When the Mini Skirt Took Over Swinging London
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good morning to you, London Walkers.
Wherever you are.
It’s Monday, March 9th, 2026.
And here it comes.
Your daily London fix.
And today’s story begins with something rather extraordinary happening to women’s skirts.
They’ve gone north.
Decisively north.
Which means that if you were perched on the top deck of a London bus rolling along Oxford Street in 1966…
the pavements below were offering a very impressive acreage of leg.
Attractive.
Show-stopping.
Female leg.
Ladies and gentlemen…
say hello to the mini skirt.
Now this podcast is turning into a bit of a Big Dipper, isn’t it.
Up one minute…
down the next.
Because just hours ago we were somewhere rather different.
The saloon bar of the Blind Beggar.
George Cornell lying dead on the floor.
A bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.
Blood pouring from it.
His killer, Ronnie Kray, standing over him.
Excited.
Gloating.
Well pleased with what he’s just done.
The Luger still smoking in his hand.
Right.
Let’s leave that ghastly moment firmly in the rear-view mirror…
and swing the camera round to a rather different London.
A brighter London.
A younger London.
A London where something remarkable has happened to fashion.
And to hemlines.
And the curious thing is this.
The man widely credited with helping unleash the mini skirt on the world wasn’t British at all.
He was French.
André Courrèges.
Born on this day.
March 9th.
And here’s something else that makes the story even better.
Before he became a fashion designer…
André Courrèges trained as a civil engineer.
Which suggests that somewhere in the early 1960s a trained engineer looked at women’s skirts…
ran the numbers…
and concluded they could safely be shortened by several more inches.
Now think about the world
André Courrèges was born into.
1913.
The Victorian age was still within living memory.
The Edwardian era had barely finished.
Modernism was only just around the corner.
The great literary detonations of the twentieth century had not yet happened.
Ulysses.
All still in the future.
Art Deco had not yet been christened. That would come at the great Paris exhibition of 1925.
And looming invisibly over everything was the catastrophe the Germans later called the mother of all catastrophes.
The First World War.
When Andre Courrèges was born in March 1913 the assassination at Sarajevo was still fifteen months away.
The trenches.
Verdun.
The Somme.
All undreamt of.
Ditto the Spanish flu pandemic that would soon kill even more people than the war itself.
And the skirts of 1913?
Long.
Very long.
Which brings me to a photograph I sometimes show walkers on the Hampstead Walk.
A photograph taken on Hampstead Heath in the 1920s.
An accidental social history lesson.
Two women standing side by side.
An older woman.
And a younger woman.
The fascinating thing is the hemlines.
The older woman’s skirt sweeps the ground.
Pure Edwardian.
But the younger woman’s hemline has crept up.
You can see ankle.
You can see calf.
And I tell my walkers:
when you’re looking at those two hemlines…
you’re looking at the First World War.
Because during the war everything was in short supply.
Coal.
Food.
And cloth.
Cloth was desperately needed for uniforms.
Millions of them.
Which meant less cloth for civilian clothes.
Which meant skirts got shorter.
Shorter skirt.
Less cloth.
More cloth for uniforms.
And once hemlines started going up…
they never really came down again.
The ball had started rolling.
Fast forward half a century.
Enter André Courrèges.
The engineer-turned-designer.
He apprenticed under the great Parisian couturier Cristóbal
Balenciaga.
From Balenciaga he learned discipline.
Precision.
Clean architectural lines.
And in the early 1960s Courrèges unveiled something extraordinary.
What came to be known as Space Age fashion.
White fabrics.
Geometric shapes.
Knee-high boots.
And dramatically shortened skirts.
It was futuristic.
Modern.
Almost astronaut-like.
And remember the timing.
This was several years before Neil Armstrong would set foot on the Moon.
The Space Age hadn’t quite arrived yet.
But in fashion…
it already had.
Now here’s where London enters the story.
Courrèges’ runway designs were elegant.
Stylish.
And expensive.
Very expensive.
What happened in London was something quite different.
London girls took the idea…
and ran with it.
Shorter.
Cheekier.
More playful.
Worn with tights.
Worn with boots.
And suddenly the mini skirt wasn’t just haute couture.
It was street theatre.
And that explosion happened in Swinging London.
King’s Road.
Soho.
And the woman most associated with that London revolution was Mary Quant.
Quant herself always insisted she hadn’t invented the mini skirt either.
Her wonderful line was this.
It wasn’t designers who invented the mini.
It was the girls in the street.
Which feels very London indeed.
Fast forward again.
London.
1966.
I’m twenty years old.
A very happy twenty-year-old.
Because the mini skirt has arrived.
And London has become the world capital of it.
And there are, it must be said, quite a few red-blooded males who might feel that this particular anniversary is one they ought to pause for a moment and acknowledge with gratitude.
Perhaps even bow the head briefly.
And murmur a quiet thank you.
And if yesterday’s story was the darker side of the 1960s…
Ronnie Kray shooting George Cornell in the Blind Beggar…
well today’s story is rather different.
Because while gangsters were settling scores in East End pubs…
the rest of London was busy doing something rather different with the mini skirt.
Not just inventing it.
Parading in it.
Relishing it.
Flaunting it.
Delighting in it.
Well…
some were delighting in it.
It was driving the prudes absolutely mad.
Which, if you think about it, raises an interesting possibility.
If Ronnie Kray had been a bit more interested in pretty girls in skirts revealing an impressive acreage of leg…
and a bit less interested in mindless violence and proving how tough he was…
his life trajectory might have been rather different.
But then again…
if he had, he probably wouldn’t have been Ronnie Kray.
The mini skirt became one of the great visual signatures of the 1960s.
Visitors came from all over the world to see this phenomenon.
American journalists.
European photographers.
Film crews.
Tourists.
All descending on London.
And what did they see?
They saw London girls striding confidently along the pavements.
Boots.
Minis.
Hair flying.
Confidence blazing.
Fashion had become performance.
And London was the stage.
So spare a thought today for André Courrèges.
Born on this day in 1913.
A French designer whose futuristic ideas helped ignite a fashion revolution.
But the place where that revolution truly caught fire…
the place where it strutted, swaggered, and revealed a very considerable acreage of leg…
was London.
Swinging.
Irrepressible.
Joyously outrageous London.
The city where hemlines went north.
And, rather often…
so does history.
So hang onto your hats.
Because this Big Dipper ride is far from over.
Tomorrow…
we’re off to Bloomsbury.
Where a suffragette wakes up in Dickens’s house…
straps a hatchet under her coat…
walks across London…
and slashes a masterpiece by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez
in the National Gallery.
Her nickname?
Slasher Mary.
This is London calling.
And London, as ever,
provides the stage.