The Mini Skirt, Twiggy And Everything Lady Like
While today it is easy to take for granted the hemlines rise and fall based on what the designer is feeling at the time rather than the political aspects that used to rule how fashion played out and more importantly how women were supposed to dress. The mini skirt has seen many challenges, in fact the origins of the fashion statements weren’t exactly accepted the way they are today. Nowadays we have so many takes on what the true mini skirt looks like and designers have played with the idea of a mini skirt in so many ways that it can sometimes become hard to recognise. A true mini skirt should fall no more than four inches below the bottom and the bottom edge of the skirt should hit roughly halfway up the thigh.
The 1920s-1960s From what we know the roaring 20s and the emergence of the flapper girl saw the hemlines rise up to the knee. Women now had the right to vote, flappers smoked in public, they were allowed to dance and women were overall sexually liberated. Although this seems like a huge change most women were still made to be housewives and still didn’t have the same freedom as their husbands.
“She was wearing a short, pleated skirt about 10in long, with a skinny black sweater, black tights and a bob haircut. What struck me was how the whole outfit focused on what she had on her feet: a pair of white ankle socks, and a pair of patent tap shoes with ankle straps … From that day on I was struck with this lovely vision of legs and ankles.”
Now, this quote might seem silly and uneducated however when you read into the words and the meaning behind what she is trying to explain everything makes perfect sense. I love this idea she picks up on, capturing the feeling that you see an image, movie, model or object that may stick in your head, you register it in a different way, a unique way, one that you might not have seen before if you didn’t look hard enough or maybe wasn’t in the right headspace to, it’s subjective to you at that moment. This idea of long legs and ankles stuck with her and added some kind of inspiration to what would have been a simple look. That feeling gave her a sense of confidence to create the well-known and extremely loved mini skirt.
Mary Quent was also well known for her friendship with the English model twiggy, who was also a great advocate for the mini skirt. She is another great female empowered woman who became a very big icon in the “swinging sixties”. Early to fame, only 16 years old and known as one of the first international supermodels. She was well known for her doll like look, big lashes, slicked to the side short hair and a tiny frame to tie the look together. Growing up twiggy wasn’t allowed to wear makeup however on the weekend, her and her friends would practice doing their faces, the doll eye look started off as a mimic of her baby doll, but it soon became her most famous and iconic look throughout her career. She also sported a baby blue shadow that rocked the fashion world for a while in the 1960s, and like most of fashions biggest moments, this look is quickly seeing its way back to our magazines today.
Around this time in the fashion industry, like many others, they had been rocked with allegations of sexual assault in the wake of the #METOO movement. Although twiggy was never a part of these allegations they were a big part of how women were treated around this decade. As sad as it was, many of these women were trying to make their way in the industry and to do that they had no other option. This also highlighted that women had come far in the fight for equality but defiantly not far enough. The mini skirt kind of represents life at this time, it woke in a time of need for women and was an object of power for many.
The sixties really were one special decade, change and light for women were one that gave everyone hope. The ladylike perception they had to follow was finally eased in the slightest, giving aspiration to what the future could bring for not only fashion but also women in general.
