I tallied the denim skirts hanging in my wardrobe on a rainy Tuesday in March because I felt guilty about buying another one and wanted to know how much of a problem I’d let it become. Eleven. Then I discovered a twelfth crumpled at the bottom of my laundry basket which I’m not sure counts as owned or lost and waiting to be thrown away but either way twelve. For context I own four denim jackets and I thought that was excessive when my sister pointed it out at Christmas.
Twelve skirts is on another level of unnecessary entirely.
What actually stopped me dead wasn’t the total though, it was trying to remember how frequently I wear one. Not sometimes. Not “on occasions”. I wore a denim skirt four days in one working week last October, two of those days to the same coffee shop and the woman on the counter asked if I’d only bought that one. She probably didn’t believe me when I said no, I have loads, they just happen to be quite similar from the waist down.
That’s the thing about denim skirts nobody tells you when you’re sixteen and having your opinions firmly settled about clothing you’ve barely tried on. You go through life accumulating all these ideas about what denim skirts are and are not for based on about three negative experiences you had in your teens, usually at school or at your aunt’s wedding, and then spend fifteen years carrying those ideas around unchallenged until one day you realise someone else might not share them. I did that. I had opinions on denim skirts that were by my own admission built entirely around high school in 2004 and adjusted slightly for inflation since then.
This article essentially is me going through every single one of those opinions and admitting where I was wrong. Some of them I got spectacularly wrong, things so fundamentally incorrect it’ll surprise anyone who knows me that I was so stubborn about something I obviously had no real experience with. Some of it wasn’t even my bias, just some dude’s face when I asked to try on a skirt thirty years ago that I bottled paying attention to and just lifted his judgement and applied it to myself. There’s a version of me out there who avoided wearing denim skirts for sixteen years based on a PE teacher wrinkling their nose at something in about 1998. That is not acceptable control over your life for one facial expression.
So here we are. The comeback. Five styles, five distinct things I thought denim skirts couldn’t or shouldn’t do, and five concrete examples of why I now own twelve of them and regret exactly none of those purchases.
The Straight Denim Skirt
I thought the straight denim skirt was for teachers. If we’re getting specific I thought it was for the kind of teacher who wore teaching manuals as fashion inspiration, kept a stapler chained to her desk AND referred to pupils as “ladies” as if it were an insult. Knee length, stiff denim, just enough slit at the back that you can walk up and down stairs in it. I spent years picturing this in my head as the template of what a denim skirt had to look like and never putting one on up until very recently, which is somehow still managing to embarrass me about 2021 me. The origin of my bias came from very clearly defined place, an open evening at my high school where literally every female teacher was wearing a version of the same skirt and teenaged me decided one day that adults just sort of graduate into wearing that kind of skirt without ever trying anything else.
I ended up buying one about four years ago on somewhat of a whim secondhand because it was seven pounds and stiff enough Levi’s denim that it probably couldn’t be torn apart by a car. And it’s the stiffness that was the clincher tbh, because having that structure meant it sat at the waist instead of slouching about all day and becoming slightly smaller by lunchtime than when I’d tied it in the morning the way some of my looser skirts do on me. I wore it out to dinner with colleagues with a plain white shirt tucked in and got stopped by someone I’d never met asking where it was from, which had legitimately never happened to me in a denim skirt before. Not once.
I think what I’d realised after twelve years of avoidance was that the straight cut isn’t restrictive it’s just skims your figure without trying to hide it underneath layers of fabric. And skimming isn’t tight. I was letting my ideas about one disgusted PE teacher ruin an otherwise excellent skirt for me and I won’t do that anymore. Straight denim skirts are not a uniform, end of.
A-Line Denim Skirts
Nobody lauds the benefits of a denim skirt with an a-line cut but my god do they deserve it. It gets pushed around as boring and unimaginative and “the one your mum will suggest when you’re stood in a crisis in a changing room”, which sounds dramatic but is literally how every time I ended up trying one on went for years. Because of that label I avoided them for years myself in favour of skirts I liked on hangers and that did nothing for me on my body.
The real test came when I sat down at a barbecue last summer for like three hours ON A LOW GARDEN WALL in my stiff straight skirt that up until that point I loved, only to get up again and discover it had rolled up in such a way that getting off this wall became a halfway perilous event. Wearing the a-line one I’d bought on a whim just in case as backup got me through the same barbecue, same hillside sitting, same standing up again without a single problem. The extra bits of fabric that create that flutey effect when you wear it? They have a purpose beyond looking cute, they allow you to move in ways that nothing sleek fits will, especially through the hip and thigh area. It’s built with activity in mind rather than just looking like an edible pastry.
I spent years convinced that if a skirt gave me some breathing room that it must automatically be boxy and ugly and ease of fit cannot be equated with shapelessness. Low blouse tops probably started wearing me down on that front years ago but I knew it was wrong for me the second I tried sitting in my denim skirts and actually realised how much better suited to life one that wasn’t just skin tight was. I wear the a-line cut when I’m going to be cycling anywhere, or sitting a lot, or just running about doing errands. It doesn’t get praise because it performs miracles week in week out and doesn’t need to tell you about it. Also possibly because it comes in less prints than some other cuts, which is genuinely a shame.
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The Mini Denim Skirt
I turned thirty four last year and somehow decided that was old enough not to wear a mini denim skirt. Fun fact, you are never old enough not to wear whatever skirt you damn well please into your forties. How old I think I look is no-one’s business but my own and until the skin on my head turns blue I’m calling it. But something made me believe that suddenly, as a fully fledged adult, minis were off limits and I internalised this entire precept about myself and carried on for a year mostly unaware of it until my friend Priya who is the same age as me but will wear literally anything, sat down at dinner wearing one with bare legs and boots and was, for reasons I can’t fully explain, miles cooler than anyone else in the room.
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“You’d look good in that on,” she said later when I was moaning about ‘not doing minis anymore’ she said. “You’ve just decided you wouldn’t.”
Priya’s almost always right and this time was no exception. I bought myself one two weeks later, denim, raw hem, curled just below the knee and wore it with opaque tights all winter and no-one blinked an eye. No-one asked me if I’ve lost weight either or anything else I’d been terrified of silently but convinced myself someone would actually ask. Zero comments about my age.
What I think I was actually afraid of is once again other people weighing in on my life decisions but by this point I’m chucking that entire notion right out the window. Because if there’s one thing spending years avoiding denim skirts has taught me, it’s that if anyone else is giving you unsolicited opinions on what you’re wearing it’s 99 times out of 100 because THEY want to talk about themselves and not you. The mini is having a resurgence and I will happily be banging that particular drum for as long as humanely possible.
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Distressed and Ripped Denim Skirts
Ripped denim I thought was for trying too hard. That’s so unfair of me to say but I want to be clear on WHERE that came from, because it wasn’t deep-down feelings I had about jeans in general, it was a distinct moment seeing a girl getting into a nightclub in her twenties with an entire skirt that was holes classed as fabric looking both REALLY expensive and also damn good. And I made a decision there and then that women who wore denim that was more holes than actual denim were Doing It For The Attention, which coloured every single denim skirt with holes I came across for years.
The issue arrived for me when I wore a denim skirt I bought really cheap from a market one time and it ended up getting a small hole near the bottom after lots of wear as opposed to when it was made. Rather than throw it away like I probably would’ve done ten years prior I just carried on wearing it and eventually the hole got big enough that it looked intentional and I kept wearing it because it did look cool, intentional or not. Nobody ever questioned whether I bought it that way, come to mention it. I actually got compliments at work on the ‘distressed’ cut which sounds embarrassing but is kind of the equivalent of getting praised for your dust heap because you lost your keys under there.
The moral of that story is that distressed denim doesn’t try hard, it just ages faster than other jeans sometimes on purpose, and sometimes by chance like in my case. I now own one that’s meant to look frayed around the edges bought specifically because I liked the look of it, hem intentionally torn, threads left hanging by the designer to look like they weren’t. It doesn’t try hard. I was trying hard by judging people wearing ripped jeans from across a room.
The Midi Denim Skirt
If you had asked me ten years ago which denim skirt did I think I’d wear the most of I would’ve said the mini. Short always felt like it had more weekend-day-versatility in my brain. Mini skirts can do office if you repeat a colour with your top/blazer/jacket but they’re infinitely more flexible to me than anything sitting on or below the knee. Spoiler alert, I was wrong.
Specifically, I was wrong about midi skirts. Mine came to me one morning I had a work meeting at nine and a friend’s baby christening at noon with nowhere near enough time to change in between. I threw on a midi denim skirt, jacket and boots for work, changed the top and shoes in the car park toilets and rolled up to the christening semi-professional and also semi-festive without really breaking a sweat. It can do business, it can do social. Unlike anything slightly shorter or longer it can do both with minimal fuss which is perhaps why it’s sacrificed in conversations about denim when really it should be centre stage.
I think the midi gets overlooked when people talk about denim skirts for the same reason I dismissed it for so long; It’s boring. But boring and versatile are not synonymous. If I had to strip my wardrobe down to one type of denim skirt based on utility alone it’d be this cut every single time. Not favourite, useful. And as previously stated I will never not appreciate the value of a useful wardrobe option again.
Final Thoughts
Looking back over all five of these, it occurs to me that actually my problem wasn’t with denim at all. It’s just how long you can leave one bad experience clouding your judgement if you let it. A decade spent hating something because of a PE teacher telling you to stow your inhaler before gym class in 1998. One night stand judging you from across a nightclub queue in 2011. The arbitrary age limit I assigned myself for some reason at 33. Proof that one school trip to Asda in the 2000s scarred me for life.
I think we all do this, is what I’m saying. We see one incident, one moment that becomes this huge keystone of ‘Don’t Wear Denim Skirts’ in our heads and then make life choices around that going forward that never gets challenged. Ask me how I know. Actually challenging it is what changes your mind. Priya calling out my denim skirt bias to my face was a hell of a lot more enlightening than any blog post ever could’ve been.
And now I have twelve denim skirts and could reel off five different learning points for each and every single one of them on why I was wrong about them. Which is either a hell of a waste of brain cells or exactly the point I was trying to make and should probably embroider on a patch and sew onto all my denim skirts as a mantra. Probably both. I’ll take that.
The point, that I guess I came to after all this, is don’t knock something until you’ve EXPERIENCED that thing yourself. My issues with denim skirts were mine but five out of ten times I allowed someone else’s completely foreign experience to colour it for me instead of just going out and proving them wrong myself. Guess what? EVERY SINGLE ONE of them was proved wrong.
Denim skirts were great, I was just being silly.
