The Untold History of the Mini Skirt:

How a barely-there Paleolithic skirt tells the ancient story of women

There’s a tiny skirt that tells a big story

It’s a story of intrigue, mystery and intelligence, revealed in the threads of an ancient garment. It’s a story in which women’s work and lives have been preserved in a fragile weave. The story begins more than 20,000 years ago when the first mini skirt was made. Wrapped in this tiny garment is the untold story of women. It’s the story of textiles, and if we follow this story from the Stone Age “through the Bronze Age into the Iron Age” (and even to a present day village in Peru) “we can watch how the craft of cloth making develops and how women’s roles change with the change of technology and its relation to society.”[1]

The first mini skirt made its debut, not on the catwalks of Paris, but in the caves of Stone Age dwellers during the Paleolithic era about 20,000 years ago. It would have made most modern fashion divas blush. Called a “string skirt,” the first mini was tiny, constructed of a band with strands of string hanging from the band. Barely covering a women’s lower body, the string skirt was skimpy, designed to seduce even a God by revealing specific female anatomy, and it announced to the world that a woman was available to have children.[2]

Besides the obvious, it might seem amazing that something so small could reveal so much about women - and history. But indeed the mini skirt does. Emerging from this ancient garment is a vivid picture of women, their skills, creativity, ability and important function in society. In this weave, we see women’s lives, from Paleolithic times forward, woven into the historical record, revealing that women worked in an industry older than pottery and agriculture.[3]

This relatively untold story provides an entirely new image of ancient women. Even as early as the Paleolithic age, 20,000 years ago, women were weaving and sewing, involved in a highly complex and creative technology that has ebbed and flowed throughout history. Sometimes women were the sole producers of this craft. Sometimes they were self-employed. Records show that 4,000 years ago, for example, in ancient Mesopotamia, respectable women were in business for themselves, weaving textiles at home to be sold abroad for gold and silver.[4] During other episodes in history, women were forced to work in cloth making, such as when “2,500 years ago, the women of Athens worked at home, virtual prisoners of their husbands, expected to provide cloth and clothing for the family.”[5]  The textile industry throughout history has been mostly the domain of women. “Up until the Industrial Revolution, and into this century, in many peasant societies, women spent every available moment spinning, weaving, and sewing, and even had men helping them (in Europe shearing sheep, curing and hacking flax, occasionally also spinning or weaving)-or at least entertaining them while they worked late into the evenings.” [6]   Looking back even further, to 20,000 years ago, women began making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibers: string skirts that announced to all a woman’s ability to bear children.”[7]

 While the first mini skirt didn’t survive through the millennia, important artifacts discovered in more recent times, along with important clues left behind in literature and other written records, reveal its existence. We know the string skirt existed because it was described in ancient literature. In Book 14 of the Iliad, for example, Homer describes how Zeus’ wife Hera used the skirt to seduce Zeus “so that the course of the Trojan war can be temporarily changed while he is too occupied to notice.”[8] And an important discovery, which places the beginning point for this story at around 20,000 B.C., was a Venus “statuette” wearing a “short string skirt …thought to be of Gravettian origin from about 20,000 B.C.”[9] From its audacious beginnings, the mini skirt endured for thousands of years in various forms and in various cultures and was often found in burial sites.[10]

The ancient string skirt reveals that ancient peoples were more advanced than often depicted; they could construct clothing from a complex process, which would have required intelligence and creativity. Even those of us who are seamstresses would have difficulty today, with our modern equipment, making our own thread to weave our own cloth before sewing a garment. Cloth is woven from strands of thread or yarn, which have been made from either plant or animal fibers such as wool. In ancient times, all of the steps for making cloth would have been done mostly by hand and with fairly simple tools.

A modern day version of an ancient art

To see how this ancient story might have looked, we can travel to the Peruvian Highlands, where in some villages the women still use ancient techniques of weaving, dying and garment construction, passed down through the generations. A look at weaving in the Peruvian Highlands helps to illustrate the complexity and beauty of this art, where cloth is “made thread by thread, by the hands of the people” giving each piece “…its own life, a reflection of the spirit, skill and personal history of the maker.”[1]  In the Peruvian Highlands, the clothing is most often made of wool fiber, sheared from sheep introduced by the Spanish in the 16^th century.[2] The clothing is often brightly colored with intricate patterns and embellished with buttons and sequins. And although the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century triggered a slow change in the clothing, some of the clothing articles of the Incan period have remained, “such as llicllas (women’s mantas or shawls), unkus (long shirts), and ojotas (sandals).”[3] This traditional clothing tells of the region, district, and community from which it came. “Even villages that are geographically very close, perhaps divided by no more than a river, a mountain or a road, may have a distinct clothing style. Clothing can also indicate a person’s marital status, occupation, artistic skills and economic status.”[4]

            Another example of women who are preserving the ancient weaving techniques is the Planeterra Project, a Women’s Weaving Co-op, which since 2005 has worked with the Ccaccaccollo community to develop a women’s weaving cooperative in the Sacred Valley. Here women are engaged in “the weaving process; from hand-spinning the wool to dying the wool using natural dyes. The video at the link, above, offers a glimpse into community life in the Sacred Valley.[5]