What is a Hobble Skirt?

A Hobble Skirt is a long narrow skirt which is intentionally designed to restrict a woman’s stride below the knee, in effect “hobbling” her, to create a very sophisticated movement.

A genuine Hobble Skirt is quite unlike the more commonplace stretchy lycra "pencil skirt" found in chain stores everywhere. It imposes on the wearer a sensual way of walking. As someone once said, "The Walk is The Look".

Whenever fashion rediscovers the Hobble Skirt, it quickly becomes an indispensable part of the repertoire of every woman who really knows how to dress for effect, from the girl-next-door to the most celebrated diva.  

Although some 19th century dress designs were closely draped, the term Hobble Skirt originates from around 1910, when the exotic, revolutionary creations of designers such as Poiret, Worth, Lucile and Jeanne Paquin first introduced the concept that a skirt narrow enough around a woman's legs to substantially restrict her movement is extraordinarily attractive.

(Please bear in mind that two of these famous original Hobble Skirt-era designers were women. The suggestion by some fashion historians that women at the height of the suffragette movement were somehow forced against their will by tyrannical males to wear restricting skirts is wrong. Poiret's boastful claim to have "shackled" women's legs should be taken figuratively, not literally. Women will only ever wear what they wish to wear. They will quite happily shorten their stride in order to wear a new design of dress or skirt with a very slender line if they can see how attractive it is to do so. No male persuasion necessary. In fact the great body of male opinion opposed, and even attempted to ridicule, the hobble skirt when it first appeared because of the difficulties experienced by the embarrassed male obliged to adjust his own stride when accompanying a woman who had decided to wear the fashionably narrow skirt. The Hobble Skirt should therefore be viewed, not as female bondage, but as a subtly effective weapon in women's struggle for emancipation and domination in the battle of minds of the early Twentieth Century.)

Hobble Skirts have, since their reintroduction in the latter 1940s by Jacques Fath and others, been a recurrent and influential theme in women's fashion but, because of their esoteric nature, the really desirable, extreme versions have always been difficult to find outside the realm of Haute Couture.

Now, thanks to RoSa Shoes, along comes "The Little Black Hobble Skirt"........