This week I’m wearing: the maxiskirt

Maxis can be seen as liberating – from fake tans, high heels, the “Do my legs look like sausages in this?” dilemma...

(ZAC FRACKELTON)

Lisa Armstrong in a Osman Yousefzada maxiskirt

I hate long skirts. I mean really loathe them. They make my flesh creep. Not physically – that would be weird – but psychologically I could get quite worked up. Wearing one in 1911, or 1711, or any of the past 2,990 years when the big news in fashion was that skirts were floor-sweeping, again, I understand. To shroud three-fifths of your body in one when you have the choice not to – that’s got to be contrary.

The maxi, as the long skirt was rebranded in the late Sixties (when life was so aesthetically challenged that someone actually came up with a design called the Ford Mustang and managed to sell it), undermines everything women have achieved in the past 100 years. Not the right to pole-dance, or have your labia remodelled, but all the other stuff.

Admittedly the maxi doesn’t impede movement in the way that the hobble does, but it’s not exactly a liberating force. All that suffocating fabric. And nine times out of ten, it’s the kind of fabric that looks like a crumpled old rag the moment you do anything challenging in it. I know one fashion director who used to suspend herself by the door straps when travelling by car so she wouldn’t crease her maxis. It’s not cool, is it?

But it has not escaped this column’s notice that for the past few years there has been a creeping maxi-misation in the dress department, especially during the warmer months. So even though Nicole Richie appears to turn into a sub-species of Mama Cass in maxidresses, it was time to try out at least a skirt.

But which one? The new maxi is meant to hang slouchily off the hips – the non-lung-threatening equivalent of a ciggie dangling from your lips, perhaps. It mustn’t be tiered, floaty or reminiscent in any way of old Flake adverts. It mustn’t make you feel like a surrendered wife. Cheap, clingy fabrics are also bad.

This narrowed the field by about 98 per cent. In the nick of time, I remembered I already owned an Osman Yousefzada maxiskirt, although I’d never worn it as a maxi because to my mind, it worked so much better as a strapless or one-shoulder dress.

Next challenge: what to do with it? American Vogue puts them with jackets, shirts – whatever you’d wear with a shorter skirt. In reality, anything too formal above the waist looks peculiar. Keeping it simple – a good T-shirt, a slouchy boyfriend cardigan, a nice belt and some slightly odd sandals to remind everyone that you’re not Nanny McPhee – seems to do the trick.

Maybe maxis can even be seen as liberating – from fake tans, high heels (long skirts look wrong with most of them), the “Do my legs look like sausages in this?” dilemma…

I can’t see them catching on when you’ve got a serious appointment in the boardroom or a hot date, but on those mornings when it’s not quite cold enough to wear thick black tights, but not sufficiently tropical to go bare-legged, the maxi may have something. Trousers, to be fair, have the same something, but sometimes you can’t face yet another day in jeans.

American Vogue, by the way, has tried to give the maxiskirt a swishy modern feel by announcing that the new way with skirts is to wear long during the day, short at night. Nice try, but I give the “new long” one more issue – two at most. Models’ legs are too gorgeous to be hidden away under long skirts for months.