The internet still remembers when Ashley Tisdale showed up to the 2005 premiere of the Disney flick “Ice Princess.”
Wearing a gold-sequined miniskirt over blue jeans and carrying a clutch resembling a piano, Tisdale perfectly embodied the wacky yet lovable layering craze of 2000s fashion.
While Tisdale and others have since poked fun at the look, the skirt-over-pants trend Tisdale donned in 2005 hasn’t disappeared into early 2000s obscurity. Instead, it’s back in full force.
At first glance, the pairing isn’t exactly what you’d call flattering. Between the skirt’s ruffles and the jeans’ flares, layering these two pieces weighs down an outfit and makes it look fabric-heavy. What’s more, a mid-thigh skirt over pants can have a visually shortening effect.
Yet, there’s something cheeky about wearing a skirt over pants that has helped this trend re-emerge. It’s definitely not suggestive — after all, Tisdale sported the look at the Disney premiere of a G-rated movie.
But perhaps that’s why it’s so subversive.
Wearing a skirt over pants distorts traditional expectations of gendered clothing, as well as the assumption that women’s pieces are inherently sexual.
Before the rise of second wave feminism in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was not socially acceptable for American women to wear pants in the workplace. In fact, not until 1993 were women allowed to wear pants on the Senate floor.
The legacy of this division is that many still regard pants as masculine and skirts as feminine.
Before you whip out counter-examples like Gucci’s masc skirts, Harry Styles’ 2020 Vogue cover or even those kilt-wearing New York fashion boys in TikTok street interviews, let me ask you this — how many men have you seen wearing skirts during your daily commute on the Green Line?
Although men wearing skirts remains rare, it’s a bit of a different story for women. Today, women’s pants are just as common as skirts. However, they’ve also come to be sexualized in the same way.
Take, for example, the extreme low-rise jeans of the 2000s. Much of the style’s notoriety came from the “whale tail” effect that revealed the wearer’s underwear underneath. In a little over a century, denim evolved from a worker’s fabric to a pretext for knowing what color thong someone was wearing.
The sexualization of women’s pants can also be seen in the case of leggings. Because they’re skintight, schools nationwide have banned them in their dress codes for being “distracting.” One New York Times columnist even had the guts to call yoga pants “bad for women” because she says they prioritize sex appeal over functionality.
I’ll abstain from commenting on that argument — but it’s safe to say we’ve come to a moment in women’s fashion where both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine pieces are sexualized.
That’s exactly why skirts over pants are so genius.
First of all, the top of the ensemble seems to be a miniskirt — both a feminist fashion milestone and a hyper-sexualized fetish symbol. In reality, the pants underneath prevent any leg from showing, reversing what was traditionally the scandalous appeal of miniskirts — how much leg it exposed.
Similarly, the skirt-over-pants trend rejects the idea that women’s jeans are just another means of showing off one’s figure.
Instead of extreme low rise cuts or those skintight, padded Fashion Nova jeans that capitalized on the BBL apocalypse, the pants featured in this trend have the sole purpose of providing structure, color and texture. The hip and waist area is completely covered.
The trend’s recent comeback is also refreshingly androgynous. By virtue of layering a traditionally masculine piece under a traditionally feminine one, the ensemble refuses to fit into a specific gendered category.
For example, spring 2023 collections from designers like Peter Do, Chopova Lowena and Kenneth Nicholson all featured male models wearing skirts over pants. That’s in addition to female celebrities like Kaia Gerber and Shakira bringing the trend into the sphere of celebrity street style.
I’ll admit, there are other high fashion plays on feminine and masculine that are more impressive than wearing a skirt over pants. Take Schiapparelli’s braided hair tie — a braid of hair models wore as neckties over suits in a 2024 show that delivered a surrealist shock factor and electrified the design world.
In comparison, the skirt-over-pants trend is modest in its references to art history. But it has another strength: memory.
On one hand, it invokes 2000s nostalgia and hours spent watching the Disney Channel. At the same time, it questions the gendered foundations of that very same nostalgia.
It distorts the ideas about men and women’s fashion that we absorbed from commercials that came on before “Ice Princess,” or from dinner table conversations we endured before sneaking away to read Teen Vogue.
At its heart, the trend reminds us that fashion doesn’t always equate to sex appeal. Sometimes, the politics hidden behind layers of fabric is far more enticing.
