New York Times - April 25, 2000
The Mini Rebellion Is Over. Long Skirts Reign By GINIA BELLAFANTE
ne recent morning, Becky Michaels, who handles advertising at a Midtown publishing house, left her Upper West Side apartment with the kind of look that hadn't called to her in many months: a skirt that sat somewhere in the mezzanine section of her thigh, not in the orchestra. Her husband, a musician, asked if she intended to go to the office "like that." Ms. Michaels, who had wavered about putting the skirt on in the first place, found herself feeling uncomfortably low-rent for the rest of the day.
For nearly as long as there has been a "Style With Elsa Klensch," designers have stood in front of television cameras trying to promote modern fashion as a laissez-faire enterprise. Hike your skirt up to your sciatic nerve; let it graze your Achilles' tendon. It doesn't matter; anything goes. But, of course, anything does not go.
For the better part of the last eight years, short skirts and dresses -- micro-minis, minis, garments with hemlines resting anywhere north of the knee -- have been rare sightings on the world's most influential runways, like Prada's. Even designers like Alessandro Dell'Acqua, once known for revealing skirts, have shown noticeably fewer of them lately. What runways and their ambassadors -- fashion editors -- have earnestly legislated instead is a length just at or below the knee.
Real women haven't necessarily abided. Until not too long ago, among the many women who don't read Vogue as carefully as though it were a warning on a can of paint stripper, shorter skirts turned up defiantly, just as flat shoes and other looks the fashion establishment considers passé managed to do.
But now, it seems, working women are indicating that they would like to keep their legs more or less to themselves.
Jeffrey Kalinsky, the Atlanta retailer who last year opened a New York boutique, recently recalled that his customers used to fight him "tooth and nail" on the sophisticated knee length he encouraged. Shoppers, he said, would ask to get the skirts hiked up. He would try, often unsuccessfully, to caution them against it. He would offer them these words, he said: "If you go this short, it's going to look like Talbot's." But two years ago, Mr. Kalinsky noticed that women had stopped asking him to hem their skirts.
At shopping environments a little less rarefied than Mr. Kalinsky's, Henri Bendel, for example, sales of short skirts started to slip last year. Ed Burstell, the store's fashion director, said the sales of shorter lengths started to decline last fall. As a result, the store carries far fewer above-the-knee skirts than it once did. The look "could have the connotation of looking cheap," Mr. Burstell suggested, adding, "There are other ways you can convey sexuality."
New hemline opinions tend to raise the kind of questions that other shifts in taste lack the history and symbolism to force. One theory long promulgated by fashion watchers is that hemlines rise in boom times (the 1920's, the 80's) and fall during less economically vital years (the early 70's). The current abandonment of shorter lengths contradicts that idea.
But more important, what, if anything, does the shift represent? The triumph of fashion's dictatorial strain? The true death of the suit (with which short skirts were often associated) as a professional costume? Or perhaps something deeper, a weariness of bringing a "go ahead and objectify me" brand of feminism to the office? That is, a reluctance to display too much, after a protracted national conversation, in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, about what does and doesn't constitute sexual misbehavior at work.
Kathy McCarver Root, a photography editor at Us Weekly, said she stopped wearing short skirts to her Manhattan office in the last year because "I feel a little bit uncovered." Shannon Luckoski, 26, an administrative assistant in Atlanta, said her instinct to abandon short skirts was validated on a recent evening when she wore a short, animal-print version to a bar and found the hand of a former colleague on her thigh.
At a recent dinner shared by about 10 professional women, all in their 20's or early 30's, at an East Side restaurant, the talk turned to the fact that none wore short skirts anymore, not even at night. What was surprising was how many used words like "inappropriate" and "sluttish" to describe how they now felt in short skirts they once wore without hesitation.
Later, Kerry Bernstein, who is 27 and works in marketing at a corporate investigations firm, said that while she was recently packing up clothes for the Salvation Army, she was shocked to discover skirts that fell to midthigh, ones she breezily wore to work two years ago, but would never wear today. "You don't want to think about men as you walk out of an office checking you out," she said.
Olivia Douglas, 30, a commercial real estate executive, said she had sent all of her short skirts to Goodwill, including one she was wearing when she met her husband at a wedding four years ago.
At Ann Taylor, arguably the nation's iconic purveyor of career clothing, the skirt suit -- or the interview suit, as it is known in retail parlance -- has had a noteworthy past couple of years. Calhoun Sumrall, a vice president and design director at the store, said that three or four years ago, the skirt length for the standard Ann Taylor interview suit was 19 inches, not too far above the knee on a woman of average height. It later dipped to 21 inches and now rests at 22 inches. Mr. Sumrall pointed out that while shorter lengths do well as part of the store's more casual collections, the best-selling length sits below the knee at 24 inches.
"The majority of women embrace a style long after avant-garde designers present it," he said.
Where showy skirts have received their greatest play of late is affixed to the waist of Julia Roberts in "Erin Brockovich," which is based on the story of a real-life single mother who didn't have much time for the fantasy of fashion magazines. Erin Brockovich set about uncovering deadly corporate malfeasance in three-inch heels and skirts that appear no wider than a Post-it note. Jeffrey Kurland, the film's costume designer, had most of the clothes made, in part because the streetwalker style Ms. Brockovich favored in the late 80's, when the movie is partly set, weren't so easy to come by.
Mr. Kurland has spent much of his career observing urban habits in the service of dressing characters that populate Woody Allen movies. He theorized that women have been moving subconsciously away from provocative lengths ever since Americans began speaking more openly about sexual harassment, which is to say, since the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings.
This is the sort of argument that Ally McBeal, champion of the über-mini, might have had little tolerance for early on in her television life. Last season, Ms. McBeal, the angst-ridden lawyer, was held in contempt of court during one episode for wearing a skirt that barely reached passed her hips. She was furious at being condemned for her choice, but as the episode progressed, Ms. McBeal came to see her brash attempts at postfeminist expression as a kind of trouble-making self-involvement, which made people around her uncomfortable.
This season Ally has often shown up at work in pants.