HOME WEB NEWS IMAGES CLASSIFIEDS YELLOW PAGESPOLLS - SURVEYS WIKI COUNTRIES PHOTOS US UK INDIA
Cities Stocks Weather Movies Coupons Travel Blogs Health Horoscope Maps ASIA EUROPE Classifieds Yellow Pages
|
A hobble skirt (from to hobble = "to limp"hobble - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary) is a skirt with a narrow enough hem to significantly impede the wearer\'s stride, thus earning its name. A knee-long corset is also used to achieve this effect. It is also known as a pencil skirt. A dress consisting of such skirt is called a hobble dress.
Contents |
Although restrictive skirts first appeared in Western fashion in around 1880, the term was first used in reference to a short-lived trend of narrow skirts in around 1913. The Parisian fashion designer Paul Poiret is sometimes credited with the design but in fact the extreme of the hobble skirt is an evolution of the narrowing skirt seen in fashion since the turn of the century.
Although the term is sometimes used in reference to narrow ankle-length skirts in the early 1910s, most skirts of this period called hobble skirts had slits, hidden pleats, and draping that did not restrict a woman\'s ability to move freely, because in this period women were becoming more active in various activities which would have been impossible to do in a hobbled hemline. The most restricting extant styles from this period, which truly do hobble the wearer, are found in wedding dresses when a woman was only required to take small measured steps down the aisle of a church.
Long tight skirts reappeared through the century in various forms, particularly in evening gowns, as well as daytime pencil skirts popular in the 1950s. A more literal interpretation of hobble skirts became a mainstay in bondage-oriented fetish fashion, often made out of leather, PVC, or latex. For example, they were a regular topic in the 1950s John Willie fetish magazine, Bizarre.
Hobble skirts are still present today in goth and BDSM communities, but are also sometimes used as evening gowns and wedding dresses and sometimes in other occasions although rarely due to restricting properties. Like other skirts in western civilization they are almost exclusively worn by women.
There are several advantages and disadvantages of hobble skirts.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia
