A ragged, all-over-the-place hem brings a topical note of chaos to your look
That thing about hemlines reflecting economic fortunes: do you remember? When times are good, skirt hems rise along with the stock market. In a depression, the fabric plunges to the floor. It seemed to hold for most of the 20th century, but in the first part of the 21st (along with opinion polls, and what happened last time, and what the people who know about stuff say, and all those other now irrelevant ways of predicting world events) it became unreliable. As the trend cycle sped up, fabric rose and fell at a rate too dizzying to be pegged to anything in the real world.
But in 2017, we have a definitive hemline. And guess what? It’s all over the place. It’s not long, and it’s not short. It zigzags up and down. It is the hemline for uncertain times, the perfect look for an era in which backlashes and upsets have replaced constancy or steady progress. It can take the shape of a conventional skirt slashed vertically to ribbons, or it can be a variation on the mullet hem, longer at the back and shorter in front. In its most classic form – the hankie hem – pointed corners of fabric are stitched together so as to dangle unevenly around your shins.
Related: What I wore this week: elevated shirts | Jess Cartner-Morley
Continue reading...