A La Mode – Part Seven
The hobble skirt
In one sense, fashion is all about causing a stir and the hobble skirt, which was all the rage from around 1908 to the outbreak of the First World War, certainly did that.
For the uninitiated it was a long skirt, tied or narrowed from the knee down or, as a New Jersey judge described them in 1910, they were like “a pair of trousers with one leg.” On the plus side, the hobble skirt allowed the wearer to dispense with the enormous petticoats that women often wore. On the down side, they were extremely difficult to walk in, requiring the wearer to take small steps and mince along. As the popular name of the skirt suggested, the women who adopted this fashion were hobbled.
The man, and it would be a man, who is popularly credited with coming up with the design was the French couturier, Paul Poiret, but apocryphally he may have been influenced by an American woman, Mrs Hart O Berg. In 1908 the flighty woman was invited to join Wilbur Wright on a trip in his new-fangled flying machine and in order to prevent her voluminous skirts from billowing up, tied them up with some rope. Having survived the trip, she was able to walk rather elegantly away and may have sparked a new fashion.
Once Poiret’s design was mass-produced, the skirts flew off the shelves. But they caused an adverse reaction amongst men. Cartoonists were soon poking fun at women’s difficulties in crossing the streets or getting into vehicles – some trains and buses even lowered their platforms to facilitate them in their struggles.
Some critics adopted a more censorious attitude. The New York Times wrote; “if women want to run for Governor, they ought to be able to run for a car.” The same paper then went on to lament the impact of dispensing with petticoats on the general economy; “think of 10,000 people turned away from their possible means of livelihood, 10,000 families, perhaps, starving, just because women persist in following an ungraceful and immodest freak of fashion!” A Chicago minister predicted that the Lord would smite any woman wearing the skirt and even the pope got in on the act by condemning the skirt as “scandalous and corrupting.” The states of Illinois and Texas considered banning them.
Naturally, any mishap attributable to wearing the hobble skirt made the headlines. In 1912 poor Ethel Lindley tried to mount a stile whilst wearing this fashionable garment. Alas, she slipped, breaking her ankle so badly that the bone protruded through the skin. She died shortly afterwards from septic poisoning and shock.
More amusingly, in 1910 a Connecticut judge, on seeing his daughter in one, commented that “a woman in a hobble is like a giraffe in a barrel.” He was so delighted with his witticism that he couldn’t stop laughing. This, in turn, brought on a bout of hiccups lasting for 10 days that were so threatening that his life was in danger until “specialists…succeeded in reducing them to infrequent periods.”
What did for the hobble was the outbreak of the First World War which meant that fabric was in short supply. The rather frivolous nature of the skirt didn’t seem to chime with the zeitgeist.
The hobble skirt duly disappeared but it took with it the petticoat, now no longer an essential piece of female attire.
