Minis and their record

Truth be told, Mary Quant, the fashion designer who died this week in London, created her most striking fashion statement in the mid-60s, when the young women she served--she wasn't French-fashion highbrow, not in the least--kept demanding -- I don't know how to say this -- that their hemlines be, well, raised. And raised. And raised. "Higher," they insisted, and the skirts she created went up to perfectly scandalous heights.

Mary Quant's great contribution to world fashion?--"the mini-skirt," set our tongues a' waggin'. All that exposed thigh had to be a signal of the end times. "Who can know what evil passions will be loos'd?" we said when first we saw what little there was of them--perfectly vulgar. Wen the press asked Mary Quant what she thought of those accusations of her "vulgarity," you can't believe what she said.

"Why, I love vulgarity," she told them. There, Satan's evil imprint was right there in Quant's hiked hemlines. We were cascading into worldliness, having departed so shamelessly from faith of our mothers. (Fathers' assessments were just a bit less vehement.) Miss Quant told those reporters there was life where there was vulgarity, only stagnation elsewhere. "I love vulgarity," she said. 

That's exactly what she said. Can you imagine?

At Christian institutions of higher learning, Deportment Departments laid down rules of conduct on slabs of stone, rules like this one: slacks were unbecoming and didn't offer the dignity young women should nurture. Thus, for class, slacks were not permitted.  

I don't know that any dorm matrons ever pulled out a tape yard stick to measure the number of inches a skirt may have ventured above the knee. But minis sort of caught on at those campuses--they became the fashion, you know. Know what else? --the boys rather loved the irony: minis were okay but slacks were verboten. Made absolutely no sense, but was, to the boys, perfectly wonderful. A full menu of short skirts.  

Soon enough, even the most draconian Deportment Departments had to concede. After all, skirts kept rising, and the onus of slacks seemed, even to the most puritanical, as plainly idiotic. 

Trust me, the good Christian boys lost big time on that one. The girls won and did so going away, and that was the beginning. Now we're closer to end times because ever since, it's been "women-this and women-that." Women preachers?--why not? 

Put them in pants and anything goes. Isn't that how it went? All of it started with that vulgar mini. Mary Quant has passed away, you say?--well, good. Look at the evil the woman unleashed.