Common Threads: The Rise (and Rise, and Rise) of the Mini Skirt

A theory from the 1920s claims that if you want to know that state of the economy, you should look at skirts’ length as an indicator: When hemlines are high, so is the stock market; but as they go down, so too does financial wealth.

While short skirts are perhaps not the most dependable economic marker, they have certainly been at the center of social and political debates. The sight of women’s legs has been occupying the minds of moral reformers and social pundits ever since flappers revealed their knees in the 1920s.

But if the flapper dress had its fair share of scandal, it was the mini skirt of the 1960s that pushed the envelope even further.

First made popular in 1965 in Britain by designer Mary Quant and the model Twiggy, the mini reached the United States in the late 1960s as high school and college students adopted the style. By 1967, the mini became ubiquitous as women across ages, classes, races, regions, and partisan lines adopted the skirt.

More than any other clothing item, the mini became a symbol of the changing cultural attitudes and the growing impact of youth that defined the period. With its length ranging from above the knee to thigh-high (also known as the micro-mini), the skirt revealed not only women’s legs but also their determination to claim their freedom, connecting it to the women’s movement and the fight for women’s rights. In a 1968 issue of the Hartford Courant, one teenager described her mini as “my independence flag,” associating it with the “new feminine drive for full freedom and equality.”

Indeed, together with the birth-control pill, the mini was the epitome of the “sexual revolution” that provided women with unprecedented freedom to assert their sexuality, equal to men, and linking it to the broader counterculture generational rebellion.

It was the hypersexual nature of the skirt that drew both supporters and critics. Mini skirts were blamed for corrupting the morality of youth, for deteriorating women’s health, and for destroying women’s feminine charms and respectability. High schools across the country banned the style, claiming that the short lengths led to a “distraction” among fellow students, and employers sought to prohibit their workers from wearing minis to the office.

The debate over the mini reached its apex in 1970, when the fashion industry, looking to increase profits, pushed for longer hemlines. The campaign was led by the retail magazine Women’s Wear Daily, which marketed the new mid-calf length as “midis” or “longette,” to give it a French flair. Seeking to convince women to abandon their miniskirts, the midi skirt was promoted as the more sophisticated choice for the fashionable woman, especially for the more mature one who might be uncomfortable wearing the revealing mini.

However, despite retailers’ hopes that women would abandon their minis in favor of a midi skirt, women were less enthusiastic about the change, complaining that the style made them look old and ugly. According to the Louis-Harris Company Virginia Slims American Women’s Opinion Poll conducted in  1970, 59 percent of the women respondents favored the mini compared to the 32 percent who preferred the midi.

Like in previous times when women resisted fashion dictates, response was swift and well-organized. Women circulated petitions and called for boycotts, founding protest groups such as FADD (Fight Against Dictating Designers) and POOFF (Preservation of Our Femininity and Finances). Inspired by the tactics of the civil rights and the women’s movements, these groups picketed in front of stores that sold midis and staged “clip-ins” events, in which they publicly cut their midis with scissors to reach the desirable mini length.

Women protesting the midi skirt (Uploaded to YouTube by Wolfson Archive)

While not all the women involved in these protests would identify as feminists, they did frame their arguments for the mini in feminist terms. For them, women’s right to choose — whether it was their clothing or what to do with their bodies — was at the center of their battle. By insisting on their right to dress as they pleased while celebrating their sexuality, these women turned the fight over the mini into a symbol of feminist activism.

If the women of POOFF and FADD were not necessarily feminists, their plea was taken up by the movement. The National Organization for Women (NOW) also joined the boycott efforts, calling on women to resist the midi. They also used the issue as a recruiting opportunity, harnessing the fight over hemlines to protect freedom in other aspects of women’s lives.

These efforts proved successful: By late 1970, retailers admitted defeat, as women voted with their purses to keep the mini. Miniskirts continued to be sold in stores, signaling women’s determination to fashion their bodies as they saw fit.

Yet, if the midi turned out to be a commercial failure, the winner of the battle over skirts’ hemlines was not necessarily the mini, but surprisingly a different clothing item — pants. Indeed, amid the controversy over the midi, more and more women began to see pants as their preferred option; they were both modest and practical while also conveying a feminist message. The mini kept it sexual connotations, yet it was pants, as feminist activist Susan Brownmiller argued, which “became a feminist statement.”

If today women have many more sartorial choices than in the 1970s, the political meanings that we associate with clothes have not lost their power. Debates over skirt length, wearing pants or leggings, and revealing skin are still very much with us. And no matter how short skirts are, we can be sure that they will keep drawing public attention. Like the stock market, hemlines go up and down. The only constant is people will have opinions about them.