As a child in the mid fifties I became fascinated by the restricting calf-length straight skirts that young women were wearing at the time, I did a lot of research on them in the late fifties to mid-sixties. I learnt a lot about the problems of wearing straight skirts from information gleaned from girlfriends. The fifties straight skirt was a product of the times. Its popularity with the masses was due more to economics than fashion. In the fifties clothes were expensive, there was no cheap imports or synthetic fabrics. Most young women were poorly paid and a good quality skirt was more than a weeks wages, consequently most women made their own clothes and dressmaking was taught at school. The long straight skirt originated in the late 40's as a more acceptable alternative to Dior's 'New look' who used an unacceptable amount of fabric in his long full skirts in the austere years after the war. The straight skirt seems to have been designed mainly for middle class women who could easily cope in such a restricting skirt as they had access to cars and did not have to work.

But the straight skirt soon gained popularity with working class women as it was cheap and easy to make. The straight skirt was the ideal solution for women living on a low budget, you could even buy kits to make straight skirts at Haberdashery shops, consisting of a zip, button and cut-out fabric, all you had to do was sew it up.

The down side was that women had to do everything in a skirt in the fifties as trousers were not an option. A straight skirt with its narrow calf-length hemline was far from ideal as a practical skirt for work and daywear, but its elegance and sophistication, together with its low cost and ease of construction insured its continuing popularity well into the sixties. I never heard it called a 'Hobble skirt' and rarely a 'Pencil skirt' it was always known as the 'Straight skirt' or more commonly, the 'Tight skirt'

The narrow calf-length hemline on the fifties straight skirt was the thing that concerned women most about this skirt style. Skirts could not be slit for ease of movement in the fifties because that would show too much leg and be in bad taste! To solve the problem most straight skirts had a small knife pleat at the back to ease the skirt's tight hemline, but it was more for show than ease of movement, if ladies took too big a step the hemline caught tightly around their legs.

As regards 'Do women like restricting skirts ?' I'm afraid that my research on the fifties straight skirt lead me to believe that they do not. Most women regarded the hobbling characteristics of a straight skirt as an undesirable by-product of the skirt style. Skirt manufactures knew that women disliked the hobbling action of the fifties straight skirts and they always played it down in their skirt adverts, stressing that their skirts had a kick pleat at the back for ease of movement. I have a great picture from a fifties skirt advert of a model demonstrating the kick pleat at the back of a straight skirt, with a caption saying. "See the generous kick pleat designed for ease of movement" which demonstrates how paranoid some women were about being hobbled in straight skirts.

Several girls I knew found the narrow hemline on these skirts very irritating. It must have been a common problem as you would often see girls standing around jukeboxes in coffee bars, fidgeting awkwardly in straight skirts and flexing the hemline tight around their legs.

As Sarah said, Women would strive to create an atmosphere of sophistication and elegance in a straight skirt, the last thing that they wanted was for someone to ask them what the skirt was like to walk in, and more embarrassing, to demonstrate its tight hemline. Women in straight skirts had to be very careful not to get caught out by the limitations of their skirts. In a straight skirt it was very easy to go from sophisticated and elegant, to hobbled and awkward and become a source of amusement. There were several tricks that women used, to deal with the problems of tight skirts. High heels were worn with a straight skirt as they made the skirt easier to walk in. Women would walk with their hands on their thighs so that they could discreetly slide up their skirts to get the hemline off their calve muscles and around the narrower part of their legs just below their knees to give them more room to walk. Women in straight skirts hated high steps and would avoid them like a plague, but getting on a Bus always caught them out. The trick was to step up as high as they could and slide that leg across the front of the other and angle it up and hope that they could reach the step. If not they had to suffer the embarrassment of hitching their skirt up in front of the Bus queue.

A lot of women were embarrassed by the fact that they could not walk properly in a straight skirt and felt very self-conscious when they wore one, specially if they did like straight skirts and had to wear them as I requirement of their employment. Girls who had spent their school days in flared skirts had quite a shock when they started their first job as a shop assistant and found themselves hobbling in a straight skirt all day.

There was a young lady I used to see at the Bus stop on my way to school in the mornings. She worked as a shop assistant in a fashion shop in the town and always wore a long slim-fitting straight black skirt. The skirt was properly supplied by her employers, she was tall and slim and she must have found the skirt very tedious to walk in. She used to used to hide it under a long raincoat which had slit pockets, She always walked with one hand in her pocket, but I knew that she was really hitching up her tight skirt to walk. She always looked embarrassed when she saw me as she must have guessed I knew her secret.

By the later part of the fifties young women were becoming more active, The had bicycles, some had motor scooters. Their boyfriends had scooters and motorbikes and the tight calf-length hemline on their straight skirts was becoming more of an embarrassment. It caught over the bike frame when they tried to ride their bikes and it prevented them from riding on the backs of their boyfriends scooter or motorbike. Riding a motor scooter in a long straight skirt and high heels must have been very nerve wracking, but a young woman who worked in the high class ladies shop in the same street that I worked in 1958 used to do it everyday. She had a special technique to cope with the fact that she could not get her legs apart to stand astride it. To watch her kick start it was pure poetry in motion. Her straight skirt prevented her from standing astride it and reaching back to kick start it. Instead she had to stand on the right-hand side of the scooter were the kick-start was and reach up backwards with her foot to operate the kick-start. Once she had got the scooter started she had to half sit on the seat otherwise she could not get her foot down on the road. When she had to stop at the traffic lights she had to almost get off the machine to hold it up. In the summer she used to eat her lunch at the local harbour, I used to cycle down and eat mine there just to watch her ride in that tight skirt. They were great days in the fifties.

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