We enjoyed reading this short article on women’s skirts Harriet Walker wrote for AnOther magazine!

Illustrations are by Zoe Taylor.

There is much comment on the ups and downs of fashion’s turbulent relationship with the financial markets – when stock is up, so are hemlines. But this season’s long skirts, seen at Ann Demeulemeester and Yohji Yamamoto, reflect much more than just our current fiscal fiasco – they’re emblematic of a new age for fashion.

After the elaborate volumes of skirts during the Elizabethan age, with the Regency and the short-lived Directoire period came a more streamlined silhouette, which blossomed among a small group of Parisian socialites towards the end of the 18th century. Thereafter, strict Victorian mores ensured another growth spurt in the span of skirts, some of which took up entire train carriages trundling along the newly invented railroads. Reform came only with a change of monarch and a change of underwear.

The fin de siècle corset shape was an S-bend, designed to promote the bust and derriere, and skirts subsequently cascaded over a bustle rather than sweeping out to the sides, heralding a narrowing of line. But this was soon abandoned with the invention of Paul Poiret’s “hobble skirt.”

The next incarnation of the long skirt arrived in the Sixties, as a bohemian take on a nostalgic pastoral idyll. But this time it came with the vote, sex and drugs. Since then, long skirts have become political. They’re a subculture unto themselves; wearers are intellectuals, goths, the Plymouth Brethren. They’re an oddity in a society full of bare thighs.

And so to the disbelief and dismay of the masses, long skirts swished, swirled and trailed through the autumn collections: some gothic, some romantic – all deadly serious.

Read the full post here