The miniskirt continues to find ways to renew, liberate and shock

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As a child, Mary Quant was required to take ballet lessons. She rarely really had a good time there, until she caught a glimpse of a tap dance class through a half-open door. There she saw an image that would never leave her retina: that of a girl in a skirt no more than eight inches long, with black tights and white ankle socks underneath. Quant is directly through the look seized. “Move the focus into fashion,” she later wrote in her autobiography, “and you have something completely new: legs.” From that moment on, Quant wanted only two things: “Make clothes and tap dance.”

In the clothes that Quant, who died on April 13, would make afterwards, people danced with bare legs. Her fashion, with the miniskirt in front, became the symbol for the swinging sixties. “It was a new, free time,” says fashion curator Madelief Hohé (Art Museum The Hague). She tells how Quant’s fashion brought about a change that can still be felt some sixty years later.

Blondie in Paradiso, Amsterdam 1977.
Photo Gie Knaeps/Getty Images

“The miniskirt mainly represented that as a young woman you looked completely different from your mother,” says Hohé, who explains that in the 1960s that was not self-evident. The same “ladies’ clothing” was then available for daughters and mothers. “Mary Quant thought carefully about what suited her time,” says Hohé. “She looked at what she and her friends liked to wear.” For example, she designed clothing especially for her generation, and for the first time boutiques aimed at youth were created. “It is quite difficult for us to imagine what fun and liberation that was for young people then.” After all, in 2023 there are countless hip brands and shops – H&M, Mango – that offer young people a continuous stream of new fashion.

Read alsoMary Quant’s designs epitomized the swinging sixties

Back to the 1960s, when young people from far and wide flocked to Quant’s boutique to buy hip stuff, says Hohé. “With her great fashion items – hot pants, patent raincoats, funny collars, nice shoes and make-up; everything fashionably designed and in beautiful colors – Quant offered a total picture for a young generation. It was a statement of the new era if you put that on.”

That statement was not without controversy. Hohé: “People were in total shock that women could wear these clothes.” The rise of bare female legs was also accompanied by the rise of the pill: the sexual revolution had been set in motion. “It was a time when as a woman you had much more control over your own body, what you wanted to wear and what you wanted sexually.”

In the meantime, the short skirt – at least in Western fashion culture – has become very ‘normal’, Hohé sees; Quant’s fashion will shock few people. “A miniskirt and a very tight, knitted turtleneck that shows your whole body – that made parents very nervous in the 1960s. But now no one cares about that anymore.” In fact, “Today, short skirts are no longer specifically a youth thing, they are worn across generations.”

_Parish Fashion Week, Paris January 2022.
Photo Edward Berthelot/Getty Images

Has the role of the miniskirt as a controversial liberator really come to an end? That remains to be seen. In 2022, fashion brand Miu Miu, for example, managed to elicit many mixed reactions with the “micro mini skirt”. If the skirt length could not be shortened further from below, the idea seemed, then from above: the micro mini skirt is low-rise and shows a good bit of hip. Combine that with an ultra-short belly button sweater and voilayou show enough bare skin to still shock quite a few people, as it turned out when the shorter-than-short skirt viral went. It is so short that it seems to never end The New York Times March last year on her Instagram account.

And Hohé sees the miniskirt taking another innovative step: it is also becoming increasingly available for men. “Last year there was an exhibition about men’s clothing in the Victoria & Albert Museum: many male visitors walked around in skirts and dresses. And the exhibition that will be on display at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag this fall includes clothing by Charles Jeffrey Loverboy – a Scotsman who makes great gender-neutral clothing, including miniskirts.”

A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 15, 2023.

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