Sunstar essay: Take a break

Saturday, August 27, 2011

IN JUST a few minutes, we could use the ability to forget about all the bad news, like rallies and protests in the Middle East, then closer home, of news about deaths due to dengue cases, and deaths also in landslides, floods, road mishaps.

We could forget for a few minutes news of loss of lives in Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Lybia, or in Bahrain and Myanmar, and think of something else, like looking at all these cases of violence as part of the trend towards freedom. These places are trying to push off the stage the decades-old dictators, for sweet liberty. And the thought could take you out of the dismal picture of violence in these places, and dark hours of pain.

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So I told myself there are other interesting things to read about, or see. Like the way a dress speaks for its wearer.

It’s during bad traffic when you’re stuck in one part of the road for minutes—you could just sit in the taxicab at the back (praying not to be too late for your appointment)—so that you’d watch people walk along the side of the road past the vehicle you’re in. People, I’d count the fat ones, imagine the women pushing to lose weight to be stylish, or I’d take note of the now popular use of sandals by girls and slippers by boys, instead of plain shoes or boots.

And consider the miniskirt. Yes, watch a passing crowd sometimes and count the women in miniskirts. In this 21st century. I don’t just remember watching girls in miniskirts of the '60s, I was one of them. What occurred to me some months back while seated on a cab was that the miniskirt style will stay. In my latest sit-and-wait routine, I watched and realized that almost all women wore miniskirts.

And not only in the '60s.

Do you know that some scholars have unearthed female figurines in old Europe in 5400-4700 B.C. wearing miniskirts? The researchers came across an ancient Eqyptian mural painting which shows a female acrobatic dancer in a miniskirt!

In our time in the '60s, Grandma once looked at me straight in the eye, then at my skirt, and asked with such concern, “Why do you have it soooo short?”

I don’t remember having been talked into the mini style, I just felt I had to wear what everybody else wore. It was an era of protest and a fight for freedom of expression, too.

Mary Quant, the British designer, introduced to the world of the '60s the miniskirt.

She got off the usual designing of clothes for the Paris fashion houses and, instead, looked out to the consumers in the street for design ideas. In the new skirt, she raised the hemline some more inches above the knee in 1965 and called this skirt after her car, the Mini..

The miniskirt mode was made even more famous by a young model called Twiggy (Leslie Hornby). Seventeen-years-old Twiggy in her miniskirt made women in the world look young for her “short, boyish hairstyle, pale lips and skinny figure,” she, with the “doe-eyed, little girl look.”

So, the miniskirt fever spread internationally because everybody wanted to be like everybody else. And especially, the miniskirt speaks of some kind of liberation in expression.

In the late '60s, the miniskirt went feminist, representing liberation of women. In the '80s and '90s, it became the suit for powerful women in business. It became global and political in the 2000s when in some conservative countries wearing them was a crime. Now there is the denim skirt that could go well with the guy wearing cargo pants next to the woman in miniskirt.

Today, the miniskirt has the hemline more inches higher above the knee. What’s more, the waistline has dropped an inch or two, for the navel to show.

The hope is that the story of the miniskirt, not just as a dress but as a struggle to be free, has lighted you up a bit.

(ecuizon@gmail.com)