University of Virginia Library

Bye-Bye, Mini

Shed a tear, red-blooded American males.
The miniskirt is dying. But shed yet another
tear for those who are now but boys and who
will grow up without the miniskirt. Instead,
they will be subjected to a nation of women
who wear their skirts halfway down their
calves like doddering grandmothers.

The miniskirt was a delight of our youth;
although Virginia's somewhat provincial belles
never took to it as their more cosmopolitan
sisters in other regions did, it still brightened
the landscape and the hearts of connoisseurs
around the Grounds. Even so, the miniskirt is
on (or perhaps around) its last legs.

Fashion designers are a frivolous lot; more
important, they are interested in selling a lot
of dresses. Too many women were entering
the new season with last year's miniskirt; they
could be stylish without buying a particular
season's variation on the mini-theme. Faced
with falling sales, and bored with the high
hemlines, the fashion designers decided to
drop everything down, either straight to the
ground or at least halfway.

Most males have rather smugly assumed
that women dress to please men, thereby
assuring that the lower hemlines would never
become fashionable. Here they made a rather
fatal miscalculation. There has always been an
unfortunate minority of women whose legs
were less than perfectly shaped and who
therefore found the miniskirt less than
flattering. Then there are the women who will
wear whatever their favorite fashion magazine
tells them to wear. When the longer skirts
start selling for $29.95 in the department
stores, these two groups will take to the
mid-calf skirt like the opposite ends of a
magnet - half of them to cover their legs and
the rest because they want to look distinctively
"in."

And that will be a sad day. Within a year,
no self-respecting female will be able to walk
down the street in a short skirt without
feeling like she just stepped off the boat from
Outer Slobbovia. And only the disgruntled
males will remember the days when women
were women and legs were out in the open.