In 1969, Jackie Collins assembled 150 young women in the Charter Room at the Waldorf Hotel, where she had each of them parade, in miniskirts, before a panel of judges. Those considered to have the most photogenic legs would feature on the jacket of her second novel, The Stud – a pulp hit centring on a free-wheeling group of swingers with names like “Miss Tight Skirt”. It’s hard to imagine a more fabulous collision of the loose morals and abbreviated hemlines that defined 1960s London. “When I look back at the clothes I designed then, it’s fairly clear that they signalled great high spirits,” Mary Quant, the mother of the mini, said in a 1995 interview with Vogue. “They celebrated youth and life and tremendous opportunity. They had a kind of ‘Look at me’ quality. They said, ‘Life is great’.”
And yet, to modern eyes – especially those who lived through Christina Aguilera’s “Dirrty” era or Glenn Martens’s autumn/winter 2022 collection for Diesel – the most striking thing about the length of those 1960s skirts isn’t how revealing they were, but how demure they now seem. “I was at Lido Festival this past weekend when something became abundantly clear,” wrote British Vogue’s Daisy Jones earlier this week. “Itty-bitty miniskirts – the sort that graze just below the underwear line – are having a moment. Whether denim, tiered or puffball, the micro-mini was everywhere I looked: in the crowd, queuing for burgers, and on the frenzied night bus home.” Hemlines might have inched skyward since the invention of Miss Tight Skirt, but the miniskirt is, and always has been, a pleasure-seeking thing.
Revisit a handful of the most important miniskirts in history, here.
