No skirting issue

The midi-length skirt – halfway between knee and ankle – is the hot new look for next season. What a shame it’s so wildly unflattering, writes Hadley Freeman

Let’s just say from the start, next season’s fashion? Not looking too hot.

Sure, there are a couple of nice dresses around – goodness, considering the number that are made, you would hope that at least some of them were halfway wearable – and some bags and shoes are OK, but in terms of overall looks, well, it’s not really working for me.

This is not, for once, because they seem to have been created solely for the underweight or underage.

In fact, on the face of it, they sound downright reasonable.

There is the skirt suit (useful for work, useful for dates. Mainly if you’re dating Donald Trump). There is embellishment (sweet, pretty, gives you something to fiddle with on the bus). There is black (duh). There are thick knits (which keep you warm, which in the winter is, you know, nice). And there are metallics (thus quoth REM: people who are shiny are people who are happy).

Unfortunately, many of the nicest examples of each of the above are marred by what has wearyingly been decreed to be next season’s length, the midi, aka the middle of the calf, aka the most unflattering length in the history of skirt and dress lengths.

Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Moschino, Dolce & Gabbana – name your favourite perfume and I’ll name you a fan of the midi. Even usually “female-friendly” labels (fashion-speak for designers who have, to their immense credit, learned along the years that women have funny bits on their bodies such as breasts and hips and that most don’t, actually, like to have their feet jammed into a fully vertical position in crippling shoes) have sliced their clothes off at this irredeemably frumpy length.

Fashion magazines are already trying to prepare the ground, but no number of promises that the midi is “surprisingly flattering” or that it will give all and sundry “a newly sophisticated look” can disguise the fact that, really, it just makes everyone resemble an extra on British TV soap, circa 1977.

And you know, I kind of blame us. This summer, you might remember, was supposed to be all about the mini.

Designers proffered skirts so short that they required constant bikini waxes. Only then, funnily enough, customers backlashed, having decided they had better things to do each morning than get out the Nair.

Instead, they ran to the forgiving folds of the hippyish long skirts and dresses that are swamping the high street as opposed to naked limbs and cummerbund skirts as predicted.

So, we refused short and we have already bought long, so what else is there for a poor young designer to try? Knee length?

Please, that’s a basic. And so we come to the compromise length, the only one we haven’t already worked through – the midi.

In fashion, compromises rarely work. One need only think of men’s cropped trousers. Style magazines are resolutely claiming that the midi works on everyone, echoing the designers hoping to scoop up customers across the mini and long-skirt camps.

But whenever something is described as “universally flattering”, any claims thereafter can be dismissed because nothing, of course, suits everyone. I’m sure style gurus could explain this better than I can, undoubtedly using phrases such as “truncates the leg” and “widest part of the calf”.

The simple fact is that you will look and feel like a squat little mushroom unless you wear positively vertiginous heels, and even then you might just resemble a mushroom on stilts.

This is particularly true if the dresses and skirts are cut, as most are next season, on an A-line.

Narrow pencil skirt ending mid-calf: potentially rather glamorous in a Hitchcock heroine way; midi-length pleated skirt fanning outwards: outsized 1970s school uniform.

And those two examples sum up why the 50s, the midi’s first great heyday, or, um, heydecade in the last century, are often cited as such a high point for glamour, and why the 70s, well, aren’t.

The only way the midi works is if the clothes are cut close to the body, a style that doesn’t really work in the post-feminist world, where women have to do more than perch elegantly on a desk or look after the homefront.

And that is what is so annoying about the midi: it suggests one must sacrifice style for mobility, which is just not true of any other style.

Another alleged benefit of the midi being bandied about is that it represents a “new grown-up look.”

Aside from svelteness, youth, detractors claim, has become too much of a requisite in order to wear many of the styles that are decreed to be in fashion, and a brief glance at all the shorts, neon colours and, yes, miniskirts that have come down the runways in recent season would seem to verify this.

Fashion is not about looking good – it is about looking different from the crowd. Sometimes this results in something surprisingly lovely, and sometimes it results in women who look like woodland fungi.

And it is at that point that most women tell designers to go stuff themselves and then go and find something on their own, as happened this summer with the miniskirts.

It is unfortunate for designers that the midi – which will almost certainly go the way of the super-high mini, no matter how hard the cognoscenti try to argue otherwise – follows this summer’s rejection of extreme high hems. Anyway, you could opt out of the whole shebang and just go for a nice pair of trousers.

Apparently, the big trouser trend for next season is jodhpurs.