Skirt silhouettes and styling for men

In wanting to wear skirts at contra dances, a question that quickly arose was how to do so without looking ridiculous - after all, in the western world, skirted garments have been almost exclusively warn by women for the past several hundred years.

Skirts within menswear aren't unheard of, with the Scottish kilt being the most widely known. Men wearing other skirts though, typically looks odd. Why does the kilt work, whereas others frequently do not?

A good place to begin answering this is to look at the differences in body shape. While there is a great deal of variation in both men and women, 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.

Much fashion design is based on the exaggeration of these body features. For example, female fashioning often uses garment design to emphasise and exaggerate the width of the hips.

Skirts on women also tend to 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.

The general visual focus of male bodies however is typically the broad shoulders. Styling advice for men often recommends accentuating the wider shoulders and de-emphasising the hips, exaggerating the visual mass of the upper body.

Because skirts have been largely worn by women, the garments that are widely available were designed to harmonise with common female body shapes. If men wear those garments, the garments attempt to exaggerate body features that the person does not have.

Thus I feel that it is best to explore male skirts as an independent category.

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 shoulders are wider than the hips, a body type 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 '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.

The width of the skirt to me looks most harmonious when about the same as the shoulders, though longer skirts can be a little wider while still looking balanced.

Another thing to consider is that men's torsos are typically quite wide and frequently lack a substantial difference between the visual width of the waist and hip.

As noted, many woman's skirts deliberately bulk the hips. My experience has been that bulking the hips on a man will often make the whole person look short and 'dumpy', because of the typically proportionally wide torso and lack of a waist for contrast.

It may be possible to make waist bulk look balanced if the shoulders are also bulked, and examples of this can be seen in historic fashion. However it may be preferable to avoid bulking the hips entirely. Traditionally made kilts actually cut out two layers of fabric from the top of the pleats, with the only purpose being to reduce waist and hip bulk.

A similar issue can arise from having a large colour contrast between top and bottom garments at the waistband. The contrast creates a horizontal line, which creates an optical illusion making the waist look wider than it is. That can be addressed in a few ways:

• Obscuring the waist split by colour matching the top and bottom garments. Actually eliminating the division by wearing a 'dress type' garment also solves that issue.
• The vertical stripe created by an open jacket or vest layered over other garments creates an optical illusion that makes the torso look longer and thinner.
• Wearing more fitted and shaped top garments that show any waist that the individual does have.

While adding bulk at the waist / hips rarely works to my eye, adding width low down can work. The tendency for men to have wide shoulders means that there is more visual weight in the upper body, and this can be balanced with a skirt that flares more towards the bottom. There are examples of this in some Chinese 'hanfu' costumes.

The same idea 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.

Skirts that flare too widely from the hips can look out of place. What looks most natural to me is if the skirt's width at the hem is about the same as the shoulders, with garments narrower than this tending to make the person look top heavy.

I think that the root cause is that men's bodies are less curvy. On a woman, the innate hip curves 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.

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:

Visual lines

When putting together 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.

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 and fit around wide female hips. This creates two issues:

• Many skirts are made from lightweight flowy fabrics and were designed to be flared out by wide hips. Without shaping provided by the body, the skirt will hang straight down, often in an unflattering way.
• Skirts in stiffer fabrics if fitted at the waist will often stand off the body at the hips, because they were shaped to contour around wider hips. This can create Issues where the line of the outfit's silhouette conflicts with the natural shape of the person's body, curving outwards where it should not.

These issues can be addressed by looking for, or making skirts that flare less widely at the hips, and create their own shape below that point by using stiffer fabric and cut that will hold its own shape. In principle, using large volumes of fabric that will naturally stand off the body would also work.

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 harmonise 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.

The visual language of an outfit needs to be both harmonious between the garments within the outfit, and harmonious with the body of the person wearing it.

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 harmonise, 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.

Visual focus of an outfit

When looking at an outfit on a person the eye will tend to go wherever the most detail is. Ruffly skirts or ones with highly contrasting patterns if contrasted with plain upper garments will tend to draw the viewers eye downwards.

This can be problematic on a man because the natural visual focus of the body is the shoulders.

Extant male skirts from fashion history and other cultures frequently utilise a plain appearance from the front, such as the kilt's simple apron front, with the fullness of the skirt moved to the pleats at the back.

It may be possible to balance a ruffly skirt if top garments are also ruffly.

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.

Existing upper garments are often longer than ideal. Wearing a standard t-shirt over a knee length skirt covers a notable proportion of the skirt and to me looks top heavy. The same outfit may look 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 'genetically-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.

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. These ideas are also encountered in top garments, such as a V shaped neckline.

Styling advice for men often recommends accentuating the wider shoulders and de-emphasising 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 skirts generally.

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-emphasises the lower body.

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

Closing notes

There are numerous design choices embedded within garments sold as 'menswear' that enable these garments to be visually coherent with other 'menswear' garments. If one sticks to only wearing garments from within the system, these factors are invisible and it just 'works', but if you break out of the system by incorporating uncommon garments like skirts, those rules are not maintained, creating visual dissonance.

Creating harmonious outfits then depends on the individual knowing what looks proportionate and coherent for themselves. Most men are not currently taught how to do this, and so it is not surprising that the resulting outfits typically look weird.

By understanding how clothing relates to the body we can start to understand how to incorporate skirts within male fashion in a harmonious way, for example avoiding garments that create a shape that isn't harmonious with the body. 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.