The surprisingly controversial history of the midi-length skirt

“Did every woman in Manhattan wake up one morning and decide to buy a leopard-print midi skirt?” This is the question, posed by writer Jess Bergman on Twitter, that women nationwide found themselves asking as they realized they were under siege by a particular silk skirt this summer.

The leopard midi has become not just an but the item to own this season, and the spotted look could be easily caught out in the wild, walking around the subway, grabbing mimosas on a patio, or out grocery shopping at a farmers market. Everywhere you look, the spotted midi seems to be present. There is even an Instagram page dedicated to it called LeopardPrintMidi. But the midi hasn’t always been this popular. In fact, in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, America was in what Women’s Wear Daily called the “hemline war.”

By the seventies, fashion had became a supermarket. There were so many options and styles that you could pick and choose what you wanted to pop into your cart. The miniskirt came from London in 1964 and quickly spread from mannequins to dancefloors to office buildings. At first it hovered just above the knee, but it slowly began cropping up and up until it had nowhere to go except back down.

In 1968, WWD declared that the mini was out and the midi — a long skirt that comes to about mid-calf — was in. A leader in its industry that knew when tides were about to shift, WWD’s predictions usually came true. “The whole look of American women will now change and diehard miniskirt adherents are going to be out in the fashion cold,” the publication promised. The thing was, the world wasn’t ready to hide the leg again.

On June 1968, the magazine banned miniskirts from the office, writing in a memo: “We all know minis are dead.” When press and buyers went to the Paris haute couture showings in ‘69, a WWD headline announced, “Au Revoir Mini, Bonjour Longuette,” using the French name for the style.

Because the magazine gave the new length the go-ahead, department stores started to order them, and major designers started to mimic the look in their own lines in fear of being left out of the mainstream. In June of 1970, the high-end department store Bonwit Teller made 95 percent of its fall fashion midi-length. That same year, eight of New York’s biggest stores carried $70 million worth in midi stock; in Los Angeles, Joseph Magnin converted 95 percent of its stock into the calf-skimming look; in Chicago, Peck & Peck had pushed every mini out of its store. It was like the style ceased to exist. Even Vogue magazine told its staffers not to wear minis to work after August 1.

But the public just came out of a six year long campaign that convinced them to put the leg on full display, and the abrupt change back into knee-covering lengths felt like whiplash. The curt shift had people resisting.

“I won’t take this sitting down!” Mrs. Alan Siegel told New York Times as she wheeled her 5‐month‐old on Third Avenue. “I don’t think women can be pushed around like this anymore. I have no intention of wearing anything long for summer, and I will be very sad if the short skirts disappear.”

“We are about to enter upon The Great Midi Crisis of 1970. In certain quarters, it is sure to rival pollution as the No. 1 issue of the year. Not to mention Vietnam,” New York Times wrote in 1970. “Already, Seventh Avenue is quaking. Enemies are being made, and friends are being lost.” Smaller designers were so concerned with the backlash that they gave anti-midi speeches before their fashion shows. But major fashion forces like Valentino, Saint Laurent, Dior, and Oscar de la Renta endorsed the look, nudging the inevitable change along.

“I think fashion was just ready for it. The mini skirt had been in style for a number of years, and it was time for a change. A decade was ending and we were moving into a new period,” Kevin Jones, the Curator for the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising Museum, shares with The Goods. Take Yves Saint Laurent’s 1971 spring haute couture Forties show for example, which brought back the silhouette of WWII. The midi was an old style and shouldn’t have been earth shattering, but the show was savaged by critics.

“He was trying to bring the silhouette back of occupied Paris in WWII. Particularly the certain kind of French woman who was willing to collab with the Nazi occupiers,” Jones explains. YSL’s collection was full of calf-skimming skirts, shoulder pads, big furry cropped jackets, and flowers in the hair. It had gritty glamour. “It was a style very popular during the war in Paris with this particular kind of woman. And it was a shock during the fashion show because everyone at the show watching it remembered the war. There was a big brouhaha.” The midi might have been seen as dated by shoppers, but it was actually pretty subversive if they took a minute to think about it.

But ultimately it wasn’t the design that put consumers off — it was the marketing scare-tactics. Women felt like they didn’t have a choice but to adopt the style, and the skirt was quickly labeled as fascist for that reason. It was a dictated decree, and magazine covers promised readers that if they didn’t drop an entire paycheck to rehaul their wardrobes, they would face the risk of being seen as outdated. The lack of choice grated.

”I am short, so if I wore a midi skirt, it would look as though I were borrowing my grandmother’s clothing,” Mrs. Mary Bartos, a housewife, told the Standard Speaker in 1970. “And with the high cost of food and everything else, who can afford to get rid of an entire wardrobe of short clothing for a type of apparel which is neither practical nor appealing?”

Seemingly oblivious to the reluctant public, WWD kept relentlessly pushing the new style, giving coverage only to the controversial length. One Seventh Avenue designer even told The Philadelphia Inquirer that a light sprinkling of blackmail was involved to back the trend. “Women’s Wear said if I didn’t do midis they wouldn’t cover my fall collection, so I made them.”

Thanks to these authoritarian-like fashion forecasts, the trend was met with rebellious cynicism. A 1970 poll by New York’s Daily News reported 83 percent of readers were wearing skirts above the knee in defiance. As the fashion industry stayed oblivious to public opinion, news headlines had fun with escalating the hemline war. “Women Call it Sleazy, Dowdy, Depressing; but Designers Say It Will Catch On Yet,” The Wallstreet Journal wrote in 1970. “Midi Skirts Aren’t Safe And All Must Be Recalled,” the Courier Post joked. “New Midi-Skirts Seen Aid To Birth Control,” Tyrone Daily Herald speculated.

Others made fun of the dowdy length. “There seems to be a conspiracy to deck girls out for a day in the office as if they were being prepared for Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.” Detroit Free Press wrote. Then others riffed on the fascist-like browbeating of the industry. The Tampa Times wrote a piece called “The Fury of a Fuehrer Scorned,” where Hitler hid in a bunker underneath Seventh Avenue’s subway, organizing how to force midi skirts onto the New York women.

”Mein Fuehrer. Seventh Avenue is in ruins. The midi-length skirt was bombed. All is lost. We must surrender,” one of his aides told him. “Don’t tell me we have lost the war,” the Fuehrer shouted. “We will counter-attack. We will punish all those who refuse to wear the midi-skirt.”

While department stores held down their forts, there really were mini skirt forces marching in. There were anti-midi demonstrations on the streets of Washington, D.C on May 1970, where women protested against the authoritarian system of the fashion industry. “There won’t be anything else to buy. They’ll just be making midis,” one protestor explained to The Dispatch.

In July 1970 a group of 50 mini-skirt clad women marched in front of a group of stores in Miami, carrying homemade protest signs with messages like “Up Your Midi” and “Things Go Better with Minis.” One woman appeared in a midi coat on the street and drew a wave of boos. It turned to cheers when she flashed open her coat and revealed a mini dress underneath. Everyone from middle aged moms to teenagers walked in the “hems up” protests. “I hated the midcalf look in 1946 when I was 24, and despise it now,” said 48-year-old Ann Pollard, who marched with her 17-year-old daughter.

Other anti‐midi‐ists held “clip ins,” in which they took out scissors and hacked off midis in front of department stores, a sinister display. Others wrote anti-midi songs, took to signing petitions to send to magazine editors, and burned their department store credit cards from stores that were pushing the unwanted length.

Hundreds of anti-midi groups sprung up across the U.S., with funny acronyms that showed the absurdity of the situation. There was SOCK (Save Our Cute Knees), in Detroit; FADD (Fight Against Dictating Designers) in Washington; WHIM (Women Happy In Minis), in Boise; and MAMMA (Men Against the Maxi‐Midi Atrocity) in Klosters, Switzerland.

“Our best weapon is to stay away from the stores,” said Mrs. Michael Deem, the co‐founder of FADD to The New York Times. “If the stores don’t give us a choice, we are simply going to push the idea of ‘no buy’ for fall.”

Phyllis Tweel, an assistant television producer, organized Girls Against More Skirt (GAMS) for the same reason. “We belong to a generation that isn’t going to be pushed into wearing something we don’t want to wear simply because it’s new,” she said. “We are going to actively resist buying midis.”

FADD, along with two other mini-groups, went as far as filing a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against WWD, citing the trade publication’s campaign for the midi was “false advertising.” The complaint stated that the magazine had “deliberately distorted news stories, blatantly staged photographs, and ruthlessly silenced opposition in furtherance of its aims to coerce the public and the fashion industry into acceding to its unconscionable demands.”

There were consequences. Vogue had a 38 percent drop in ad revenue in the first three months of 1971. By 1974, several couture houses and small manufacturer filed for bankruptcy as women continued to stay away in droves. Even worse for those backing the midi, pant suit sales nearly doubled over the year as women decided to ditch the skirt debacle altogether.

But be that as it may, the mini was still not going to prevail. Fashion changes, whether we want it to or not. WWD was so aggressive in its coverage because it saw the wind changing. “If you’re an expert in something, you do have you pulse on things a little more than a general customer,” Jones explains. “So you know where fashion is going, and sometimes it’s one of those aspects of being inevitable. So if you want to be in the forefront of fashion and want to lead, you’re going to take risks and push something that you know will eventually catch on.”

It-girls like French actress Catherine Deneuve and Spanish designer Paloma Picasso were already seen at flea markets, poking through boxes looking for the ‘40s-inspired length. There have also been op-eds in 1971 that suggested the midi was turning into a defiant statement piece akin to the Man Repeller style of today. One journalist, Judith Viorst, wrote a column where she reminisced about how the same men at cocktail parties who would light her cigarettes and ask if they could get her drinks the year before, would now greet her with remarks like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” In another instance, one of her midi-clad friends walked past a table of businessmen in a fancy French restaurant and was hissed at thanks to her heavy skirts. But these ladies kept at it.

“I’m bored with trying to dredge up a snappy comeback to their attacks on everything from my good judgement to my mental health,” Viorst wrote. “And I’m sure there are questions of more immediate interest to mankind that whether I have become a victim of Women’s Wear Daily, a tool of the garment industry, and the oldest gypsy maiden in D.C.”

Now with the new leopard print midi craze, you get to decide which team you are on. In 1970, it was a divider of nations. Today, the response is much more tame, even in this normally outraged social media time. But love it or hate it, as we have seen, no amount of protest will stop fashion from reinventing itself since the zeitgeist is a constantly fidgeting thing. But the good news is that fashion is also filled with déjà vu. When hemlines fall, they will only creep back up. Fashion is always cyclical — even if sometimes it requires a little push.

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