Skirts

Skirts is an illustrated social history that follows how women's lives and roles changed across the twentieth century, using the era's most recognizable and influential dresses as its guide. Popular accounts of women's liberation often center on the gradual acceptance of trousers, but Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell maintains that the most consequential women's fashions of the period were skirts. Suffragists and soldiers marched in them, and civil rights activists stood their ground in them.

The book notes that Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe reshaped modern art while wearing skirts, and that Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes in hers. Mathematician Katherine G. Johnson later recalled that the computers working on NASA's moon landing wore skirts. As women gained ground in voting rights, employment, and public life, their clothing changed alongside them. Women did not have to dress like men to hold power or to be progressive. Designers including Mariano Fortuny, Coco Chanel, Jean Patou, and Diane von Furstenberg reimagined femininity for a new age.

Organized around landmark designs such as the little black dress and the Bar Suit, along with lesser-known creations like the Taxi dress and the Pop-Over dress, which came with a matching potholder, the book shows how each garment reflects the period that produced it and the women who wore it. It also traces how these styles still shape fashion today and points toward a future in which skirts may be worn across gender lines. Written as both a history and a survey of decades of fashion, Skirts follows the changing fortunes, freedoms, and ambitions of women themselves.