“You’re too short, love, you’ll drown in it,” a shop assistant at a branch of an admittedly now-defunct department store up in Leeds said to me, one vaguely irritated afternoon several years ago as I stood in their clearance section trying on, and failing to be allowed to buy, a blue maxi dress. I’m five foot two. She meant it like she was saving me. Said it firmly, like catching a child before they wander too close to the road. Which maybe would have been reasonable advice if I’d been choosing clothes from their kids section, but this was their women’s rail. Still, I bought it anyway. Buoyed by defiance and an arbitrary£5 price tag, mostly. And it turns out I wear it more than almost any other dress I own despite the seamstress’s obvious disappointment in me that day. So one of us was wrong, and after buying, wearing, and washing long dresses on the reg for several years at a height “unsuitable” for them apparently, I’ve decided pretty firmly that it was her.
- The reason maxi dresses can work on short women is not actually about how tall you are.
This particular pearl of wisdom isn’t even unique to her, it’s just the standard response on the subject everyone regurgitates without thinking about anymore, repeated so frequently it doesn’t even sound like an opinion so much anymore as simple fact. Short girls and maxi dresses aren’t meant to mix. You’ll drown, they’ll say. You’ll look like a child wearing your mother’s skirts. They’ll eat you up, the word combinations your torso will be lost in. I bought into it myself, actually, longer than I care to think because nobody bothered explaining why just said it like they were reading the care label aloud. But here’s the thing: the “why” is important because the two aspects of a maxi dress that really do determine whether or not it works for someone petite have barely anything to do with height itself.
Where your waistline is does more heavy lifting than how tall you are
The biggest factor by far, and it’s not close, is where your waist is. Where the dress itself decides your waist should fall, that is. A maxi designed with an empire silhouette, where the waist falls high up under your bust, gives you one long column from bust to floor. On a shorter body like mine that column does about ninety percent of the heavy lifting when it comes to making that outfit look deliberate, not like my legs got lost somewhere. I have about three dresses just like this in different colours because it’s the easiest way to make something work. One of them, rust brown, I bought two winters ago and my mum caught me wearing it and asked me if I’d grown, bar for none. Tells you everything doesn’t it? She wasn’t looking at lengths she was looking at proportion. It’s all proportion. Nobody sees how tall you are when your outfit is pulling their eye up and down, they only see the line it creates.
Compare that to a maxi that hits your waist seam dead where your own waist actually is, right around the hips which, let me tell you, is where almost every idiotic “DON’T” dress out there wants to sit. It’s so easy for brands to pattern cut dresses that way, seeing as that’s kind of where most peoples’ natural waist actually is. But on a taller person? No problem. There’s plenty of leg below there for the proportion to still work. But on me? It chops that imaginary line in two, gives me a mini top and maxi bottom and suddenly, instead of looking like it was tailor made for me, I look like I got lost and wore my sister’s skirt. It took me awhile to learn that the hard way, buying about three dresses from some doomed charity shop one spring thinking because it was all maxi doesn’t mean it’ll all fit, and only one of them actually got worn. The others are still in the bag waiting for me to take back down to the charity shop proper. Which I will. One day.
Length isn’t the real problem with maxis and short people, it’s just what everyone assumes is
Here’s the kicker, the thing I actually got wrong for ages. It’s not the length of the dress itself, but what you do with that length at the bottom. Everyone thinks it’s simple proportions. More inches needed, less inches to play with, dress swishes, ta-da! Problem. And yes, if you pick a dress that’s meant to sit EXACTLY at your ankle on someone who’s five foot eight that’s definitely, inherently gonna be too long on you. Pool of fabric bunching at your feet problem. But that’s a hemming issue, not a “maxi dress” issue, and honestly it’s solved with a pair of scissors and about a tenner for alterations, maximum, not your entire wardrobeteeheehea. Oh yeah, I’ve had two maxis shortened by the lovely woman round the corner who does alterations for a living out of her front room. And both times it was less “now this fits me!” and more “wow I actually look like I tried here.” Same dress. Just hemmed properly.
The other thing with the actual length that matters is where you fall when you go to stand naturally. Seen as, this is another one everyone tries to pin on height but it’s actual ratio of your body to the dress. A maxi that finishes around, say, your ankle, that’s going to look wholly different to one that actually touches the floor, even if they’re literally the same dress and you’ve just taken up one metre off the bottom. Leaving a bit of anklebone and shoe visible breaks up that shape. Makes your legs look longer because…well, they are longer now. It adds movement back into the look, stops everything about you reading as “big” because the dress itself doesn’t cover enough of you to do that. Everything about mini-top maxi-bottom and I again. On me, that tiny slither of ankle does all that work and more. It tricks the eye into thinking there’s more there. Enough that when I got back home I vowed to only ever wear heeled shoes with my floor-skimming maxis, I was convinced that was the issue. It wasn’t my height, I promise you. It was that nobody explained hem and heel go together, not separately.
None of which has anything to do with your height. It’s tailoring basics. Doesn’t matter how tall you are, if your trousers don’t fall right they don’t fall right. Same goes for a dress that just happens to be extra-long at the bottom. No, I wasn’t convinced that day in Leeds. Now, having worn more than enough summer dresses over the last few years to test that theory season after flat-footed season? I’ve got bag full of evidence that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt I’m right, and that anecdotal aside is wrong. A maxi dress doesn’t and doesn’t not suit short people. It’s a style that just so happens to need its waist and hem placed with intent, not automatically. Get that bit right and your height suddenly isn’t a factor at all.
