“Just get one that hits mid calf, it’s universally flattering, every body type” a shop assistant at Nordstrom Rack told me four years ago. I was standing there holding a rust coloured midi that, three weeks later, I would go home with. Still own. Still wear. Feel Feelings about. Universally flattering. Sure. Said it to herself with every smug inch of fibre that dropped below my knee.
I bought it. Wore it out to dinner for my sister’s birthday, and across the restaurant table she looked at me and said “did you shrink?” Not unkindly! Troubled, honestly. Furrowing her eyebrows together in that confused way you do when you’re trying to do maths on someone’s legs without asking them how tall they are. I hadn’t shrunk! I was wearing the exact dress the woman working at Nordstrom Rack had clearly told hundreds of other customers would work on anybody with legs and it had, through some stroke of twisted magic, removed four inches from my body that no sweater body-camic nor bootcut jean had ever been able to manage before or since.
Which is why I don’t think midi dresses make you look short. Some can! Like everything, depending on how you hit it. But I also don’t think that guy knew what he was talking about either, because mid calf is doing an obscene amount of heavy lifting in that sentence and until you actually say WHERE on the calf the hem hits you’re kinda just blowing smoke. It matters. Loads.
The exact placement of your hem matters more than the style of dress itself
Look, here’s a secret. When people say midi like it’s one distinct measurement, it’s not. A midi that ends just beneath your knee is a completely different garment, to the eye, than one that ends three inches higher on your ankle bone. They’re both midi. They’ll probably both be listed as midi on the size tag. But where that hem falls radically changes how the entire dress makes you look and nobody fucking explains that when they mouth empty affirmations about body type.
My stupid rust dress landed right on the widest part of my calf. If you have to think for longer than two seconds about where NOT to put a hemline on your leg, that’s where it should hit. It put a big thick horizontal line right where my calf bulges the most and effectively ended my leg right there. Snipped every semblance of length off before it could happen. My sister wasn’t kidding. That hem was placed with my height and calf size ZEROFFUCKINGREGARD.
Whereas the midi I ended up replacing it with? Slim knit, beige, happened to hit me right above the ankle and does the complete opposite. That dress does everything the rust abomination failed to. It barely grazes my calf before skimming down to where my leg naturally narrows at the ankle bone, and because it keeps going after the widest part of my leg instead of cutting it off the entire thing just LOOKS LONG. Like leg, instead of torso, down below. Same category of dress! Doesn’t matter how flowy one is or the other isn’t. Same length on average. But completely different depending on WHERE on average it falls.
Half the reason I hated shopping for midi online pre-rust disaster was I couldn’t physically tell from a photo whether I’d be getting broken up at the calf or not until it was too late. Dresses come with one model, one height, one shoot, one picture, and you genuinely cannot tell from most product photos what shape your hem will be when it reaches the ground without knowing how you stack up against that model’s height on a good day and then counting or something. I do it automatically now. Made my partner afraid to go clothes shopping with me because I’ll refuse to look in the pricetag until I’ve cast their chosen shirt/Dress/Skirt over my shoulder and done my own math.
Which sucks, because the hem is only half the issue most people argue about with midi lengths, and I think we care so goddamn much about it that we forget what’s happening above the waist can be just as fatal to your newfound Barbie dreams. Loose midis that don’t have any structure at the waistline love to create one contiguous blob of material from your shoulder all the way down to your ankle. Waist hidden by fabric instead of highlighted with it. And because that blob is one uninterrupted mass it reads shorter than your actual body because your eyes NOTHING to compare the length of your upper half to. There’s no clear separation of where the torso ends and the leg begins, and when you have something as long as a midi stealing focus from your waist like that… well, you end up looking shorter than you are because your body got cut in half by a stupid pair of pants.
I’m looking at you, two midis that live in my closet right now.
One of them’s the culprit of this whole article. Dead straight, skimmy, exists to horrify me every time I wear it and I wear it often because unlike most humans I know my worst angles. Costs me all of eleven dollars at some secondhand store and lemme tell you friend… there’s no possibly good angle on that thing. No where on my body does it give me length or visual cunning. It flattens me and I know it. Which is why the other midi in my closet is worn twice as often; because it understood the actual problem.
Hint: it’s gotta fit snug somewhere. I found that belt built into the waistline of another thrifted midi months later that was also fourteen dollars but has since seen me through thirty one wears since April. TWO THIRTY ONE WERESSS. Because it defined my waist. That sewn-in belt gave my eye somewhere to stop looking and everything below that meant leg instead of more clay-smithing stomach. Damn near no difference in silhouette when they hang next to eachother but on? Game changer.
And then there’s your footwear factor. Nobody talks about how shoes UNDER a midi change your actual look as much as they should. Slip that rust monstrosity on me and dress me head-to-toe in heels and what you have is a legit continuation of line past where my actual leg ends. Trick the eye into thinking my body goes further than it does by adding length where there wasn’t any to begin with. But throw those same heels under a midi with flat sandals and immediately the line stops at my calf because… well, there’s no shoes to convince your otherwise.
Started noticing that YEARS ago, too. First time I wore that blasted green linen number to walk the pupper then immediately out to dinner in a pair of wedges. Mum shouts at me about how much taller the “same outfit made me look” from across the restaurant and all I did was add six centimetres of heel she wasn’t stupid enough to notice the dress covered. That midi wasn’t suddenly doing things my flats refused it the day before. My shoes were.
My sister wasn’t wrong, the dress just didn’t work on me. That specific midi on my legs in 2018 isn’t a constant every person can apply to themselves whenever they wear a midi. It’s an irritating artefact of my past mistakes that I catch myself replaying every.single.time I shop for something new and online retailers don’t make it easier on me. Hell, they make it harder with their practices.
TLDR: Midi above your calf or below your ankle =/= short. Midi that hits you smack dab in the middle of your calf? Bingo. Also happen to be the only place on your leg that guarantees you’ll feel like that.$14 shit from Forever21unless the dress itself has some sort of SOLID INDICATION where that hem hits.
