NEW YORK, Apfril 16 — The British fashion designer Mary Quant, who died Thursday, April 13 at the age of 93, is credited with being the first to liberate women’s legs by removing several inches from their skirts. Six decades after first landing in a store on London’s King’s Road, the mini-skirt is making a comeback in fashion, and in a version that’s shorter still, synonymous with the same spirit of emancipation and freedom.
A crucial decade for women’s liberation, the 1960s revolutionised the codes of women’s fashion with shorter clothes, oversized accessories, brighter-than-ever colours, and the emergence of designers who marked the history of fashion and ready-to-wear. Mary Quant is undoubtedly part of this generation that contributed to changing the face of fashion, especially since she managed to popularise the mini-skirt, the ultimate icon of liberation and emancipation of the female body.
While not everyone agrees on who invented this iconic womenswear item — André Courrèges, Mary Quant or Lucien David Langman? — it is indeed the British designer who helped to bring it to the mainstream, and not just for a fleeting moment. No less than six decades after it first landed, the mini-skirt is resurfacing to make a striking fashion comeback.
A revival driven by Miu Miu
The mini-skirt has traversed the ages without ever getting old, whether on the tennis courts, of course, but also in fashion. The 2000s especially helped put this fashion item in the spotlight as a wardrobe essential of singers like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, before it became more discreet. Without ever falling into oblivion, the mini-skirt was shunned in favour of longer cuts, shorts, and pants of all kinds... until fall 2021. At the end of the pandemic — a period synonymous with (much) more casual fashion — the Miu Miu label stood out by reviving this ‘60s icon on its catwalks. And it didn’t take much more to rekindle the craze for the mini-skirt, and to see new versions emerge, each shorter than the next.
In this particular game, the Diesel brand hit hard during its fall-winter 2022 show, showcasing what were more like wide belts than simple mini-skirts. In a very ingenious and daring twist, these metamorphosed in the blink of an eye into ultra-stylish micro-skirts, which did not take long to prove a hit with younger generations. And many luxury and ready-to-wear houses have followed the movement, from Versace to Coperni through Balmain and Dior. All of which has brought this womenswear — and now unisex — essential back to the fore.
A timeless garment
The phenomenon is such that in February 2022, the specialist site Fashionista reported that demand for mini-skirts was at a three-year high, explaining that Miu Miu’s micro-version had generated nearly 900 searches per day in just one week. Two months later, the trend was confirmed with data published by the influencer marketing platform LTK, reporting a 200 per cent increase in searches for the mini-skirt. As such, the rise of this timeless classic seems unstoppable. On TikTok, the #miniskirt hashtag, which features a multitude of tutorials on how to wear the garment with style, has some 600 million views.
A look at the Fall/Winter 2023 collections suggests that the trend is not about to fade anytime soon. Germanier, Cormio, Valentino, Prada, Heron Preston and JW Anderson — to name a few — are among the houses that have put the mini-skirt at the top of the season’s trends. Something that Mary Quant’s passing should bolster in the coming weeks. — ETX Studio
