Hotties In Short Skirts
Nelson Suggs
Deputy principle of Henderson High School in Auckland told a group of female students after assembly that they would receive detention if their school uniform skirts were not worn below the knee, Newshub reported. The age of the girls is not known, but the lowest year has students aged 13.
A miniskirt (sometimes hyphenated as mini-skirt, separated as mini skirt, or sometimes shortened to simply mini) is a skirt with its hemline well above the knees, generally at mid-thigh level, normally no longer than 10 cm (4 in) below the buttocks;[1] and a dress with such a hemline is called a minidress or a miniskirt dress. A micro-miniskirt or microskirt is a miniskirt with its hemline at the upper thigh, at or just below crotch or underwear level.
Hemlines were just above the knee in 1961, and gradually climbed upward over the next few years. By 1966, some designs had the hem at the upper thigh. Stockings with suspenders (garters) were not considered practical with miniskirts and were replaced with coloured tights. The popular acceptance of miniskirts peaked in the "Swinging London" of the 1960s, and has continued to be commonplace, particularly among younger women and teenage girls. Before that time, short skirts were only seen in sport and dance clothing, such as skirts worn by female tennis players, figure skaters, cheerleaders, and dancers.
Russian writer Pavel Melnikov-Pechersky has noted numerous times in his ethnographic works about the 19th century Mordvin (Erzya and Moksha) people that their culture valued the beauty of female legs, and Mordvin women could wear short ponevas [ru] (a kind of traditional skirt).[11]
In 1922, skirts were shortened and could now reach the mid-shin rather than just the ankle.[12] The banana skirt worn by the dancer Josephine Baker for her mid-1920s performances in the Folies Bergère was subsequently likened to a miniskirt.[13][14] Prior to being censored in 1934, cartoon character Betty Boop also wore a short skirt.[15] In the 20th century until the 1960s, a woman could not wear skirts above her knees as part of her everyday clothing and still be socially accepted. Exceptions included stage performers or showgirls like Josephine Baker, athletes, and competitive dancers. During the 1950s, even the skirts of cheerleaders and many ballerinas fell to the calf. Women were taught to keep their knees covered, seat themselves in ways that kept the legs together, or maintain other postures to avoid being viewed as sexually promiscuous.[16] Nevertheless, miniskirts were beginning to emerge by this time. Two notable examples that showed miniskirts were the science fiction films Forbidden Planet and Flight to Mars.[17]
The manager of an unnamed shop in London's Oxford Street began experimenting in 1960 with skirt hemlines an inch above the knees on window mannequins and noted how positively his customers responded.[22] In August 1961, Life published a photograph of two Seattle students at the University of Hawaiʻi wearing above-the-knee garments called "kookie-muus", an abbreviated version of the traditionally concealing muumuu), and noted a "current teen-age fad for short skirts" that was pushing hemlines well above the knee.[23] The article also showed young fashionable girls in San Francisco wearing hemlines "just above the kneecap" and students at Vanderbilt University wearing "knee ticklers" ending three inches above their knee when playing golf. The caption commented that such short skirts were selling well in the South and that "some Atlanta girls" were cutting old skirts to "thigh high" lengths.[23]
Extremely short skirts, some as much as eight inches above the knee, were observed in Britain in the summer of 1962.[24] The young women who wore these short skirts were called "Ya-Ya girls", a term derived from "yeah, yeah" which was a popular catcall at the time.[24] One retailer noted that the fashion for layered net crinoline petticoats raised the hems of short skirts even higher.[24] The earliest known reference to the miniskirt is in a humorous 1962 article datelined Mexico City and describing the "mini-skirt" or "Ya-Ya" as a controversial item of clothing that was the latest thing on the production line there. The article characterised the miniskirt as stopping eight inches above the knee. It referred to a writing by a psychiatrist, whose name it did not provide, who had argued that the miniskirt was a youthful protest of international threats to peace. Much of the article described the reactions of men, who were said to favour the fashion on young women to whom they were unrelated, but to oppose it on their own wives and fiancées.[25]
Only a very few of the avant-garde, almost entirely in the UK, wore such lengths in the beginning years of the decade, however.[26][27] The standard hemline for public and designer garments in the early sixties was mid-knee, just covering the knee.[28] It would gradually climb upward over the next few years, fully baring the knees of mainstream models in 1964, when both André Courrèges[29] and Mary Quant[30][31] showed above-the-knee lengths. The following year, skirts continued to rise as British miniskirts were officially introduced to the US in a New York show whose models' thigh-high skirts stopped traffic.[32] By 1966, many designs had the hem at the upper thigh.[33] Towards the end of the 1960s, an even shorter version of the miniskirt, called the microskirt or micro-mini, emerged.[34][35]
The shape of miniskirts in the 1960s was distinctive. They were not the squeezingly tight skirts designed to show off every curve that 1950s sheath skirts had been, nor were they shortened versions of the tightly belted, petticoat-bolstered 1950s circle skirt. In the 1990s and later, exhibitions on the sixties would occasionally present vintage miniskirts pulled in tight against gallery mannequins, but sixties miniskirts were not worn tight in that way.[36] Sixties miniskirts were simply-constructed, uninhibiting, slightly flared A-line shapes, with some straight and tapered forms seen in the early years of their existence.[37] This shape was seen as deriving from two forms of the 1950s: (1) the shift dress, a waistless, tapered column introduced by Givenchy in 1955,[38][39] presaged by Karl Lagerfeld in 1954,[40] and refined by Givenchy and Balenciaga in 1957 under the names sack dress or chemise dress,[41][42][43][44] and (2) the trapeze dresses popularized by Yves Saint Laurent in 1958[45] that were a variation of Dior's 1955 A-line,[46][47][48] both of a geometric triangular shaping. In silhouette, the minidresses of the mid-1960s were basically abbreviated versions[49] of the shift dress and trapeze dress,[50][51] with Paco Rabanne's famous metal and plastic minidresses of 1966 and '67 following the trapeze line and most of Rudi Gernreich's following the shift line. Mary Quant and other British designers, as well as Betsey Johnson in the US, also showed minidresses that resembled elongated rugby jerseys, body-skimming but not tight. When skirts alone, they tended to sit on the hips rather than holding the waist, called hipster minis if they were really low on the hips.[52] The fashionable forms of the microminis of the later 1960s were also not tight, often looking somewhat tunic-like[53] and in fabrics like Qiana.
In addition, sixties miniskirts were not worn with high heels but with flats or low heels,[54][55][56][57] for a natural stance, a natural stride,[58][59] and to enhance the fashionable child-like look of the time,[60][61][62][63][64] seen as a reaction to 1950s come-hither artifice like stiletto heels, constrained waists, padded busts, and movement-inhibiting skirts.[65] The designer Mary Quant was quoted as saying that "short short skirts" indicated youthfulness, which was seen as desirable, fashion-wise.[24]
In the UK, by shortening the skirts to less than 24 inches (610 mm) they were classed as children's garments rather than adult clothes. Children's clothing was not subject to purchase tax whereas adult clothing was.[66] The avoidance of tax meant that the price was correspondingly less.[67][68]
(Decades later, starting in the late nineties, the term midi-skirt would be expanded to refer to any calf-length skirt from any era, including skirts of that length from the 1930s, 1950s, and 1980s of any shape,[96] and the term maxi-skirt would be expanded to apply to any floor-length skirt from any era, including ballgowns, but that was not the case during a period from the late 1960s to the 1980s, when the term midi-skirt only applied to casual, simply-cut A-line calf-length skirts of the late sixties and earliest seventies and the term maxi-skirt only applied to casual, simply-cut A-line floor-length skirts of the late sixties and earliest seventies. Even the full, calf-length skirts worn from the mid-seventies to the early eighties were not called midi-skirts at the time,[97][98] as that was by 1974 considered a passė term restricted only to a specific shape of skirt from the late sixties and earliest seventies.)
As designers attempted to require women to switch to midi-skirts in 1969 and 1970, women, especially in the US,[99] responded by ignoring them,[100] continuing to wear minis and microminis[101] and, even more, turning to trousers[102] like those endorsed by Yves Saint Laurent in 1968,[103] a trend that would dominate the 1970s.
Several designers have been credited with the invention of the 1960s miniskirt, most significantly the London-based designer Mary Quant and the Parisian André Courrèges. Although Quant reportedly named the skirt after her favourite make of car, the Mini,[104][105] there is no consensus as to who designed it first. Valerie Steele has noted that the claim that Quant was first is more convincingly supported by evidence than the equivalent Courrèges claim.[106] However, the contemporary fashion journalist Marit Allen, who edited the influential "Young Ideas" pages for UK Vogue, firmly stated that the British designer John Bates was the first to offer fashionable miniskirts.[107] Other designers, including Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent, had also been raising hemlines at the same time.[108]
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