To be fair to the Ladies, The History of Skirts

Anyone who has seen Gone with the Wind will know that in 1860 skirts were anything but tight. Huge crinoline skirts had been in fashion for a generation, growing steadily larger, and by the time of Rhett and Scarlett they were bigger than they had ever been before due to advances in technology. By this stage, though, the skirt might be as wide as its wearer was tall, and that particular fashion had gone as far as it possibly could: if crinolines had got any bigger fashionable ladies would never have been able to go through doors. If the style of skirts had to change, it had to change in a different way.

From 1865 onwards the huge skirts subsided and took on a new form. By 1875 the skirt was pushed out only at the back, by the famous "bustle"; below that it stretched out behind in a train. The front of the skirt hung straight down, which meant that it started to show off the shape of the legs in walking. It wasn’t thought proper for a Victorian lady to show her admirers even an ankle, but she soon realised she could let them know exactly what her legs were like while keeping them decorously hidden. A series of tapes were sewn into the sides of her skirt inside, from the hip down to the knee; once she had put it on her maid tied them behind her legs. This meant that despite the bustle pushing her skirt out at the back, the front of it could be as tight as she wanted.

By 1880 these styles had evolved into the first truly tight skirts I can find in the history of fashion. The bustles and projections behind vanished, leaving the skirt narrow from waist to hemline. There was no need for tapes to pull it tight in the front; it was simply tight all the way round. The outfit in the picture is inaccurately called a "walking costume", though in fact the skirt is so tight that the lady wearing it would hardly have been able to walk at all. The most fashionable ladies wore their skirts so tight that they were in danger of bursting the seams with every step: some resorted to a fine chain sewn round the lining of the skirt at ankle-level, but the really fashionable answer was to wear a chamois-leather petticoat. By 1880 fashionable dresses had become so tight that they made it almost impossible for the lady of fashion to do anything: her skirt not only prevented her walking properly but also made it difficult to sit down and almost impossible to get up stairs, and the sleeves were so tight that raising a hand to blow the nose was to risk splitting them open. The fashion victim of 1880 had become so limited by her clothes that she became a joke: a cartoon in Punch shows a dressmaker in a very tight skirt asking her client "Do you wear chamois leather underclothing?" and only offering her a seat when she is answered "No."
Because the styles of the late 1870’s had made life so difficult, they were short-lived: skirts soon relaxed, and women could walk and sit down again. First of all in the early 1880’s a new version of the bustle came out, bigger than ever before; then in the 1890’s for almost the first time in a century the fashion was for skirts which were neither very full, nor very tight, nor pushed out by any clever hidden mechanism.

At the beginning of the next century, though, things changed again. The high-fashion skirt in the early 1900’s was tight over the hips almost to the knee, then flared out in a mass of flounces and frills. Since it was still the rule for fashionable ladies to wear very tight corsets, this gave the dedicated turn-of-the-century beauty a truly dramatic silhouette.
The days of very elaborate clothes were numbered, though. The First World War was coming, and it was no longer possible for a lady of fashion to be followed by an army of maids who would get her into her clothes before she went out, free her from them when she came back, and repair any damage they had suffered in the meantime afterwards. There was a need for more practical clothes, and tight skirts went out of style for a long time.

It took another war to bring them back. During the Second World War clothes were rationed in Britain and many other countries, and the only ones available tended to be brisk and military, not sexy and luxurious. Once the war was over there was a reaction against the uniform styles of the past few years, and fashion returned almost to the styles of the nineteenth century. The most fashionable skirts were long and full, held out by masses of nylon petticoats; but there was another style with tight pencil skirts "so long and narrow," said London’s Picture Post, "that the mannequins can hardly walk." The picture is of a suit from their report of the 1947 Paris collections: the caption tells the reader that "you can be just as chic in this long, crippling hobble."

Long, tight skirts remained fashionable through into the early and middle 1950’s. Again the most fashionable ladies took to wearing tight corsets, and these produced exaggerated curves which tight pencil skirts showed off to perfection. The particular look of a long, very tight skirt fitted with the ideal figure of the time, tall and slim but with womanly curves, and to get the best effect fashion photographers often had their models pose with one leg in front of the other, then pinned the skirt back behind until it was impossibly tight, as can be seen in this picture.
Nothing so dramatic as the First World War ended the fashion this time, but in the end it went slowly out of date. Skirts gradually relaxed, becoming shorter and looser; then came the 1960’s and the miniskirt, and tight skirts were forgotten.
Harrods `Tight little skirt'

At the end of the 70’s a few designers started to introduce straight skirts into their collections, and by the early 1980’s proper tight skirts had become important to fashionable women again. The really high-fashion styles were for very short skirts, but only very young women could wear them; older but fashionable women often chose knee-length straight or tapered skirts, which could sometimes be very tight. The picture on the left is from the catalogue of a big London department store, and shows what the caption describes as "a tight little skirt". That on the right is a dieter who is showing off her new figure with the kind of Eighties suit that demanded a diet to make it look right.
Of course, fashion had to change again, and at the end of the Eighties the styles that had been in then—padded shoulders, high heels, tight and often short skirts—became out of date and were officially Out. In fact many women went on wearing similar clothes, but the really fashionable, those who had worn the most extreme styles and the tightest skirts, moved onto the new look. Anything which looked at all tight or sexy was out until the end of 1994, when the New Glamour appeared.
Galliano suit

At that point The Designers decided they had had enough of grungy styles, and we could do with a bit of Glamour in fashion again. Suddenly we were showered with pictures of models in clothes that might have come from 1950: second-skin jackets, high heels, corseted waists, and very tight skirts. I looked forward to meeting some of these styles in real life; unfortunately they never reached here before they had gone out of fashion, and the last I heard The Designers were ordering the women of the world that if they wanted to be up with the latest styles they should aim for "androgynous minimalism". That doesn’t appeal to me at all, but as the pictures show, probably fashion will come back round to the kind of thing I like sooner or later.
Galliano pink mermaid evening gownDonatella Versace in sequins

The Designers don't seem to know what they are up to these days: they change their minds so often. The New Glamour wasn't long in the past when I wrote the last paragraph, but already (in late 1997) there are hints that the elegant and sexy may be back in style. John Galliano, creator of the sexy suit at left above, took over at Dior in 1996. From the start there were reports of him sending dresses repeatedly back to the workroom with shouts of "Smaller! Tighter!", and in October 1997, he showed the delicious pink evening gown illustrated above left. Meanwhile in Milan, the house of Versace had been taken over by Donatella, sister of Gianni who had been murdered earlier that year. You can see her taste in clothes from the pictures of her at right above and on the user text page. When her brother was at work she used to check the models, and if their skirts weren't short and tight enough or their heels high enough to suit her she would yell at him until he changed his mind. There may be more good stuff in the future. Maybe it will go out of fashion again, but things change so fast these days that the "drought" may not last long.
Appendix: skirt lengths and economics

My excellent contributor Gianvittorio wrote to me once discussing the use of various mathematical methods to examine economic figures and asked if I had any suggestions for aspects of fashion which he could apply his statistics to. I suggested the theory, repeated by Dr Desmond Morris among others, that skirt length is an economic indicator: the better the economy the shorter skirts are, and vice versa. Gianvittorio got a lot of good data from somewhere, fed it into his copy of Excel, and voila, disproved the theory entirely to his and my satisfaction. Here are his graphs: