The First Mini Skirt of the Year

ramblings on knee high socks, mini skirts, and daisy dukes

A couple weeks ago I woke up with my skin sticking to my sheets and sweat trailing down the nape of my neck. The morning sun illuminated my childhood bedroom and thick air wrapped me in a familiar humid embrace. The embrace of summer’s long awaited arrival after winter’s overstayed welcome. On this day I looked forward to getting dressed. I quickly knew that today would be the day; the first mini skirt of the year. Having recently purchased a plaid pleated mini skirt after searching for the perfect plaid pleated skirt since last summer, I was eagerly awaiting the first warm day of the season to wear it. Turning to my Pinterest boards for inspiration, I wanted to look cute and girlish, but simple. I am in my hometown after all. I tend to abstain from my usual cross accessories and ribbons in my hometown because people are a little too serious about Jesus Christ and dressing the same around here. I looked in the mirror and I felt pretty, excited to listen to my Hot Girl Anthems playlist and walk in the sun to the grocery store without shivering after a long winter of too many layers. 

As I walked down the street it wasn’t long before I felt a forgotten and yet instantly familiar sensation searing into my flesh. The burning sensation of eyes on my back. I forgot this feeling. I somehow forget it every year. When I dream of summer somehow without fail I am repeatedly struck with blissful amnesia about two things in particular; the pesky bugs and burning gaze of men. I attempt to mentally swat away their glances as I do with the mosquitos and black flies but it isn’t long before I self-consciously start pulling at my shirt, trying to minimize the gap of skin peeking between my skirt and top. I had purposely packed a gray hoodie for this reason. In the case that I felt too provocative in my own skin, and wanted to hide. I almost put it on, as I became hyper aware of myself through the gaze of others. But I decided against it, the hoodie remained at the bottom of my Jennifer's Body tote bag. 

I turn the music in my headphones up at maximum volume so I don’t hear any potential cat calls. This is a habit I picked up after moving to the city to drown out the sound of drunken men on patios trying to get my attention. If I hear them I feel an unfortunate obligation to acknowledge them. Despite all my attempts of deprogramming there are still some feminine conditioned habits that die hard. I can’t help but throw an awkward robotic smile back at the yells in spite of my discomfort, and oftentimes this uncomfortable smile is misinterpreted as a further invitation for advancement. So I try to drown out the sound of their voices all together. If I don’t hear them it feels like they never said anything at all. 

But I still see them, feel them, looking at me. A recent development is I stare back at them. I’m not sure if this is the right move. If my acknowledging of them is still soliciting an invitation of sorts, but I do it anyway. For some reason it makes me feel more humanized. Not just a pair of legs in a mini skirt. Perhaps influenced by the quote by Agnes Varda “The first feminist gesture is to say: “OK, they're looking at me. But I'm looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but how I see them.” I think this also comes from the fact that throughout my teenage-hood I didn’t really notice men looking at me as much, especially in cars, because I refused to wear my glasses in public and I was too poor to afford contact lenses. So in a way my blurred vision left me largely blissfully ignorant to the pervasive gaze of men who were likely far older than me, ogling at my teenage flesh. I remember on one occasion when I was 16 one of my friends said to me “I see the way men look at you from their cars when we walk down the street.” I had no idea what she was talking about at the time, and in all honesty didn’t believe her. I wasn’t a uniquely pretty teenager, but in a culture that fetishizes feminine youth it doesn’t take much to attract attention from old men. 

There's a strange moment in girlhood when clothing begins to metamorphosis into something more than just fabric. Suddenly skirts aren’t skirts but a beckoning, an invitation. One of the first times I remember my clothing  being a topic of contention was when I was 12 years old. It was common for many girls in my grade to wear those knee length plaid shorts with a graphic t-shirt that said some sort of silly saying with a cute animal or character on it. I was so excited when my mom brought me to the store to get a t-shirt of my own like all the popular girls in my grade were wearing. I remember picking a blue shirt with a pink cupcake on it because I always liked the combination of blue and pink. It was my favourite shirt, and I’d wear it as often as I could. Then one day my older brother came to visit, he was in his 20s at this point and when he came to visit he got mad at my mom “Why are you letting her wear that t-shirt?” I remember him asking her “Don’t you think it’s a little inappropriate?” I had no idea what he was talking about at the time. The t-shirt, parallel to the print of a cute pink cupcake character said something along the lines of “Sweet enough to eat.” I had never thought of the shirt in any sort of sexual way. And I still don’t think it was intentionally alluding to any sort of sexual nature. But I remember feeling slightly uncomfortable wearing that t-shirt after that moment. Fearful that I was unintentionally soliciting attention from men and of being non-consensually sexualized. 

The following summer I turned 13 years old, and the shorts got much shorter. I had swapped out my knee length plaid shorts for the tiniest denim shorts I could find. It’s funny, when my mom and I were shopping the summer before for the cupcake t-shirt and plaid cargo shorts I remember waiting for the dressing room. As I waited a pair of teen girls emerged from the stall, only a couple years older than me, they were wearing these tiny denim shorts. My mom said to me “You’re never wearing shorts like that.” and I nodded in agreement. At that point I had hardly hit puberty and still very much looked like a child, I couldn’t even picture myself wearing shorts that short on my awkward, boxy, childlike frame. But I looked at those older teenage girls with admiration, and secretly couldn’t wait until I grew just a little older and could dress and look like them. Just the next summer with the onset of puberty maturing my childish figure ever so slightly, and too much eyeliner around my eyes I was now transcending into teenagehood and as if in a ritualistic initiation ceremony I’d be in the same store, one year later, picking out my first pair of daisy dukes. Later that summer I was sitting on the sidewalk with some friends, and an 18 year old boy approached me and said I was cute. When I told him my age his eyes widened and he said “You can’t be wearing shorts like that at 13, men just see a pair of legs and go for it.” I didn’t see anything inviting about the way I dressed, it was hot outside and every girl in my grade dressed the same. But he was right, that summer as a freshly 13 year old wearing my first pair of daisy dukes I would receive the most amount of cat calls in the street than any summer thereafter. This was the first time I considered that showing my legs could mean something. 

When I was around 14 I started to try and emulate the style of Tumblr it-girls, wearing ripped tights and thigh-high socks with high waisted denim shorts and knock off American Apparel skirts. On one summer night my best friend and I made our way to a party in our friend's garage. We both wore some amalgamation of the Tumblr-girl trends of the time; oversized denim jackets, tattoo chokers, my friend's purple hair tied in space buns at the top of her head whilst my over-bleached and under-toned blonde hair hung long and messy at my waist. My over-the-knee socks were shoved down inside my combat boots because I felt uncomfortable and self conscious with the sexual comments and stares I experienced from adults when I wore these socks, so I concealed them in my shoes until we got to the party where I would promptly roll them back up over my knee. My friend and I talked about the sexualization we experienced from wearing over-the-knee socks, and our confusion and frustration surrounding it “I just don’t get it,” I remember venting in frustration “I’m showing less skin than if I wasn’t wearing the socks, how is it more sexual?” To us these socks were not an expression of sexuality, or an invitation to be sexualized, they were just fashion. I didn’t care about looking sexy, I wanted to be cool like Cara Delevigne, Alexa Chung, and Sky Ferreira.

Cara Delevingne, Alexa Chung, and Sky Ferreira circa the 2010s

Lauren Gross reflected on this awakening to gaze of grown men in her essay Delectatio Morosa, she reflects on the sudden shift in the way she saw herself as a young girl through the gaze of men after reading Nabokov’s Lolita as an adolescent “I was shocked by Lolita at first; and soon I began to be disturbed deep in my flesh by it. By the time I had finished it, the book had turned sex squarely in my direction and attached it to my body. And when I looked around, I discovered that all around me, the bodies of my little friends, these girls who rode their bikes in their Umbro shorts, who did ballet in pointe shoes, who secretly tried on their aunts’ sparkle lip gloss, who cried when they watched The Princess Bride during sleepovers—these half-grown girls—had become in my vision unexploded bombs waiting for male desire to light their fuses. I want to emphasize from the safety of my middle age that there was no real power in our tentative newfound status; but feeling oneself an object of attention can create the illusion of power. After all, there is a currency of attention, as well as a currency of attraction. Perhaps men had looked at us with lust before this, but I hadn’t noticed or felt the attention in my body. Now I did. Now I felt strange riding alone in cars with the fathers of  the children I babysat, or being out of the water in my bathing suit, though all my life I'd been a competitive swimmer. I felt the eyes of men on me. I was cowed by the heat and weight of this attention. In truth, there was a part of me that also loved it, craved their eyes, their heat, their intake of breath.” 

myself at 14 or 15

On that day, a couple weeks ago, when I wore the first mini skirt of the year, I was lost in thought, thinking of what would inevitably become this essay as I walked down the familiar residential streets of my childhood. The same streets I was getting cat-called at 12 and shoving my over-the-knee socks into my boot at 14. I thought of these moments when I became awakened to the inherent perceived invitation of my pre-teen and teenage flesh, and the way clothing had become something more than just fabric. When I broke free of my existential trance I looked up and noticed another person staring at me. Though this time it wasn’t a man double my age, instead it was a little girl of 9 years old. She trailed behind her mother and brother, kicking her feet as she stared at me. When we made eye contact she smiled at me and waved, I returned the smile and waved back at her. I remember what it was like to be that age, I was absolutely obsessed with any pretty or stylish older girl I saw. I couldn’t wait to wear makeup and dress in the clothes I wear now. As the little girl continued to smile at me from up the street I noticed that she is dressed relatively similar to myself, wearing a skirt and a simple t-shirt. And I silently question when exactly the day was that my clothing metamorphosed from fabric into an invitation. When my mini-skirts turned provocative, and my pigtails turned to handlebars. Or maybe that was always the case, there just comes a day when everyone feels comfortable enough to admit it.