Ok so for years I genuinely thought midi skirts were a height scam. Like a real life conspiracy against anyone under five foot five. Five foot four if we’re being real and today is Monday. I said this like every time I thought about it out loud. I said it once in a TikTok caption a while back that happened to do really well because it turns out a lot of you felt the same way. Then I bought a knit midi skirt in October wore it with the wrong shoes filmed it, watched the footage back and looked like I’d been folded in half by a filing cabinet.
Case proves bias, midi skirts make you look shorter, confirms my life long suspicion and get angry whenever anyone wore one again…moving on.
Except it wasn’t true, I’d tested one midi and decided that was scientific enough of a verdict to last me a decade. The real turnaround came when my friend Marnie, who is shorter than me at five foot two rocked up to her sisters engagement shin-thing wearing a midi, and looked about a foot taller than me in photos. I did the maths out loud in my head like HOW. SAME SILHOUETTE CATEGORY AS THE SKIRT I’VE BEEN BANNING FROM MY LIFE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT RESULT HOW. Went digging through my own pics to try and see if I was maybe tricking myself but it turns out the skirt wasn’t the problem, it was two very specific things stacked on top of it that I’d been avoiding.
Where it actually hits your leg matters more than the fact that it’s a midi at all
“Midi” is doing far too much heavy lifting as a category. Because it’s actually anything from just below the knee to like proper mid calf, and those two extremes act completely differently when you’re on the shorter end of the spectrum. The straight at the knee one, the one that hits right at the widest bit of your calf, that one plays havoc with the line of your leg and makes everything below it look stubby. That’s the enemy, THAT’S THE ONE EVERYONE’S ACTUALLY THINKING OF WHEN THEY DECIDE MIDIS CUT YOU IN HALF. Slide it down those few inches to where your leg starts narrowing into your ankle again, but not all the way to the bone, and you’ve changed the whole game. It looks intentional and long instead of awkward and mistaken.
I didn’t realise that was an actual thing until I laid out four midi skirts I own next to each other on the floor and realised they each hit me in four completely different places and I’d been treating them like the same skirt. They are not the same skirt. The shortest one, that stopped right at my calf was the one that made it to the back of the rail during my Great Midi Ban of 2021, and the longest, the one that hits about an inch above my ankle bone is the one I’ve probably worn on camera more times this year than any other thing without so much as a “Hang on, actually” moment when editing. Sent everyone a still of it from my camera roll before I’d even properly decided if I liked it and got “Wait that’s so long?? ?” from one friend and “No wait that’s so good” from another. Both of them looking at the exact same six inches of material difference on me. Try spending that much time staring at where your skirt hits your leg and you’ll see the margin really is that fine.
TLDR: Midi CAN make you look shorter but it’s not the skirts fault, it’s hitting you at the widest part of your calf and that’s the problem. Not everything midi length is gonna do that, though. Just because your skirt is midi doesn’t mean it stops at your calf.
What’s happening at your waist and on your feet is doing half the work you’re blaming on the skirt
So here’s the part I fucking misunderstood for way too long. Your skirt is only half of the outfit. Every time I let the other half ruin it for me and then proceeded to attack midi skirts in the editing room for playing a part they didn’t technically speak in. Throw a midi on with a flat wide shoe and a top that you’ve tucked in super loosely and you’ve created one giant uninterrupted block from waist to floor to shoe. No breaks for your eye to catch, it just thinks short person wore a really long piece of fabric and that’s that. Slip on a heel, even a tiny kitten heel, jumps in there and now you’ve got this slither of real leg showing at the bottom that’s doing SO MUCH MORE FOR YOUR HEIGHT THAN YOUR SKIRT EVER COULD HAVE ON ITS OWN. I wore the same knit midi, same casual shirt, same day with flat sandals for one take and thought it looked awful and hated it on myself. Changed the shoes into some heels for a second take just to see if I liked it with heels better, and it was the heel version that ended up online. Why? The shoes.
How you do your waist determines the rest. High waisted and tucked in snuggly, not just shoved into your jeans at the front creates a sort of break point that makes your legs look like they start higher than they do, which I KNOW THAT sounds like utter bullshit but honestly try it on yourself and watch OH. Drop your waist or leave your top untucked over that midi and it ruins that whole break point and you’re straight back to staring at one large block of human again. I literally have the same midi skirt on myself at two different waist heights in my camera roll from the same WEEK. Neat and high tucked on a Tuesday, oversized and untucked on a Friday and I looked drastically different proportions of person between the two of them. Not because I put on five inches overnight but because my outfit was visually telling a different story about my shape completely.
Pairing a midi with flat shoes and an untucked top is what makes you look shorter, not the midi skirt by itself. Three elements that people often round up into “oh don’t wear midi skirts they’re too…” etc etc. Change one of those three things and you instantly see a difference, fix two of them and it’s hardly an issue at all.
Does every midi work on every height? No. Of course not. That’s a silly generalisation and we definitely do not do those here. There are some midis that are genuinely unkind, they hit you at the widest part of your calf and have zero shape or structure to them and YOU DO NOT NEED THOSE IN YOUR LIFE. But yelling about all midi skirts being flat out bans when yours just so happens to be that specific evil combo is ridiculous. And the blanket statement I used to champion and once turned into a_caption that_, that’s just wrong. Even if I did say it first.
