Beth Djalali, a 63-year-old living in Athens, Georgia, remembers the first miniskirt she ever saw. “When they first sprang on the scene, during the 1960s, I was just a young girl,” she says. “When Twiggy came out with the miniskirt and minidresses, it was just very cool, very different from what we’d had.” In the late 1980s and the ’90s, when miniskirts cycled back into fashion, Djalali was a young mom. Years passed, and in the 2000s, when Djalali was in her 40s, the holy teen trinity of Lohan, Hilton, and Spears brought 2000s hemlines to a newly outrageous level. Recently Djalali watched the second season of Emily in Paris. The skirts, she says, looked very familiar.
It’s 2022, and the miniskirt is back. Hemlines are creeping toward crotch level; inner thighs are once again getting fresh air. The ubiquity of this season’s Miu Miu micro mini, which looks like a teen girl used an office paper cutter to hack up her Catholic school uniform, is almost comical. The skirt has been seen on half a dozen magazine covers, and worn by Zendaya, Naomi Campbell, Hailey Baldwin, and Hunter Schafer. “Mini Skirts Make Their Return,” The New York Times proclaimed. “The Micro-Mini Skirt is Fall 2022’s Biggest Trend at NYFW,” wrote Nylon. WhoWhatWear announced that “The Micro Miniskirt Is Taking Over the Streets of Paris.”
The question is not if your genitals will have direct contact with the elements; the question is when. And the other question is: Will people of all ages partake? The generation that came of age with the first miniskirts are now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. Why should they be deprived of the trend they helped invent?
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“I have legs, and I like them, period,” says Arlinda McIntosh, 65, a proud designer and wearer of miniskirts. She likes a short skirt with a good twirl and sense of whimsy. Short skirts make people feel happy, she says. And they’re particularly good for older women. They “lend themselves to the menopausal age,” she says with a laugh. In a skirt, you get “free air-conditioning.” Plenty of women have reached out to cheer her on. Others, she said, have commented, “Don’t you think maybe you’re a little too old for that?” She always responds the same way: “Don’t you feel you’re too old not to? At 50, 60, and 70, if you can’t do what you want, damn! When are you gonna do it? We’re definitely on the clock now, for real! This is the time to be free and wear whatever.”
“Whatever”—including truly daring, revealing looks? The 2022 Vanity Fair Hollywood cover featured Nicole Kidman in the aforementioned nearly invisible-to-the-naked-eye Miu Miu micro mini. Here are the things Kidman, 54, looks like in the skirt according to less gracious Instagram commenters: a “skimpy dressed schoolgirl,” “a teen on Euphoria,” “a Maxim cover,” “a 13-year-old,” and “2012 Lana Del Rey in a Lolita outfit.” If Kidman—with her full-time job of meeting conventional beauty standards—can’t wear a teeny-tiny mini without criticism, what nonfamous 50-plus woman can?
“A woman is as young as her knees,” Mary Quant liked to say. Quant is often credited with inventing the miniskirt—it was her design that Twiggy wore, impressing adolescents like Djalali. Her bold hem lengths announced a style divorce between the older and younger generation. Minis belonged to the very young. “They celebrated youth and life and tremendous opportunity,” Quant told Vogue in 1995. “They had a kind of ‘Look at me’ quality. They said, ‘Life is great.’”
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But for Karian Nicholas, a 54-year-old in Ontario, life is great, not in spite but because of her age. “When I was younger, I was ultra-conservative and very conscious of my body,” says Nicholas, a retired nurse who runs the fashion blog 50s Fine with her best friend, 58-year-old Dianne. “Even something like a sleeveless top I wouldn’t wear.” Now, she says, she’ll even wear two-piece bathing suits. She’s more confident with her body now than she was when she was Quant’s ideal customer. “I think I accept the changes in my body and I don’t have a microscope looking at it, like I used to before,” she says.
“I get a lot of grief from women my age, saying that I need to retire skirts above the knee,” says Djalali, who runs the page StyleAtACertainAge. “For boomers, there are still some hard and fast rules when it comes to fashion and what we can and cannot wear. One of them is: Women of a certain age shouldn’t be wearing short skirts anymore because our knees don’t look very good.” She finds it interesting, she says, that she faces far little criticism for wearing a swimsuit compared with showing far less leg in a short skirt. It’s as if the currency of youth associated with the short skirt trend is more offensive than the skin itself. “Clothes have sizes not ages,” Djalali likes to retort. These ideas about knee modesty are as outdated as not wearing white after Labor Day, she says: “There are no hard and fast rules anymore when it comes to style.” And to McIntosh the idea of covering one’s legs is just ridiculous. “Your face is out!” she says. “It’s all skin!”
Older fashion influencers demand the right to wear miniskirts without critique. Whether they will actually exercise that right is a different question. Nicholas wears bikinis, tube tops, cutout dresses, and little shorts. But she doesn’t really wear miniskirts. “I do wear a few short skirts,” she says. “But they’re usually three to four inches above my knee.” Djalali, too—she likes a short skirt, but nothing Paris Hilton would have worn in the 2000s. It’s not so much a question of insecurity, both women said. “I want to look stylish, but I also want to feel comfortable—being able to bend over, sit down gracefully. I wouldn’t want to be tugging at it,” she says. “In principle they can be worn by mature women,” says Nicholas of miniskirts. But in reality? “You don’t have to be so cautious about your leg position if you’re sitting,” she says. These women have spent enough years of their lives trying to look cute without exposing their underwear. They prefer short shorts.
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The idea that you should “dress your age” is getting easier and easier to rebuke, Djalali says. She gets far fewer negative comments these days than in the first few years when she started blogging about style. “There’s kind of a mindset that you become invisible at a certain age as well and you just kind of float into the background,” she says. “I think more women are embracing the fact that: No, we’re not invisible, we’re still here, fashion still plays a big role in our lives and that it is just as important as it was when we were in our 20s and 30s and 40s.” Nicholas agrees: “I think it’s important for mature women to show that in our mature years we’re still viable—we can still look great in fashion, we can still access some of the trends and wear them appropriately.”
For McIntosh, a designer, her short skirts have been selling better with older customers ever since she started modeling them herself. Seeing a woman with gray hair in little skirts, she says, helped shoppers see themselves in the trend. Her new collection references the miniskirts of the ’70s—the era when her older customers came of age.
If miniskirts represents, as Mary Quant claimed, sex, freedom, movement, and being alive, then they don’t belong to any generation or age group. “If you’re not going to wear it at 50, 60, 70,” asks McIntosh, “when are you going to wear it?”
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
