"Poor Sharon's Skirt"

I own a skirt.

At the moment, it's officially just the one.

I've been going through my stuff lately and slowly identifying things that are just taking up space in my home which should be released into the wild in the hope that someone else actually uses them.

It's kind of connected to the yurt thing I was talking about on my other blog - I have too much crap I don't need and I don't use, so I'm trying to think about what I would actually take with me if I had to downscale to a yurt, and then asking myself very seriously whether anything I wouldn't take with me is worth keeping at all.

Recently, two of my skirts bit the dust.  I've been keeping them because I feel I should own skirts.  I haven't been wearing them because they don't meet my skirtage needs.

I wear pants, most of the time.  Actually, jeans.  I'm a denim girl.

What I require from an item of clothing is a very specific (and apparently highly unfashionable) list:

• Hard wearing
• Fit to move around and do stuff
• Reasonably modest (as in, I don't like showing too much skin on legs, shoulders or torso)
• Likely to avoid falling down/riding up/exposing underwear
• With pockets

I don't necessarily need pockets for shirts and blouses, but pants and skirts need pockets.

So, what I want from a skirt is something sturdy, below the knee, likely to keep my underwear safely under my outerwear at all times, and equipped with storage options.

I currently have one skirt that matches that criteria, so I currently have one skirt.  The other skirts failed on the "hard wearing" or "has pockets" front, so I never wore them.  After several years of never wearing them, I have decided to set them free.

I would like to replace them with skirts I actually would wear, but I can't find any in the shops.  They're all either too flimsy for my liking or too short.  I just want a good, serviceable denim or cotton skirt (with pockets) that goes past my knees.  Apparently I'm asking for too much.

As for the remaining skirt, I've decided I really should try to wear it occasionally - if for no other reason that I'm sick of hearing surprised cries of "you're wearing a skirt!" every time I do wear it.

Part of the reason I rarely wear skirts is the fact that I rarely find a skirt I actually want to wear.  The biggest part of the reason is the fact that I hate having my clothing pointed out to me as if I'm doing something unspeakably radical just because I'm dressed "like a girl" for a change.

Yes, I'm wearing a skirt.  I'm allowed to do that.  I understand women fought for several decades in the middle of the last century to give us the freedom to wear whatever the hell we want.  I sincerely hope that one day men will be able to earn the same right.

I wore my skirt to work last week and managed to be in the building for all of five minutes before someone decided to point it out to me.  This prompted a friend of mine to lament "poor Sharon's skirt!"

Poor Sharon's skirt, indeed.

Burn your pants.

I'm thinking of getting a utility kilt.

There are two basic reasons for why I don't wear a skirt very often:

1. Whenever I wear a skirt, people insist on pointing it out to me: "Oh my god! You're wearing a skirt!", "Hey, you're wearing a skirt!", "Hey, nice skirt!" (it's not - it's a boring brown skirt that wouldn't get a mention at all if I wore skirts more often)

2. Skirts just aren't as practical as pants. Wear a good pair of pants and you can do all sorts of things in them. Wear a skirt and suddenly you have to change the way you move - not for the better, either. You can't tackle obstacles as easily, you have to walk around things you would otherwise step over and you need to think carefully about the way you sit and stand. It's restrictive, and doesn't usually involve decent pockets. We all know how important pockets are in my universe.

Which is why I find this appealing:


Yes, that's right, it's a kilt with cargo pockets.

Also, a retractable tool loop, which I'm sure will come in very handy at some point. You know, when I start carrying around hammers as part of my duties... Oooh! - I could start carrying a mallet when going to help people with the public computers. That would be entirely appropriate.

I used to work for a guy who wore kilts as his normal day wear (and, for that matter, as his fancy evening wear). He would really only switch to pants of some description if he had to be up a ladder on a school ground. He always maintained that unbifurcated garments were superior in every way - especially for men (for reasons I won't elaborate). He also always maintained that kilts were for men - women wore "pleated skirts".

Which is just typical of the strangle hold men have on useful garments, frankly. Even when it comes to skirts, men get to claim the most practical garments for themselves.

Anyone who has ever worn a kilt knows it provides the greatest flexibility of movement with the lowest likelihood of flashing - add a sporran and you could jump over any obstacle you wanted without fear. There's a reason why highland laddies go running through the hills in their kilts, and the fellows at the highland games wear kilts for every sport (actually, there's a second reason for that: nudity is frowned upon for such events these days).

By the way, if you've ever taken a close look at a sporran, you would notice something instantly - it's just like a purse, only it's designed to stay out of the way and never be accidentally put down and forgotten - no matter what you do, it stays neatly in your lap. In other words: purses intended for men are more useful than purses designed for women.

I am tempted by these "utility kilts" for a number of reasons. For one thing, you get the practicability and freedom of a kilt without actually needing to commit to tartan - the plain colour could pass for a skirt, making it less obvious that I am (once again) resorting to menswear in order to avoid useless clothes. For another, it has pockets - thereby precluding the need for a sporran, which would draw attention to the fact that my "skirt" is actually a kilt. Thirdly, they are machine washable. If there is one thing I love more than pockets on a garment, it's the words "machine washable".

And, living in the Tropics, hemp seems like a better option than wool or synthetic blends.

The problem with this, though, is that if I actually bought and wore one of these things, I would eventually become a kilt wearing, banjo playing, juggling, bike collecting, multilingual Australian-Estonian librarian... and something tells me that's not normal.

knickerbocker holiday

Heh, the things you end up doing when you're on holidays.

So, we got lost in Oamaru and accidently found ourselves in a little neighbourhood where all of the buildings are from the Victorian period and made of limestone.

Turns out there's a little Victoriana thing happening, with a bicycle museum dedicated to penny farthings and the like (I know, I get lost and find a bicycle museum - what are the odds, right?)

Also in this area is a shop dedicating to clothing from the 1890s through to the 1920s. I'm not kidding. They make a lot of the clothes on site for re-enacters and the vintage car people.

I just happened to find a pair of early 1910s style knickerbockers. They just happened to fit me very comfortably. This, in spite of the fact that they were made on site for a "random" size (which wasn't even on the pants) and I'm a girl with girl-shaped hips.

Yes, I know the pants are technically gender inappropriate (a phrase that can describe far too much of my wardrobe), but I don't care.

I've decided that it's high time mens fashions from before the Revolution* became perfectly acceptable women's clothing today. Everyone who's ever watched Firefly would agree that mens styles from the late 1800s look pretty good on women, and I think we should just bring steampunk into the mainstream with high waisted pants and braces for all.

I will admit that I still want a pair of bloomers (and a matching basque), but I know I'll also have to get the foundation garments to go with it. Quite frankly, the thought of wearing a corset (whale bone or otherwise) chemise, drawers and a dickie in the tropics is unappealing - especially when you're wearing the other clothes on top of all that**. Men's fashions from the period were much more flexible and allowed for more movement (hey, look! Nothing's changed!).

Join with me, all of you. Men and women alike. It's time we started mixing and matching the fashions of the last two hundred years. Empire line dresses with sneakers one day, knickerbockers and T-Shirts the next. What a bright and glorious future it will be***.


*Nothing too political folks (depending on your point of view). I'm talking about the sexual revolution in the Sixties - you know, the one were it started to become perfectly normal for a woman to wear jeans and a T-Shirt without having to explain to her father why she still dresses like a boy even though she's past 18 and should start wearing more pretty dresses if she wants to land a husband any time soon - thus paving the way for those horrendous power suits in the 1980s.

**I once had a strange desire to go around dressed in nothing but a chemise, corset, pair of drawers and multiple layers of petticoats (standard "foundation garments" from the mid-to-late Victorian period) and see if anyone noticed that a) I was walking around in public in nothing but my underwear, and b) I was still wearing more clothes than anyone else.

***Okay, I'm possibly not crazy enough to actually expect anyone to join me in this endeavour. I'm not even crazy enough to actually join myself in this endeavour - but largely because I know I'll have to sew my own clothes if I want to do this economically, and that's not something I'm likely to take up any time soon.

****Bonus footnote: Interestingly, women's fashions do shadow mens fashions from several decades ago more than you may think. I once bought women's vests from the 80s to dress a couple of actors who were playing men in the 20s, because the cut of mens vests in the era were closer to women's clothes from the 80s than mens clothes from today.