Hemlines

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Joan Nicks

Hemlines have been equated with both fashion and culture, defining particular decades, generations, economies, media, and gendered ideologies, thereby working as imagistic markers within systems of popular culture. Couture culture's system of design traditionally has fed the contents of fashion magazines with fantasy imagery fabricating a "look," color, or hemline for readers. Such is the case with Christian Dior's New Look of 1947, the essential feature of which was the full skirt fish-tailing from cinched waist to mid-calf. This shape and length were adapted for department-store and catalogue sales and for home-sewing patterns, thus becoming part of popular fashion.

Hollywood's studio system of the 1930s and 1940s established a primary place for designers, whose costumes glamorized the female star, made her a screen icon, and typified the genre character she played, especially in melodrama and film noir. Two films released in 1957, Designing Woman (Minnelli) and Funny Face (Donen), parodied the arbitrariness of the fashion system and its fixation on the viewable woman.

Television sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s conventionalized the look of the well turned-out wife and mom, dressing her in the essential style and hemline seen in the costuming of Gracie Allen (The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show), Lucille Ball (I Love Lucy), Harriet Nelson (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet), and June Cleaver (Leave It to Beaver). Weekly, these original sitcom women performed their domestic roles wearing variations of the New Look's vertical line, most commonly the shirtmaker dress of trim bodice and sleeves, tailored collar, buttoned front, and mid-calf skirt flaring out from a defined waist. The full skirt was often underpinned by a crinoline. But, whether flaring or straight, their dresses often were accessorized by that symbol of the proper woman, a neat strand of cultured pearls. The middlebrow American homemaker represented in these sitcoms was a picture of postwar comfort, consumerism, and suburbia. She was also a trickster who juggled her husband's money to maintain her image by shopping for fashionable clothes.

British designer Mary Quant's radical miniskirt of the 1960s, emerging out of a "swinging" London of Carnaby Street and boutique-store culture, countered the Americanized femininity of Lucy and her sitcom generation.

Boutique culture's eclecticism prevailed into the 1970s, displacing the long-or-short hemline dilemma with fashionable options, notably the "maxi," which fell to the ankle or below. Mid-calf lengths, given the term "midi," were reincarnated in looser styles and fabrics. By the 1980s, the long-or-short hemline dilemma had become passe, though still part of fashion rhetoric in style magazines and department store flyers promoting "seasons," "the new" or "the latest" in ready-to-wear labels and commercial brands.

Asymmetrical hemlines in variation (a short front with dipping back, or a side-to-side diagonal) signalled the compromise of designers in the 1980s and early 1990s. Similarly, the flash effect of vertical off-side slits, found on every skirt length from maxi to mini, made one leg visible and emphasized the thigh. Manufactured in office wear as well as evening garb, this style allowed for greater mobility but also a loss of skirt-control when the wearer sat down. The ladylike posture of crossed legs became an instinctive defence against exposure. The vertical side-slit was less about utility than about projecting a feminine essence--reminiscent of the New Look, if more sexualized.

In the late 1990s the hemline debate has been given timely twists and fell victim to self-conscious parody in the popular television series Ally McBeal. Ally's short skirts (the micro-mini in tailored form) are a feminine tool to test, sometimes to arrest, the sexist patriarchal structures of the legal system and courtroom. Anne Hollander argues in Sex and Suits, "...the first [1960s] function of small, short modern skirts was to put women's clothed bodies into a complete physical correspondence with men's ... visual assumption of public equality for men and women." Ally McBeal's ultra short skirts bring forward this struggle for the contemporary young woman within American culture who presumably strives to be taken seriously as a professional and to be desirable to men. Ally's short hemlines and sputtering naive persona externalize the cultural tentativeness that followed a long line of fashionable sitcom figures, from Lucy and Gracie as maneuvering wives in the 1950s to Mary Tyler Moore's single woman negotiating with male newsroom colleagues and boyfriends in the 1970s.

Ally McBeal's character is popular culture's good girl reincarnated, whose short skirts do not render her sexually secure or successful. At the same time, Ally's quirkiness exudes what the cool if neurotic bad girl of 1950s "B" movies had to suppress. The "bad but beautiful" movie genre persona of actress Ida Lupino in Women's Prison (Seiler, 1950) is embodied by her simple, sophisticated costuming. In her pencil-slim, mid-calf dark skirt and crisp white blouses, Lupino's mean prison warden metes out a professional woman's control. Unable to handle power, in this tale of morality she is not only asexual but must die. It is the decent women prisoners, garbed in striped shirtmaker dresses, midi-length, who are domesticated and make sacrifices in order to survive. In the moment of her destruction, the warden's clean blouse and midi skirt give way to a straightjacket, her cold femininity and existence erased.