Today, a skirt is a subject of women's wardrobe. The only exception is the kilt, and even then, Scottish men do not wear it daily, but take it out of the closets on holidays and significant days. But at the dawn of mankind, the division into male and female clothes did not exist. Ancient people covered only the lower half of the body using loincloths from the skins of dead animals or plant leaves. We can say that it was then that the story of the appearance of the skirt began.
The term "skirt", which is derived from the Arabic word "jubba", for a long time meant knee-length clothes gathered at the gates and belted, as well as the lower part of the dress. Only in the 15-16th century did the skirt separate from the dress when they began to practice its tailoring separately from the bodice.
For the first few millennia, people were equal, so men, women, old people and children dressed almost the same. But evolution does not stand still: living conditions have changed, moral, ethical and religious differences have appeared, clothes have also changed. As ancient Greek and Roman history shows us, in the modern sense of the word women did not have skirts in those days; they wore tunics without sleeves and raincoats. And the men of those centuries with the length of the outfit showed their significance and social status: young men wore short clothes, rich and revered men - longer.
The further history of skirts confirms that the practice of demonstrating one’s status using the length of clothing has been preserved in subsequent centuries. Only now women have begun to do this, because gradually the skirt migrated precisely to the women's wardrobe.
Moral and religious orders forbade the ladies to show their feet to others, all women began to wear dresses to the floor, but representatives of the wealthy estates came to the aid of long trains. The church tried to show that before God all people are equal. The history of skirts did not worry medieval religious leaders; they declared the train a devil’s invention and refused to let sins to all the ladies in “long-tailed” dresses. But, despite all the prohibitions, trains remained popular for several centuries. The history of the skirt briefly preserved information about the longest train in the world. The dress for the coronation of Queen Catherine the Second was complemented by a seventy-meter “tail” carried by fifty pages.
But fashion is changeable, and in the sixteenth century, ladies begin to show off the splendor and width of their skirts. This style was called “verdugado”, from the Spanish word “verdugo” - “hoop”. It was the Spanish fashion designers who invented the frame of the hoops, which made the skirt voluminous, but did not prevent women from moving relatively easily. Sometimes the outfits were so vast that the ladies struggled to squeeze through the doorways.
The history of skirts does not stop there, the skeleton is replaced by numerous lower skirts. In the nineteenth century, crinoline and tournaments were invented. And the skirt in the form in which we know it appeared only in the twentieth century. Mini, maxi, slit skirts , pencils and pleats - in the arsenal of modern women there is a huge variety of such a seductive wardrobe detail.