Can a Pants Person Fall in Love With Skirts?

“This past SEASON, the RUNWAYS were awash in fantastic SKIRTS.”

Skirts have had their moment in the sun on the red carpet lately too. At the Cannes Film Festival in May, Hunter Schafer served French Riviera opulence in a monochromatic white ensemble from Prada, with a retro headscarf and a naughty little wrap skirt that was left just a tad undone at the front. Parisian pop star and model Yseult’s custom Dior skirt suit by Maria Grazia Chiuri, a design that reimagined Christian Dior’s revolutionary 1947 New Look into something much more democratic, was one of the standout looks of the 11-day festival.

Knowing my preference for pants, my editor issued me a challenge: Could I give skirts another try? Luar’s Raul Lopez makes a very convincing case for them. “The versatility of skirts makes them so powerful,” he says. “You see long denim skirts worn by conservative women and midlength pencil skirts on women bringing back the 2000s office attire, and minis have always been worn by people in underground scenes in every possible way.”

Skirts are also often an important marker of cultural shifts. The invention of the miniskirt in the ’60s was tied to the era’s sexual liberation. When Christian Dior unveiled his Spring 1947 collection and introduced the New Look, women were given a new, more body-conscious proposition for dressing with the formula of a cinched-waist Bar jacket and full skirt. It was a restrictive return to femininity after the war, when many women rolled up their sleeves and went to work. Decades later, in 1984, Jean Paul Gaultier showed plaid skirts worn by men and women on the runway, a precursor to the kind of gender-nonconforming approach to dressing that fashion has embraced in more recent years. Today’s version of the all-gender kilt comes courtesy of Chopova Lowena’s Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena, who kicked off a new era with their pleated and upcycled punk-
folklorish skirts, which have become a visual marker of cool.

The most enduring modern skirts come from the brilliant mind of Mrs. Prada, who almost always wears them herself. At Prada and Miu Miu, she has used skirt lengths—mostly midi at Prada and, more recently, micromini at Miu Miu—to define her pragmatic yet intellectual vision of fashion and the ways women want to dress. A skirt is one of the most traditional pieces of clothing, and as such, for Mrs. Prada, it’s ripe for subversion. As she told Harper’s Bazaar a couple of years ago, she delights in the slicing and dicing of a skirt, which she thinks of as “something very normal. Classic. Usual. … The idea of cutting is a rebellious gesture,” she said.

Guillaume Lavoie, who runs the popular Instagram account What Miuccia Wore, which chronicles Mrs. Prada’s outfits, has always been fascinated by her penchant for skirts. Through his obsessive study of her personal wardrobe and her skirt designs, he says, he’s found that skirts “signify effort” for him. He adds, “It’s a really traditional, conservative garment, but skirts can be interesting when there’s a subversion at play. To wear them with a rebellious or ironic attitude, to pair them with something unexpected, then it becomes about playing with the codes of femininity and making it your own.” Mrs. Prada said it succinctly backstage after her Fall 2024 show for Miu Miu: “Every single morning, I decide whether I’m going to be 15 years old or a lady near death.” A skirt highlights that choice of expression.

From left: Isaac Mizrahi Spring 1994, Jean Paul Gaultier Fall 1999

Isaac Mizrahi famously showed off the range of a skirt when he first sent full ball skirts and tank tops down the runway for his Spring 1994 collection. He posits that there is something “primal” in this piece of clothing. It’s also always been, for him, an important plaything, a medium to express ideas of juxtaposition and mixing high and low. “When you have the romance of something like a ball-gown skirt and then you make it accessible with a T-shirt, there’s something so compelling about that idea to me,” he says. When Mizrahi first did it, people in fashion were in shock. “I had [personal shopper] Betty Halbreich at Bergdorf’s being like, ‘Darling, where do I get these $9 tank tops that we’re showing with the $17,000 skirt?’ It was a real issue because you couldn’t sell the full look.”

Like Mrs. Prada, Mizrahi has always exulted in the irony a skirt can possess. “The joke of the skirt is that it’s maybe not the most modern thing in the world, but there is an incredible part of it that pulls at our heartstrings,” he says. Skirts enable us to dress with a bit of a “wink,” whether it’s with a sexy hem length or that mash-up of high and low, classic and modern, punk and prim. “They often become ridiculous, you know? That’s why I think skirts are so great.”

In the spirit of this assignment, I recently wore a tight mermaid-style neon dip-dyed Dries Van Noten midi skirt to work. I bought it on a whim when I was pregnant and craving something that made me feel pulled together; its stretchy fabric hugged my growing belly and gave me a shape I didn’t think I could ever embrace with a bump. It was so far from the cottagecore maternity muumuus being pushed to me on social media while pregnant, and it was everything I craved.

For that late-spring day in the office, I paired it with a vintage Comme des Garçons knit tank top and vintage Miu Miu heels with a kooky square toe and wacky swirl print. Getting dressed that morning, I was tired like I always am as someone with a toddler. But that skirt gave me a jolt of energy. Even my spitfire daughter clapped when I asked how I looked before I headed out. It felt risky, dressy, cool, and a little crazy (it’s a bit sheer!) but also easy. I moved freely and stood taller, like my legs came back to life as I strolled to the office from the subway, sat in meetings, and socialized at an event later that night. That skirt made me feel a kind of confidence I’d forgotten about. Perhaps some minis and midis will make their way back into the rotation too.

Top collage: Skirts on the Fall 2024 runways, top row, from left: Dries Van
Noten, Junya Watanabe, Dior. Second row, from left: Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Kors, Akris, Molly Goddard. Third row, from left: Miu Miu, Batsheva, Chopova Lowena, the Row, Maria McManus. Bottom row, from left: Marni, Luar, Valentino, Bottega Veneta, Louis Vuitton, Brandon Maxwell.

Brooke Bobb is the fashion news director at Harper’s Bazaar, working across print and digital platforms. Previously, she was a senior content editor at Amazon Fashion, and worked at Vogue Runway as senior fashion news writer.