Fashion 88 : Women Skirting Hemline Issue With Shorts
A lot of women have settled the great debate over skirt lengths. They’re wearing shorts instead.
Along with skirts in lengths that bared the knees or all but covered the ankles, the shorts suit was one of the looks designers offered for spring. Now that all the options are actually available in stores, a surprising number of women are choosing a single alternative: They want shorts for many occasions.
Designers call the look “put together,” especially when it’s worn with the full complement of jackets, good T-shirts, serious shoes and bags. And while the key ingredient, well-tailored short pants, does show off a lot of leg, most styles nearly touch the knee--and that’s more than you can say for a mini.
The name for the total effect is city shorts suit. And in Los Angeles, some women are even wearing it to work. Laurie Fullerton says she does for her job in a Sunset Plaza shop. She takes a playful approach, with a pair of cyclist-style shorts covered with rows of ruffles that she teams up with a bright-colored bolero.
More casually dressed Californians often wear basic, cycle-style shorts with longer, fitted jackets. It’s a version of a suit that designer Claude Montana showed in Paris several seasons back. And here in the capital of comfort, another kind of shorts suit starts with cutoff blue jeans. Women wear them with everything from band jackets and thrift-shop tuxedo jackets to tailored linen styles, pulled tight at the waist with wide belts.
Executive women say they get more for their money if they buy both a skirt and a pair of shorts to go with one jacket. Adolfo is one New York designer who offered that option for spring.
He showed silk shorts and a knee-baring skirt, along with the same seven-eighths-length coat. Patty Fox, fashion director for Saks in Beverly Hills, bought the set for herself. She says people don’t recognize that the two outfits are related.
“I wear the shorts for a younger, more contemporary look,” she said. “But in the store, we have to wear skirts.”
Ingrid Klee, a hair stylist who divides her time between salons in Beverly Hills and Frankfurt, puts her black-and-white check walking shorts together with a cropped linen jacket and black patent, wedge-heel shoes for work.
“It’s everywhere in Europe,” she said of the look. “And it’s very easy to wear.” But Klee hasn’t given up her minis. She still likes short skirts with high-heel shoes.
Fashion designers here and in New York say they keep watch on street fashion to see how women are taking to shorts for dress-up situations.
In Los Angeles, designer Karl Logan has been so impressed that he’s offering only one skirt in his next collection for fall. He’ll substitute shorts for long pants.
Logan started moving in that direction more than a year ago. At first, he recalls, his shorts styles didn’t sell very well. Now they’re best sellers, he finds.
His California-inspired fashion collections are more softly tailored than certain hard-core urban cuts. He likes walking shorts with breezy, trapeze jackets or more body-conscious jackets, cropped at the waist.
The year-old controversy about skirt shapes, from long to short and tight to loose, led women to this latest solution, Logan said. A recent trip to Chicago showed him that more working women there prefer the dressy shorts look as well.
“It wasn’t really the designers’ idea; they got it from women they saw in the streets,” he said. “This is like the mini versus the maxi skirt debate of 1969.” Given two extreme choices, women ignored them both and wore pantsuits instead, he recalled.
“It doesn’t look like you just came in from the beach,” noted designer Patricia Pastor, who is featuring shorts suits under the Perry Ellis label this season. “It’s more complete than that.”
In New York, young-spirited Pastor works in shining, cotton sateen for spring and summer. Under the Ellis label, she said, dressy shorts sell better than short skirts. “For most women they’re more palatable,” she finds. “You don’t have to worry that your skirt is up to here when you sit down. Women were tired of being uncomfortable.”
Just back from a trip to Paris and London, Pastor says she saw more women there wearing shorts than short skirts. And women who do wear skirts are choosing long, full styles. At Ellis, midcalf and longer lengths are selling best for fall, said Pastor.
In dress-up cities like New York, shorts aren’t appropriate for most office situations. In jobs where shorts do seem right, Pastor recommends wearing them with a matching jacket, natural-tone hosiery and 2-inch high-heel shoe. For casual dress she recommends bare legs and sandals.
Whatever else this trend tells fashion watchers, it certainly says the miniskirt is in trouble.
