Every couple of seasons the fashion press announces a new skirt length, and every couple of seasons the same scene plays out in our fitting room here in Sarasota. A woman comes in having read that the knee is back. She tries on a skirt that ends at the knee. She looks at herself for a long moment and says, quietly, that something is off, and then she cannot tell me what. Nothing is wrong with the skirt. It is stopping in the wrong place on her, and those are two different problems.
The runways really did move this fall
This part is not imagined. The knee turned up on enough fall collections this year to get called a shift, with Fendi, Gucci and Michael Kors among the houses putting the hem back above the calf after several seasons in which the midi owned everything. The trade press has been writing it up all summer as the length that finally replaced the midi.
In Italy, as far as I can tell, nothing happened.
I was in a showroom outside Florence in the spring and again in July, and the women working the racks were wearing what they wore last year, and the year before. Not out of stubbornness. They simply were not treating the hemline as an open question, because for them it was settled a long time ago, and not by a runway.
Two women, one skirt, two different answers
Here is the thing I did not understand for years, and I sold clothes for a living while not understanding it.
Put the same skirt on two women of roughly the same height. On one of them the whole leg reads long and unbroken. On the other, the identical skirt makes her look shorter than she is, and she will blame the skirt, or the shoes, or herself, in that order. Neither woman is wrong about what she is seeing. The skirt has landed in a good place on one body and a bad place on the other, and it is the same number of inches from the floor in both cases.
So a length that is announced as correct for a season is correct for nobody in particular. It is an average. Averages look fine on a runway, where the models were selected to be close to the average in the first place.
Which brings us to what an Italian woman is actually doing when she stands in front of a mirror with a hem in her hand.
The hem has exactly one job
It has to stop where the leg is getting narrower, and never where the leg is at its widest.
That is the whole rule. Look at your own lower leg barefoot: it swells out below the knee, reaches its widest point somewhere in the middle of the calf, then tapers toward the ankle. A hem that cuts straight across the widest part of that curve makes the eye read the leg as wide and short, no matter how good the skirt is. Move the same hem an inch or two up, so it sits just under the knee, or two inches down, into the taper, and the line resolves. Nothing changed but the landing.
Stylists say a version of this too, so I am not claiming Italy invented it. What is Italian is the refusal to renegotiate it every season. She found her landing once, probably in her twenties, probably by accident, and now she buys skirts that end there and has them altered when they do not. A friend of hers wears a length two inches different and they both look right, and neither of them thinks this is remarkable.
There is one corollary worth knowing. If your landing sits low, down in the taper near the ankle, the length will be beautiful and slightly impractical, because a narrow skirt that long stops you from taking a full stride. That is what the slit is for. It is not decoration. It gives back exactly the walking room the length takes away, which is why so many Italian midis have one and why the good ones are cut at the front rather than the side.
Try it this week with something you already own and have never quite worn. Stand in the mirror, find where your calf stops being wide, and see how far your hem is from it. It is usually not far. That is the frustrating and wonderful part.
If you want one that already lands there, this taupe pleated midi from Tensione In ends mid-calf and has the slit cut where it belongs. The rest of what came back from Italy is in the skirts.
She travels to Italy each season to hand-select the boutique's collection.
Keep reading
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The Only Three Colors Italian Women Are Buying This Fall
