fashion. He introduced a "body jewelry" collection in 1966 that presented short shift dresses constructed from plastic or metal discs or tiles linked with wire or chain. Other 1960s designers worked with easy-care acrylic and polyester fabrics that were becoming popular.
In her book From A to Biba, Barbara Hulanicki provides an alternative explanation for the invention of the mini skirt. Soon after Biba opened on Kensington Church Street in 1966, she received a delivery of skirts made out of stretchy jersey fabric which had shrunk dramatically between leaving the manufacturer's and arriving at her shop: '... I nearly had a heart attack. The skirts were only 10 inches long. "God," I thought, "we'll go bust - we'll never be able to sell them." I couldn't sleep, but that little fluted skirt walked out on customers as fast as we could get it onto the hatstands."http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/b/biba,-barbara-hulanicki/
Fashion designer Rudi Gernreich
Rudi Gernreich
Rudi Gernreich was a Austrian-born American fashion designer and gay activist.-Biography:Born in Vienna, Gernreich fled Austria at age 16 due to Nazism, and later migrated to the United States, settling in Los Angeles, California...
was among the first U.S. designers to offer miniskirts.
Upper garments, such as rugby shirts, were sometimes adapted as mini-dresses. With the rise in hemlines, the wearing of tights or pantyhose
Pantyhose
Pantyhose are sheer, close-fitting legwear, covering the wearer's body from the waist to the feet. Mostly considered to be a woman's and girl's garment, pantyhose appeared in the 1960s, and they provided a convenient alternative to stockings...
, in place of stockings, became more common. Mary Quant cited this development in defence of the miniskirt:
"In European countries where they ban mini-skirts in the streets and say they're an invitation to rape, they don't understand about stocking tights underneath."Hemlines were just above the knee in 1961, and gradually climbed upward over the next few years. By 1966, some designs had the hem at the upper thigh. Stockings with suspenders were not considered practical with miniskirts and were replaced with coloured tights.
1970s
Christopher Booker
Christopher John Penrice Booker is an English journalist and author. In 1961, he was one of the founders of the magazine Private Eye, and has contributed to it for over four decades. He has been a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph since 1990...
gave two reasons for this reaction: firstly, that "there was almost nowhere else to go ... the mini-skirts could go no higher"; and secondly, in his view, "dressed up in mini-skirts and shiny PVC
Polyvinyl chloride
Polyvinyl chloride, commonly abbreviated PVC, is a thermoplastic polymer. It is a vinyl polymer constructed of repeating vinyl groups having one hydrogen replaced by chloride. Polyvinyl chloride is the third most widely produced plastic, after polyethylene and polypropylene. PVC is widely used in...
macs
Mackintosh
The Mackintosh or Macintosh is a form of waterproof raincoat, first sold in 1824, made out of rubberised fabric...
, given such impersonal names as 'dolly birds', girls had been transformed into throwaway plastic objects". Certainly this lengthening of hemlines coincided with the growth of the feminist movement. However, in the 1960s the mini had been regarded as a symbol of liberation, and it was worn by some, such as Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer is an Australian writer, academic, journalist and scholar of early modern English literature, widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century....
and, in the following decade, Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem
Gloria Marie Steinem is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970s...
, who became known for their promotion of women's issues. Greer herself wrote in 1969 that:
"The women kept on dancing while their long skirts crept up, and their girdleGirdleA girdle is a garment that encircles the lower torso, perhaps extending below the hips, and worn often for support. The word girdle originally meant a belt. In modern English, the term girdle is most commonly used for a form of women's foundation wear that replaced the corset in popularity...
s dissolved, and their nipples burst through like hyacinth tips and their clothes withered away to the mere wisps and ghosts of draperies to adorn and glorify ..."
Indeed, miniskirts never entirely went away and, for example, were often worn by Deborah Harry
Debbie Harry
Deborah Ann "Debbie" Harry is an American singer-songwriter and actress, best known for being the lead singer of the punk rock and new wave band Blondie. She has also had success as a solo artist, and in the mid-1990s she performed and recorded as part of The Jazz Passengers...
, of the group Blondie
Blondie (band)
Blondie is an American rock band, founded by singer Deborah Harry and guitarist Chris Stein. The band was a pioneer in the early American New Wave and punk scenes of the mid-1970s...
, during the "new wave" of the late 70s. The song (I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea (1978), by new wave artist Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello , born Declan Patrick MacManus, is an English singer-songwriter. He came to prominence as an early participant in London's pub rock scene in the mid-1970s and later became associated with the punk/New Wave genre. Steeped in word play, the vocabulary of Costello's lyrics is broader...
, contained the line: "There's no place here for the mini-skirt waddle."
1980s and 1990s
In the 1980s, short skirts began to re-emerge, notably in the form of "rah-rahsRah-rah skirt
The rah-rah skirt is a short flounced skirt that originated in cheerleading and became popular among teenage girls in the early 1980s. As such it marked, as the Oxford Dictionary noted, the first successful attempt to revive the miniskirt that had been introduced in the mid 1960s...
", which were modeled on those worn by female cheerleaders at sporting and other events. In the mid-1980s the "puffball" skirt enjoyed short term popularity, being worn by, among others, the Princess of Wales and singers Pepsi and Shirlie. Many women began to incorporate the miniskirt into their business attire, a trend which grew during the remainder of the century. Films and television series made in the mid-1990s (Melrose Place, Sex and the City
Sex and the City
Sex and the City is an American television comedy-drama series created by Darren Star and produced by HBO. Broadcast from 1998 until 2004, the original run of the show had a total of ninety-four episodes...
, Ally McBeal
Ally McBeal
Ally McBeal is an American legal comedy-drama series which aired on the Fox network from 1997 to 2002. The series was created by David E. Kelley, who also served as the executive producer, along with Bill D'Elia...
, for example) show how common the mini had become again. In the BBC TV series Keeping Up Appearances
Keeping Up Appearances
Keeping Up Appearances is a British sitcom created and written by Roy Clarke for the BBC. Centred on the life of eccentric, social-climbing snob Hyacinth Bucket , the sitcom portrays a social hierarchy-ruled British society...
(1990-5) the snobbish Hyacinth Bucket
Hyacinth Bucket
Hyacinth Bucket, who insists her last name is pronounced "Bouquet" , is the main character in the BBC sitcom Keeping Up Appearances , played by Patricia Routledge.-Personality:...
was frequently outraged by the brevity of her sister Rose's
Rose (Keeping Up Appearances character)
Rose is a fictional character in the British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances. She is portrayed by two actresses: Shirley Stelfox in Series One, and the late Mary Millar from Series Two onwards...
skirts.
21st century
Around the turn of the 21st century, hipster trousersLow-rise jeans
Low-rise jeans, worn by both men and women, are jeans intended to sit low on, or below, the hips. They are also called lowcut jeans, hipsters, hip-huggers and lowriders. Usually they sit at least 8 centimetres lower than the belly button...
became highly fashionable for women. The micro mini or microskirt
Microskirt
A microskirt or micro-miniskirt is a very short skirt. It is shorter than a miniskirt, being less than in length. At that length, the microskirt exposes the thighs and the lower portion of the buttocks, as well as part of the underwear...
has been reworked as an even less substantial beltskirt, which is more an evocation of the idea of a skirt than something that covers anything substantial. However, these "microskirts" are rarely worn as streetwear, but for theatrical effect.
Miniskirts are also seen worn over trousers or jeans
Jeans
Jeans are trousers made from denim. Some of the earliest American blue jeans were made by Jacob Davis, Calvin Rogers, and Levi Strauss in 1873. Starting in the 1950s, jeans, originally designed for cowboys, became popular among teenagers. Historic brands include Levi's, Lee, and Wrangler...
, or with leggings
Leggings
Leggings are a type of fitted clothing covering the legs, which can be worn by both men and women.Originally leggings were two separate garments, one for each leg....
that provide coverage of each leg from above the knee. Although "floaty" skirts were most closely associated with the boho
Boho-chic
Boho-chic is a style of female fashion drawing on various bohemian and hippie influences, which, at its height in 2004-5, was associated particularly with actress Sienna Miller and model Kate Moss in the United Kingdom and actresses Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and Nicole Richie in the United States...
look of mid-decade, short skirts also featured in some outfits, and in London, for example, minis were more widespread during the hot summer of 2006 than for several years before, a trend that continued through the mild autumn and winter and even five years later have not yet lost their popularity with bare legs becoming more common in 2011 for the first time in some years.
Stretch miniskirts and micro-minis can be made using Spandex
Spandex
Spandex or elastane is a synthetic fibre known for its exceptional elasticity. It is strong, but less durable than natural Latex, its major non-synthetic competitor. It is a polyurethane-polyurea copolymer that was co-invented in 1959 by chemists C. L. Sandquist and Joseph Shivers at DuPont's...
material or PVC
Polyvinyl chloride
Polyvinyl chloride, commonly abbreviated PVC, is a thermoplastic polymer. It is a vinyl polymer constructed of repeating vinyl groups having one hydrogen replaced by chloride. Polyvinyl chloride is the third most widely produced plastic, after polyethylene and polypropylene. PVC is widely used in...
and are sometimes worn by the more daring as club-wear in conjunction with hold-ups
Hold-ups
Hold-ups or stay-ups are stockings with a band of elastic sewn to the top, designed to hold the stockings up when worn, without the need for a garter belt or garters...
and a pair of stiletto heel
Stiletto heel
A stiletto heel is a long, thin, high heel found on some boots and shoes, usually for women. It is named after the stiletto dagger, the phrase being first recorded in the early 1930s...
pumps.