Skirt silhouettes and styling for men

Probably the most widely known male skirt today is the Scottish kilt, but what if we wanted to explore a wider range of styles? When considering skirt styling for men it can be easy to look to women for inspiration, after all in the western world, skirts have been almost exclusively warn by women for the past several hundred years.

One may assume that this would offer a rich set of styles and ideas one could draw from, but the reality isn't quite so simple. Men and woman's bodies are shaped differently. While there is a great deal of variation in the body types of both, a basic understanding can be drawn from stating that:

  • Men tend to have wide shoulders, narrow hips and a relatively 'straight' torso.
  • Women tend to have narrow shoulders in proportion to their hips, a narrower waist, and smooth curves joining the two.

A great deal of fashion design is based on the exaggeration of these body features, and if we wish to draw ideas for styling skirts for men from female fashion, we need to be aware of this.

Female fashioning often uses garment design to emphasize and exaggerate the width of the hips, as this is a natural feature of most women's bodies, and something people tend to find attractive, weather due to innate human perception, cultural training, or probably both. It however is not something people tend to look for on a man.

Skirts on women's bodies also tend to inherently create appealing visual lines because of the smooth body curves around the waist and hip area, which can be extrapolated from in a huge number of ways, flaring wide, hanging in a triangle, or contouring close to the legs.

Men wearing clothing designed for women often creates a visual 'uncanny valley', and I think that much of this comes from garment designs that attempt to exaggerate body features that the person wearing the garments does not have. Being aware of this, we can create some guidelines around how to choose or design skirts for a male body type.

Skirt silhouettes that work on men

I think that the best place to start with skirted silhouettes for male body types is to look at the silhouettes of existing garments, as despite the cultural taboo, men's skirts are by no means uncommon, here are just a few examples:

  • I'd imagine that most people have seen a man in a bath robe / dressing gown.
  • The Scottish kilt is also widely known - a slightly flared knee length plaited skirt.
  • There are many examples of skirted garments worn by men in western fashion history, for example medieval tunics.
  • The Japanese kimono is a floor-length 'dress' worn by both men and women, with a boxy profile.
  • And the Hakama resembles a floor-length skirt.

I doubt that any of these silhouettes look in any way weird to you, but why do they work? personally I think that visual subdivision is the key factor here.

Typically male bodies are shaped are such that the shoulders are wider than the hips, which is called an 'inverted triangle'. If we look at the existing male skirted garments, it can be seen that in most cases, the shape of the skirt part is a similar shape to the torso, as if it were mirrored vertically at the waist.

This creates a silhouette where the wide shoulders gently flow into a narrow waist, before gently flowing out once again into the skirt. This kind of 'bow tie' silhouette could be considered a characteristic of the male skirted silhouette.

For many people, flipping the volume of the torso around the waist like this results in a skirt that is roughly knee length, with the distance from the skirt to the floor being approximately the same distance again. In other words, splitting the body from the shoulders down into 3 equal sections.

Many existing examples of historic male skirts are approximately knee length, and the reasons given for this often relate to practicality, for example needing to do physical work, but it seems likely to me that visual appearance as noted above is also something that would factor in - it is widely known that people like the visuals of things in simple ratios.

For a longer skirt the proportion then becomes more like one third torso, two thirds skirt. They seem to look best when the skirt's width at the hem is about the same as the shoulders, but longer skirts can be a little wider while still looking balanced.

Skirts that flare more widely can look out of place, and I think that the root cause is that men's bodies are less 'curvy'. On a woman, their hip curves can provide a smooth 'ease in' to the line of a skirt at a wider flare angle, while on a male, the same produces a harsh angle. It may be possible to correct for that by including the easing curve into the skirt itself.

The tendency for men to have wide shoulders means that there is more visual weight in the upper body, and this could potentially be balanced with a skirt that flares more towards the bottom. There are examples of this in some Chinese 'hanfu' costumes.

The same tendency is probably also why skirts on men tend to pair well with large boots, because it adds additional visual weight to the lower body in counterbalance.

Choosing and styling skirts for men

So, having an idea what silhouettes work, we can start to look for skirts and develop a style. One may want to then consider:

How the skirt hangs

An important factor to consider with looking for skirts for a male body is how the garment hangs on the body. As most skirts available today were designed for women, they were designed to be flared out by female hips, and usually made from lightweight fabrics. On a male body the same skirt will just hang straight down.

It is more important that the skirt be able to hold and define its own shape through being designed with a somewhat stiffer fabric, or creating shape just using large volumes of fabric that will naturally stand off the body.

Consistency in visual language

Visual language refers to the kind of patterns found in a visual design, for example using patterns of angles and straight lines, tight yet rounded forms, or large flowing curves.

In clothing, visual language matters because there is an innate 'language' within different peoples bodies, being more angular or more rounded, and the visual language of the clothing needs to harmonize with it:

  • More angular body shapes may fit better with skirts that have more angular shapes, such as pleats.
  • More curvy body shapes may blend better with skirts that are more flowy or ruffly in nature.

It seems to me that woman's fashion has often been based on curvy visual language, while men's has become based on straight lines and angles. While different people's bodies are different, I don't think this is accidental because men's bodies are often more angular.

There are almost certainly ways of combining different kinds of visual language in ways that harmonize, just like different kinds of colours can be combined in complementary or contesting ways through colour theory, although how to do this is beyond my current knowledge.

Balancing proportions

It seems to me that a great deal of what makes skirts for men look flattering is their proportion in relation to the rest of the outfit. Issues can quite easily arise with this as many skirts are worn at the natural waist, around the level of the navel (belly button), while menswear clothing uses a 'waist' that is lower on the body.

Due to this, wearing a standard t-shirt over a knee length skirt covers a notable proportion of the skirt and to me looks very top heavy. The same outfit looks better if the t-shirt is either tucked in, or the skirt worn with a 'cropped' top. Partial tucking / french tucking is also an option.

However it is important to note that this is a proportional thing, and that same normal length t-shirt if worn with an ankle or floor length skirt does look visually balanced to me, because it then creates a subdivision into two equal sections.

These factors probably relate to us being used to, and probably to some extent 'pre-trained' to expect to see the torso and legs in a given proportional relationship, and upsetting that balance can look odd. It certainly does depend on the fashion of the time though.

Visual lines

When putting together a skirt in the context of an outfit it is important to consider the lines of the silhouette and how they relate to overall visual balance in the outfit. For example, how does the line from the shoulder down through the skirt flow?

Skirts can pair well with tank tops and vests as they reduce the apparent width of the shoulders, and create a clean visual line running from the shoulder right down to the bottom of the skirt. Wearing more fitted tops can enhance this effect.

If one's skirt includes a curve and isn't just a linear flare, it is important to consider how the lines of this curve extrapolate and where the end up landing on the upper body. Poor line extrapolation can look really weird. It is also possible to create a consistent visual line if one designs the top to extend right to the edge of the shoulder:

Irregular hems, v shaped pleats, and hacking human perception

It is widely known that human perception has some oddities. For example there are well known optical illusions that show that:

  • We perceive vertical lines as longer than horizontal ones, even if they are both the same length.
  • A line will look longer when paired with a pair of short lines forming a 'V' at each end, when the V faces outwards, vs faces inwards, even though they are actually the same length.

      • This can be a useful feature in skirt design because by adding triangular shapes to the skirt that are wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, the skirt and wearer can be made to look taller. Such features can consist of a V shaped box pleat creating a shadowed section, slits that create triangles in negative space, and asymmetrical hemlines. Those features can also be combined at the same time.

      Styling advice for men often recommends accentuating the wider shoulders and de-emphasizing the hips, exaggerating the visual mass of the upper body. I don't know to what extent that is a culturally trained thing, vs innate in human perception, but it is somewhat in conflict with styling skirts for men.

      Wearing a skirt is unavoidably adding a large chunk of visual mass to the lower body, and will tend to draw attention downwards. This could be a part of why men have become associated with trousers, given that having less fabric around the legs de-emphasizes the lower body.

      Using these kinds of optical illusions in skirts for men can reduce the attention that the skirt draws by making it appear longer, which helps it to blend in and create a more balanced appearance overall.

      Another option would be layering a longer sheer (transparent) skirt over a shorter opaque skirt, shorts, or trousers, and would add some visual flare to the lower body without adding so much visual weight.

      Closing notes

      By understanding how clothing relates to the body we can start to understand how to incorporate skirts within male fashion in a way that looks visually balanced. Of coarse there are many different body types, and so these ideas will need to be adapted, and may or may not work for everyone.

      If you are interested in more thoughts on styling skirts, take a look at the end of my article on skirts for contra dance.