Skirt

• 1. Introduction

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  Skirts have covered human bodies since before written history, making them one of the oldest garments on earth. A straw-woven example discovered in Armenia at the Areni-1 cave dates to 3900 BC. Yet this simple piece of clothing has sparked legal battles, fuelled feminist movements, divided nations, and dressed everyone from Greek soldiers to ballerinas. How did a garment so basic become so loaded with meaning? And who, exactly, gets to wear one?

• 2. The Ancient Wardrobe

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  Figurines produced by the Vinča culture, a civilisation that flourished around 5700-4500 BC in what is now Serbia and the neighbouring Balkans, depict women in skirt-like garments. That makes the skirt one of the earliest forms of clothing the archaeological record shows us.

  In ancient Mesopotamia, the Sumerians wore a garment called the kaunakes, a word that traces back to the Sumerian TÚGGU-NAK-KU and ultimately passed into Greek as καυνάκης. It began as actual animal fleece tied to a belt, then evolved into a woven textile that imitated the texture of sheepskin. The kaunakes eventually carried religious weight too, appearing in iconography such as the fleecy cloak of John the Baptist.

  Egypt developed the skirt along different lines. Around 2130 BC, during the Old Kingdom, men wore a rectangular cloth wrapped around the lower body and tied in front. These were called the shendyt. By the time of the Middle Kingdom, fashions had shifted toward longer garments reaching from waist to ankle. Under the New Kingdom, pleated kilts with a triangular section became the style for men, worn over a triangular loincloth called the shente, fastened with cord ties.

  Northern and Southern Europe diverged in their approaches during the Bronze Age. Southern parts of Western and Central Europe favoured wraparound dress-like garments, while in the north people wore distinct skirts paired with blouses.

• 3. When Men Stopped Wearing Skirts

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  Through the Middle Ages, the division between men's and women's skirts was mostly a question of length, not gender. Men's lower garments were cut shorter, wide enough for horse riding, and often pleated or gored for ease of movement. Even knights wore a short metal skirt below the breastplate to protect the straps connecting iron leg armour to the upper body.

  The shift away from skirts for men came not from any single decree but from technology. Advances in weaving during the 13th-15th century, including foot-treadle floor looms and scissors fitted with pivoted blades and handles, made tailoring trousers and tights far more practical. Those garments became fashionable for men and quickly hardened into standard male attire. At the same time, they became taboo for women.

  The Duan Qun Miao offer an interesting counterpoint to this European trajectory. Their name literally means "Short Skirt Miao", a reference to the short miniskirts worn by women of the group that reportedly shocked observers in premodern and early modern times. Meanwhile, in upper-class medieval Europe, some women's skirts swelled to over three meters in diameter at the bottom, about as far from minimal as it is possible to get.

• 4. Reform, Rebellion, and Bloomers

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  In 1851, Elizabeth Smith Miller introduced Amelia Bloomer to a garment known at the time as the "Turkish dress": a knee-length skirt worn over Turkish-style pantaloons. Bloomer took to it with force, promoting the design in The Lily, a newspaper dedicated to, in its own words, the "Emancipation of Woman from Intemperance, Injustice, Prejudice, and Bigotry". The garment spread quickly and took on her name.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone all adopted the style in the 1850s, calling it the "freedom dress". The name was deliberate. Ordinary skirts of the era were heavy, restrictive, and impractical. The freedom dress was an argument made in fabric.

  At the coal pits around Wigan, pit brow women reached a similar practical conclusion by a different route. Working conditions demanded it, so they wore trousers beneath short skirts as a functional part of their uniform. Their appearance drew public attention, and photographers produced a body of images documenting the style through the mid to late 19th century.

  The 19th century also saw the hemline used as a signal about female freedom. In the 1890s, the "rainy daisy skirt" arrived for walking and sportswear, with a hemline measuring as much as six inches off the ground. That shorter cut helped open the door to the broader shift toward abbreviated hemlines in the early 20th century.

• 5. The Miniskirt and Its Discontents

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  By the 1960s, the hemline had climbed to mid-thigh. The miniskirt, sometimes written as two words or hyphenated, is defined as a skirt with its hem well above the knee, generally at mid-thigh level and no longer than 10 cm below the buttocks. The maxi skirt arrived as a direct reaction, offering an ankle-length alternative popularised in the late 1960s. The midi, with its hem halfway between ankle and knee, was pushed by designers in 1967 as another answer to the micro trend.

  A shorter version of the miniskirt, the microskirt, emerged toward the end of the 1960s. Alongside it, fashion moved in elaborate structural directions: the bubble skirt, also called a balloon skirt, tucked its hem back under to create a rounded silhouette and found audiences in the 1950s, 1980s, and again in the 2010s. The hobble skirt, which peaked between 1908 and 1914, cut so narrowly at the hem that it visibly impeded walking.

  The poodle skirt holds its own footnote in this history. Juli Lynne Charlot created it in 1947 as a wide swing felt skirt in a solid color with a design appliquéd or transferred onto the fabric, often a stylised poodle. Later versions swapped the poodle for flamingoes, flowers, or hot rod cars.

  Vivienne Westwood designed the mini-crini in the mid-1980s, a mini-length version of the crinoline, and it directly inspired the puffball skirt, also called the "puff" or "pouf", which caught in at the hem to produce a bouffant silhouette and dominated the mid to late 1980s.

• 6. Men's Skirts Around the World

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  The kilt is perhaps the best-known men's skirt in the Western imagination. Rooted in Gaelic and Celtic history, it forms a core part of Scottish national dress and is worn formally and, to a lesser extent, informally. Irish and Welsh kilts also exist, though they carry less of a national identity charge than the Scottish version.

  The fustanella, a full-pleated skirt worn by men in Albania, Greece, and parts of the Balkans, travelled a different path. By the mid-20th century it had largely retreated to ceremonial use. Today it is worn by the Evzones, the members of the Greek Presidential Guard who parade the presidential mansion in a short version of this historic costume.

  In Bhutan, the gho is a knee-length robe that men are required to wear every day in government offices, schools, and on formal occasions as part of national dress. Japan's hakama comes in two forms: the divided umanori type, designed for horse riding and similar in construction to culottes, and the undivided andon hakama. The sarong appears under different names across multiple cultures: the pareo and lavalava in Hawaii and Polynesia, and the dhoti, lungi, and mundu on the Indian subcontinent and in the Maldives.

  In the Western world, fashion designers including Jean Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood, Kenzo, and Marc Jacobs have introduced skirts into men's wear collections. Gaultier in particular has made a habit of it, describing the practice as a way of injecting novelty into male attire. The sarong worn by David Beckham became one of the most widely noted examples.

• 7. Skirts in the Courtroom

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  The question of who must wear a skirt has been settled more than once by legal force. In the 1980s in Puerto Rico, Ana Irma Rivera Lassén was barred from entering court while wearing trousers and was told to wear a skirt instead. She sued the presiding judge and won.

  In the United Kingdom, the legal picture has remained murkier. In June 1999, University Professor Claire Hale took legal action against Whickham School after it refused permission for her daughter Jo Hale to wear trousers. The Equal Opportunities Commission backed the case. On the 24th of February 2000, the school avoided a courtroom ruling by announcing that girls would be permitted to wear trousers going forward. No test case on skirt requirements in British schools is known to have reached a final judicial determination, leaving the legal position officially uncertain.

  In 2022, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled against the Charter Day School in North Carolina. The school had required girls to wear skirts on the grounds that girls are "fragile vessels" deserving "gentle" treatment from boys. The court found the requirement unconstitutional.

  The International Skating Union moved in a different direction in 2004, allowing women to wear trousers instead of skirts in competition if they chose to. It was a rule change, not a court order, but it reflected the same pressure that had been building in classrooms and courtrooms for decades.