Once, when you complimented someone’s skirt or dress, he had a tough chance of replying, “Thanks, it’s in the pocket!” Nowadays, you’re more likely to be met with a different response, or rather a correction: “Thanks, it’s actually a skort.”
The skirt, long relegated to the tennis court or the little girls’ section, has been promoted more for its practicality than its stylishness for most of its century-long history. But this summer, the dress — which is to say, shorts that look like skirts — is everywhere, to the delight of chafed thighs the world over. At the moment, there is More Google searches for the item than at any other point in the past 20 years. It is, gloriously, the summer of the skirt.
It is possible that the film Challengers It has something to do with it. Tennis fashion has always influenced style, whenever culture paid attention to it. In this spring’s sexiest romantic drama, combining sweaty, rock-hard bodies and bisexual polyamory, Zendaya wore a variety of skirts not only in the movie, but also on her much-lauded press tour.
The current iteration of Skortsmania is retrograde challenger, Although, and can be traced back to the spring of 2021, when a few skirts went viral on TikTok and searches for clothing some shopping website double. Trend forecaster Chalk it up A renewed nostalgia for ’90s and Y2K fashion and Internet-born micro aesthetics like dark academia, which fetishize collegiate staples like tweed, sweaters and preppy athletic uniforms. In the years since, brands have capitalized on the interest, creating more styles not only in traditional athletic fabrics but also in suitwear that mimics cotton, linen and materials.
Women unveil their skirt hauls on TikTok, checking out the latest options Lululemon or Urban OutfittersAppreciate them for their usefulness against the wind or The dreaded riding-up which have produced miniskirts since time immemorial. Crucially, they allow curvy women to stop painful chab rubbing and revel in micro-minis without resorting to mismatched bike shorts underneath. While Google’s interest in bike shorts and workout clothes are the top athleisure trends for 2020 and 2021, respectively, skirts have become even more popular over the past three summers, helped by a serious skirt fangirl named Taylor Swift. They are worn all Over The place.
Masked like shorts skirt, then “dub”trouser skirt, first appeared in the 1890s as part of a fun new craze: cycling. In the early 20th century, college women embraced shorts because they did all the activities their mothers didn’t: they rode bikes, they attended gym classes and played outside, and soon began wearing them for leisure as well. But men and older women scoffed at shorts, just as women’s bloomers did in the mid-19th century. An etiquette writer Written in 1936, “If you girls really knew how beautiful you look in a well-cut dress, you wouldn’t want to wear shorts. Of course, you have to be comfortable, ah, me! Even if men’s aesthetic sense has to be insulted to do so?
It’s trending as a pattern among countless fashion trends throughout history: young women embracing a look despite the screams of the rest of the world, until eventually everyone else sees and catches on to that look. By the 1950s, Bermuda shorts had become a wardrobe staple for both men and women. (The uproar continues: Athleisure, a clothing category that exploded in the U.S. in the 2010s, is responsible for a decade of controversy surrounding the idea of women wearing leggings outside the home.)
As usual, college women’s tastes won the day: Deirdre Clement, a fashion historian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, explains that the rise of the skirt as a new fashion powerhouse in California after the Great Depression was intricately tied to it. Unlike New York design houses, which released seasonal collections after French models, Californian brands were consumer-demand driven, designing items based on what was selling. “Skorts became so popular because people were like, ‘We want them.’ They’re comfortable, they’re easy to wear,'” she explains. The introduction of rayon and synthetic fibers at the same time, she adds, was also key to the rise of the skirt, allowing for more stretch at a cheaper price.
The 2020s saw a similar phenomenon. In early 2021, newly launched fast fashion brand Halara began selling its first collection of skirts, which immediately took off on TikTok. Global Brand President Gaby Hirata said that Lucid tennis skirt, a crisscrossed skort with a phone pocket, has been viewed over a billion times on TikTok Since then, Halara has sold more than a million of them, making it the brand’s fifth-best-selling item of all time. Today, they offer more than 500 versions of the skirt, which Hirata credits to how the brand obsessively crowd- and A/B-test product designs and produce more based on what’s already selling. Skort’s sales “continue to grow and improve,” he says. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had so many iterations.”
Another unexpected boost came in April, when Taylor Swift was spotted Coachella wearing a halter buckle skirt, which looks like a simple pleated mini skirt but has straps over the thighs like a garter belt. “It was quite surprising, because it doesn’t look like the usual athletic and tennis-inspired skirts on the market,” says Hirata.
Hirata explains that customers are constantly drawn to skirts that appear to be regular skirts but come with tailored shorts. Go to any website where many young women shop for skirts — Asos, Abercrombie and Fitch, Uniqlo, Old Navy — and you’ll find skirts made from nonathletic-wear fabrics. Miniskirts that were simply skirts a few years ago are now made with shorts sewn into them (Los Angeles Apparel, infamous for its sister brand American Apparel’s sexy schoolgirl skirts, now sells a variety of skirts).
When fitness influencer Casey Ho launched her athleisure brand PopFlex in 2016, “everything was sports bras and leggings,” she says. In 2021, she released her first line of skirts, which she designed to “make you feel like a ballerina – very feminine and ethereal.” his Pirouette skirtAn athletic short with a tiered, petticoat-inspired outer layer, was released in 2022 and sold out as a TikTok she made about it went viral.
It was the lavender skirt that famous skirt-lover Taylor Swift spotted Worn in a video clip in April to promote his new single “Fortnight”. (He even probably mentions it in the opening line of his song “imgonnagetyyouback”: “Lilac short skirt, that fits me like skin,” she sings — it’s technically a skirt, but as much as women love them, the term doesn’t really refer to the same sex.) Swift’s video gave the brand its biggest sales day of the year and its second of all time. Skorts, says Ho, are now Popflex’s best-selling product category.
Will the summer of the skirt last? It seems so for now. Hirata notes that one of the most important selling points of the scort is that many versions come with a phone pocket “People are becoming more and more addicted to their phones, and with that pocket, your phone is almost touching you,” he says. While younger women may like skirts because it allows them to wear short, tight skirts without worrying they’ll accidentally show too much, they’re also useful for the older demographic. “I bought my first skirt when my daughter was 2, and that’s when they started moving around a lot,” says Hirata.
“The thing about skirts is that they cater to the needs of the women who wear them,” adds Clemente. “As long as something is comfortable, practical and easy to wash – they’re the tenants of American clothing.” As Derek Thompson wrote in the Atlantic“The theme of Western fashion in the last century is: we take clothes designed for activity, and we adapt them for inactivity.”
Men — at least those on the cutting edge — are also embracing skirts. High-end menswear designers such as Comme des Garçons, Fendi, and Louis Vuitton debuted skirted trousers in their Fall 2024 collection earlier this year. A perfect dress shouldn’t be limited to women, after all, or short lengths: Halara recently started experimenting with maxi versions, which are now do something up The brand’s most popular skirt. Hirata said, “Factories joked to us, ‘You know what you’re doing? People don’t wear it to play tennis, what are you making it for?’ But eventually it stopped.”
I’ve always been a lover of miniskirts, but I’ve since graduated to this option that, I understand, is superior in every possible way. For anyone who once imagined summer dressing to be an excruciating pain, consider the skirt. Your thighs will thank you.
