A hobble skirt was a skirt with a narrow enough hem to significantly impede the wearer's stride. It was called a "hobble skirt" because it seemed to hobble any woman as she walked. Hobble skirts were a short-lived fashion trend that peaked between 1908 and 1914. [1]
The hobble skirt may have been inspired by the Japanese kimono [2] [3] and by one of the first women to fly in an airplane. [4] At a 1908 Wright Brothers demonstration in Le Mans, France, Mrs. Edith Ogilby Berg asked for a ride and became the first American woman to fly as a passenger in an airplane, soaring for two minutes and seven seconds. [4] [5] She tied a rope securely around her skirt at her ankles to keep it from blowing in the wind during the flight. According to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, a French fashion designer was inspired by the way Mrs. Berg walked away from the aircraft with her skirt still tied and created the hobble skirt based on her ingenuity. [5]
The French fashion designer in the Berg story might have been Paul Poiret [4] who claimed credit for the hobble skirt, but it is not clear whether the skirt was his invention or not. [6] Skirts had been rapidly narrowing since the mid-1900s. [6] Slim skirts were economical because they used less fabric. [6]
The hobble skirt became popular just as women were becoming more physically active. [6]
Hobble skirts inspired hundreds of cartoons and comic postcards. [6] One series of comic cards called it the "speed-limit skirt." [4] There were several reports of women competing in hobble-skirt races as a joke. [6]
Boarding a streetcar in a hobble skirt was difficult. In 1912, the New York Street Railway ran hobble-skirt cars with no step up. [4] Los Angeles introduced similar streetcars in 1913. [7]
Hobble skirts were directly responsible for several deaths. [4] In 1910, a hobble-skirt-wearing woman was killed by a loose horse at a racetrack outside Paris. [4] A year later, eighteen-year-old Ida Goyette stumbled on an Erie Canal bridge while wearing a hobble skirt, fell over the railing, and drowned. [4]
To prevent women from splitting their skirts, some women wore a fetter or tied their legs together at the knee. [1] [8] Some designers made alterations to the hobble skirt to allow for greater movement. [6] Jeanne Paquin concealed pleats in her hobble skirts while other designers such as Lucile offered slit or wrap skirts. [6]
The trend began to decline in popularity at the beginning of World War I, as the skirt's limited mobility did not suit the wartime atmosphere. [9]
The next time skirts would be narrow enough to impede movement would be with the sheath skirts of the 1950s, first introduced at the end of the 1940s. [10] [11] [12] Though shorter lengths (from just below the knee to the lower calf) and advances in fabric would enable a little more movement than in the hobble-skirt era, [13] the 1950s sheath skirt's new waist-to-hem tightness, said to reveal the shape of the leg, still created problems of mobility, with split seams a familiar occurrence. [14] Nonetheless, they were widely promoted by designers and the fashion industry, their narrowness exaggerated even more by having models pose with one leg directly in front of the other. [15] Some other skirt styles of the time also had very narrow hems, particularly the knee-length puffball/pouf skirts shown by Pierre Cardin, [16] Yves Saint Laurent, and others from 1957 to 1960. [17] A few of Saint Laurent's 1959 skirts were so narrow at the hem that some fashion writers revived the word "hobble" to refer to them. [18] [19] Sheath skirts remained part of the fashion picture into the early 1960s and then went very much out of style with the rise of the flared miniskirts of the mid- to late sixties [20] [21] [22] and the easy, comfortable clothes of the 1970s. [23] [24] [25] [26]
Toward the end of the seventies, beginning in fall of 1978, some designers began reviving the narrow skirt silhouettes of decades past. Initially, many of them allowed some movement via slits, [27] [28] though not always. Some were so inhibiting that the word hobble was once again used to describe them. [29] When the tight silhouette of the 1950s sheath skirt was revived in the early 1980s, it was somewhat less restricting, as it was now usually produced in stretchier, often knit fabrics and could even be in mini lengths, though there is only so much movement possible in a knee-length or longer skirt that is tight all the way to the hem. [30] [31] These 1980s-style stretch sheath skirts in various lengths have been revived off and on ever since.
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Dior produces...an arrow-thin sheath....His tightest skirt has to be split for walking.
...[Dior] suits have hobble skirts...
Body line was the key term this year, as the sheath superseded New Look dresses....The designers of the most uncompromising sheaths were Dior...and Schiaparelli...The daytime sheath was seen at all three main fashion capitals...The sheath was the most fashionable evening line.
[T]he sheath...was attainable as a result of developments in corsetry, such as the use of nylon and light elastic net.
American Vogue emphasized that...[w]e want skirts we can step out of an automobile in without splitting their sides...
To make skirts look even narrower at the knee, models are photographed with one leg behind the other...
Cardin's...skirts...swell out over the hips and then are caught in around the knees.
Castillo of Lanvin has a whole new way with skirts. Fullness from the waist is gently pulled in about the knees as if by a drawstring to create his...teardrop silhouette.
Yves Saint Laurent at Dior raises the skirt to the knees...and pulls the skirt in to a tight knee-band....Vogue...show[ed] the hobble first in its 'least exaggerated'...form before leading up to the 'extreme trendsetter'.
...Yves Saint Laurent['s]...newly cut skirt...seemed to constrict the knees and then balloon above them. The skirt obviously was based on the hobble skirts of yore....The majority of the daily newspaper reporters immediately labeled it 'hobble'...
Take the anti‐establishment 60's...: the untamed manes of the flower children, the faded jeans of the affluence‐rejecting hippies, the discarded bras of the women's liberation movement, the knee‐freeing skirts..., and the street‐imitating gear of the radical chic...share...an antifashion attitude that became...powerful and pervasive...
Movement and freedom keynoted...skirts that widened into A-lines...
Snug dresses are...uncomfortable, [Courrèges] points out...
In the 1970's...[s]portswear emerged as the dominant theme, implying a relaxed fit and considerable versatility, since most clothes were made in interchangeable parts....For a number of years, it offered a serviceable way of dressing, geared to active women's lives, adjusting to vagaries of climate, adapting easily to travel requirements. As the sportswear onslaught continued, clothes lost their linings and interfacings, becoming softer, looser, less structured. Almost everything became as comfortable to wear as a sweater.
What women have found appealing is the freedom of the full shapes, which offer no restraint on wide strides and easy movements.
...[A] straight skirt crop[s] up here and there. Anyone who remembers how it feels to wear one will not welcome its...return.
Straight skirts have vanished.
[T]he skimpiness of the styles made the skirt slits obligatory — otherwise, the wearer would not be able to move.
Many of the skirts are so narrow that slits are indeed necessary to permit the wearer to take a healthy stride.
Karl Lagerfeld ... had ... hobble skirts that are impossible to walk in...
...[H]ow explain the resurgence of short, tight skirts, body-cupping knitted dresses, spindly heels and other constricting clothes that can only be described as sexist? Favored by a small fashion-oriented cult in Paris, the styles by such designers as Azzedine Alaia, Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana ... run counter to the flowing, unrestricted ... look, and many women find them offensive.
[Azzedine Alaïa, Claude Montana, Thierry Mugler, Jean-Paul Gaultier, i]n these designers' collections, waistlines are usually taut, heels are high ... and, while the designers generally deny it, many of the clothes are restrictive.
