Welcome to Knee Length Dresses
The knee-length dress in its most basic form is simply a dress that lies right at the knee of the wearer. Traditionally this length is worn as sundresses during the day or cocktail dresses for evening or more formal wear. Although this style is extremely popular in today’s society, that was not always the case.
Women’s fashions have changed considerable over time. For centuries women wore dresses or skirts that were long- long enough to at least cover their ankles, if not touching the ground. For a woman to show her legs was considered improper and racy, which is why respectable women stayed covered with long dresses. Obviously today that is no longer the case. Today wearing a dress gives women the chance to show off their legs!
Sometime during the early 1920’s women’s fashion had a change in the length of acceptable dresses. Thanks to the “flapper’s” knee-length dresses began to be worn more regularly. More importantly the lack of coverage slowly began to be acceptable in public by more classes of women. This movement helped in the styles of the 1930’s, where women started to wear day dresses that sat right around the knee very regularly. The day dresses of the 1930’s were comprised of full skirts and small waists, so not a completely new style but more skin was showing. During the 1940’s the dress length did not change much. The biggest different was that women started to wear skirts with suits, or even pants depending on their daily work (a result of WWII).
In the 1950’s there was a movement back to longer lengths in dresses. The popular style hit around the mid-calf. After the more man-like styles of women during the war, there was a desire to look more feminine, which resulted in fuller skirt styles or cute pencil skirt styles. However that conservative style did not last, because in the 1960’s mod fashion made it mark. That meant that shorter skirts came back with a vengeance, in fact the mini made its appearance.
Since the 1970’s women have started to mix all the different styles of the previous decades because the mindset of freedom from the 1970’s has stayed with women. Now women want the freedom to wear long skirts, or miniskirts or knee-length skirts; tight skirts or flowing skirts; suits, pants, or fringe!
