Obviously, there are many different types of skirts. But the specificity of the pencil skirt has its own unique story. The first mention of this straight-line skirt wasn’t until the 1880s, but it was largely due to the Asian influence of the early 20th century that the subject was spread into Western society. An earlier version of the pencil skirt was conceived at the hand of Paul Poiret. Both have the same characteristic of being equipped with a narrow hem at the bottom, disrupting the gait of the Western woman just like geishas impeded by their kimonos. Before World War I, the skirt got shorter. From the feet, the length crept up to the middle of the calf. Recognized as the liberator of women’s bodies, Poiret would put his muses to the test with this fashion. In the end, the designer freed women from the corset only to imprison them in yet another set of fabric shackles. Denounced by the Pope, this earlier incarnation of the pencil skirt would also be ridiculed by satirists.
It wasn’t long before World War II was erupting throughout the European continent. In light of strict rationing, the British government asked the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers to create styles that would require less fabric. A straight skirt with a simple cut was thus thrust upon women. Politics isn’t a matter of extravagance or coquettishness. It was a reaction to this censorship of creative liberty that Christian Dior triumphed with his New Look in 1947, these large skirts that required several meters of fabric. Copied by all, he would renounce them in his Fall 1954 runway, presented within the H collection that Time would dub the “Second Look”, and create its polar opposite: the one and only pencil skirt. For Christian Dior, it was “an ephemeral architecture made to exalt the proportions of the female body.” He wanted it to be “constructed, molded onto the curves of the female body.” A veritable sculptor, he maneuvered fabric like clay to envelop the woman as closely as possible, elongating the torso, amplifying and plumping up the female curves right down to the knee in a perfect balance between the shoulders and the hips. Through this anatomical work, the designer revealed the body without showing it off.
Little by little, the pencil skirt would show up in the wardrobes of women from all walks of life and styles. They dress up business women, who adopt it as a uniform with a chic, minimalist vibe, just as much as icy Hitchockian blonds or the bourgeois appearance of Parisian housewives. While the skirt may partially constrain the body, it is also the object of a certain sensuality what with the undulations of the body, a captivating dance that is even more accentuated if worn with high heels. Dita Von Teese uses and abuses this power in her erotica-burlesque shows. Another actress that made this piece an iconic object: Angelina Jolie, named the “Queen of the Pencil Skirt” after the release of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”.
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