Skirts run from micro hems to floor length—and not only on women
A skirt is dress-bottom or separate garment falling from the waist. Simplest forms are single draped cloths like pareos; most are waist-fitted then flared with darts, gores or gathers. Modern wearers are often women, yet izaars and Scottish kilts keep skirts in men’s wardrobes too.
Skirt-like garments appear on Vinča culture figurines made in the Balkans between about 5700 and 4500 BC, and Armenia's Areni-1 cave has produced a woven straw skirt from 3900 BC. Across the ancient Near East and Egypt they were standard for both sexes. Sumerians wore the kaunakes, a fur skirt tied at the belt whose name first meant a sheep's fleece; Egyptian men of the Old Kingdom wrapped a linen shendyt around the hips, and later fashions lengthened it to the ankles or added a pleated triangular front.
Medieval men wore short, wide-cut, pleated skirts that made riding easier, and even armour included a short metal skirt beneath the breastplate. Better looms and pivoted scissors between the 13th and 15th centuries improved tailored hose and trousers for men. Some noblewomen's skirts measured more than three metres across at the hem, while the Duan Qun Miao of China, the Short Skirt Miao, were named for women's skirts that barely reached below the buttocks.
Nineteenth-century Western silhouettes swung from narrow Empire lines to crinolines in the 1860s and bustles afterward, and the 1890s rainy daisy skirt cleared the ground by six inches for walking. Dress reformers pushed back; in 1851 Elizabeth Smith Miller showed Amelia Bloomer a knee-length skirt over Turkish trousers, which Bloomer promoted in her paper The Lily. After 1915 daytime hems left the ankle, rising in the 1920s, dropping in the 1930s, and peaking at their shortest between 1967 and 1970.
Men's versions persist worldwide: the Balkan fustanella worn by Greece's Evzone presidential guard, Bhutan's compulsory knee-length gho, Japan's hakama, the sarong, dhoti and lungi. Designers like Jean Paul Gaultier have sent skirts down menswear runways, famously the sarong worn by David Beckham. Courts have weighed in too: in 2022 a federal appeals court struck down a North Carolina charter school's skirts-only rule for girls.
Source: Skirt
