The 1980s fashion for tight skirts came in just as I was getting interested in girls, which is why they have made such an impression on me. When my big sister got into her teens her friends all wore pleated or A-line skirts to school, which didn’t get my attention, but by the time I was that age tight skirts were starting to appear. The first I ever saw was a knee-length black pencil skirt worn by a girl called Senga, in about 1984. I can remember standing outside the metalwork class waiting for the teacher, and watching her wiggling along the Technical corridor towards us. A friend of mine was standing and watching with me, and as Senga tried without success to hurry he said to me "I don’t know how Senga can walk in that skirt!"
Some girls ignored this fashion, but others took it to extremes. By the middle of the 80s some of my female classmates got into a sort of arms race with each other: though they didn’t talk about it, you could see they were competing. One day Mandy would come in and find that Dawn was wearing a skirt tighter than hers, so that evening she would take her school skirt in and the next morning her skirt would be under such strain that it made Dawn’s look loose. We did have a school uniform rule, but it wasn’t enforced very well, and if the girls wore white blouses, navy V-necked sweaters, navy skirts and dark shoes, nobody much quarreled with them about the design. They were not supposed to wear high heels, though a lot of girls did, but the teachers didn’t complain about girls in skirts so tight they could hardly walk, as long as they could get up the stairs if they had to. Within those limits, some of the girls went as far as their skirts could stand: they would only give up taking their skirts in when they were in danger of splitting them open. The skirts were usually made with a short slit a couple of inches long at the back, which was supposed to make it easier to walk, but didn’t really allow for climbing stairs or hurrying. Usually the seam at the top of the slit had been many times repaired, often with thread which didn’t match, because the strain of walking kept ripping it up the back. There was one girl who used to go into the back door of the school at the same time as me every morning, and come out of it at the same time as me every afternoon. She had straight brown hair and always wore a red leather jacket, black high heels, and a mid-thigh-length ultra-tight skirt. Every morning when she went in up the back steps the slit in her skirt would be a couple of inches long; and every afternoon when she came out, without fail it would have ripped up almost to her crotch, leaving a sad trail of snapped threads to show where the seam had failed to stand the strain. Now and then girls would suffer even more dramatic accidents. In my French class there was a dark beauty called Ilona who wore a very tight knee-length skirt which showed off her every curve to perfection, and which had down the back seam right at the point of greatest strain a little line of stitches in coarse pale blue thread to tell us where once it had given way and shown off more of her than she intended.
(This isn’t a picture of any girl mentioned in the story; it’s just the closest I can find to what the school skirts looked like.) I only came close to this particular accident once. At the end of 1985, when the tight skirt fashion was at its height, I was in a Latin class with about twelve other boys and girls. Most of the girls wore fairly ordinary clothes, but there was one named Linsey who was quite another matter. Linsey wasn’t very interested in learning Latin—she used to talk all the time, and once got nought out of ten in a test—but she was very interested in looking good: she put streaks in her hair, wore make-up which if not against the rules was frowned on, and kept the boys’ attention with one of the school’s tightest skirts. It was knee-length, tapered, and always apparently just on the point of splitting open. The Latin class was up two flights of stairs and it must have made it difficult for her to get there, but being fashionable and sexy mattered more to her than being on time. As long as she could sit down when she got to the classroom she was all right: nobody was asking her to do anything strenuous.
One day a big cupboard which was under the classroom had to be cleaned out, and a mixed group of boys and girls was sent down to do it, including Linsey. She was pleased to be out of the classroom, and got a bit excited; if she had been thinking she might not have made the mistake she did. There was something she had to pick up off the floor, and she went to it and bent over without stopping to think whether the tightest skirt in the class would let her do it. She found out the answer: there was a terrible ripping noise, and the skirt burst open right from the waistband to the hem. She gave up moving books immediately, and hobbled back up to the classroom bright red in the face, clutching the back of her skirt together as best she could. The teacher said "It’s a wonder it didn’t happen before," and sent someone else down to take her place. I don’t know how she sorted herself out: I suppose she was last out of the classroom when the lesson was over, and afterwards went to the toilet to sew herself up. The famous skirt reappeared the next day just as tight as before, but I don’t suppose Linsey was so keen to volunteer for removals after that.
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