Andrey Krotkov. Mini-midi-maxi skirts

Mini-midi-maxi skirts - consensus reached
Andrey Krotkov

Date of publication: October 27, 1999

It’s surprising, but true: since the European peoples - from the North Cape to Sicily and from Gibraltar to the Urals - established a different in detail, but fundamentally uniform in cut type of clothing, called “European”, there have been no serious discussions or disagreements There have been no changes in clothing for over a thousand years! There were, of course, bickering and skirmishes about who could wear ermine fur and who should be content with fox fur; in certain circles there was a lively discussion of the issue of whether it was permissible to make a slit on men's trousers in the front (and not on the side) and whether this would not be gross obscenity and a lascivious innuendo; a pad placed under a woman's dress from the back below the waist (bustle) was considered an unusually successful find by fashion designers, because, according to the aesthetes of that time, something sticking out from below at the back harmonized and balanced what usually sticks out from above in front...

The solid unity of European legislators of morality (and fashion) for centuries consisted of only one thing: a woman’s dress should be long, reaching to the ground, and closed. Representatives of the stronger sex could handle the lower part of their musculoskeletal system quite freely. It was only possible to indicate the presence of the lower extremities, it was possible to emphasize and tighten them, it was possible to build the famous “Gishpan trousers” over the covered calves (for wearing which Peter the Great, by a special decree, ordered that dandies be beaten “with a whip in the ass..., as long as those Gishpan trousers only the shreds will not remain").

The female figure below the waist had to be packed and draped in such a way that the owner of the wildest imagination would not be able to finish drawing or inventing anything.

The result of such strictness was paradoxical. For example, in the golden era of aristocratic youth - the first third of the 19th century. - high-society stallions looked rather sluggishly at the bold cleavage of that time, but adrenaline began to flow from their noses and ears when the naughty beauty showed the rise of her feet from under her skirt. Known to everyone who went to school, the fiery lines from Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”, dedicated to ladies’ legs, are the best domestic illustration of this funny circumstance.

As political freedoms and women's emancipation grew, skirts began to rise uncontrollably. They crawled, however, rather slowly: an entire generation of European men died out without ever seeing (excuse the weak pun) a woman’s knee, and another generation saw the coveted object at an age when this sight is no longer particularly interesting. After the First World War, women were still intensively sweeping the sidewalks with their skirts; in the early 20s, emancipation rose above the ankle; in the 30s, no one fainted at the sight of a skirt that ended just a palm below the knee. Only after the Second World War did women’s clothing begin to serve not as a function of humiliation and hiding, but as emphasizing a woman’s figure.

It is easy to notice that men's clothing, tailored and sewn with a deliberate emphasis on the sexuality and gender-role function of its wearer, suggests thoughts of "gay orientation", while a similar style in women's clothing is completely natural.

A woman's strength lies in her weakness. By nature, being the vessel of life and the guardian of the race, a being more complete, socially more conservative and biologically more stable than a man, a woman, even in minimal clothing, remains mysterious. The notorious miniskirts, which shocked Americans and Europeans in the mid-60s, a few years before the so-called “sexual revolution,” ended just where the legs and back suddenly changed their names. And this was a normal swing of the pendulum to the extreme position, not dictated by any unbridledness, after centuries of containment; it was not a programmatic-conceptual, but a natural-essential challenge of women to the world, which for centuries reproached them with an apple eaten in the Garden of Eden. And the challenge is short-term.

The mini-boom quickly burned out and passed; it turned out to be short-lived, like any extreme. He, in fact, was the last surge of radical fashion, after which pluralism came to replace stylistic dictates: everyone dresses the way he wants and is comfortable, and if he (she) looks like an idiot (an idiot), then that’s his ( her) personal matter, but in no way a reason for a public scandal and not a subject for investigation... The fighters with miniskirts were still frantically scribbling their manifestos and proclamations, pushing their pen past the inkwell and forgetting to look out the window. And there, with a flexible gait, with a wave from hip to shoulder, girls in the most modest chintz skirts of astronomical length, the so-called “gypsy”, were already walking along “Max Avenue” and “Tverbul at Pampush”. The mini-midi-maxi-consensus has taken place.

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