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"  How you feel about the return of the miniskirt will depend on the following: your relationship with your legs, your relationship with your age, and your relationship with thick, stretchy, hold-it-all-together tights. &amp;quot;Personally, I despise my legs,&amp;quot; says Tibi founder and designer Amy Smilovic, &amp;quot;but a very short skirt felt new to me this season. I love it in the mix, especially when minimalism&amp;#039;s so strong. Minis stop it from looking too serious. Plus, a shorter skirt looks a bit younger. I&amp;#039;ll wear mine under an enormous sweater and thick tights. Then, as it gets warmer and it&amp;#039;s time for the bare-legs look, it&amp;#039;s pencil skirts for me.&amp;quot; Like all classics, the mini now comes in so many versions, it&amp;#039;s practically all-inclusive. There&amp;#039;s a comprehensive spectrum of lengths that qualify as short: lower mid-thigh at Chanel and Gucci, mid-thigh at Antonio Berardi, upper thigh at Balmain, seven-eighth short at Michael Kors, and what may as well be called the Kardashian cut at Isabel Marant. Then there are the variations: mid-thigh dirndl at Balenciaga and upper thigh and slashed (for that extra challenge) at Lanvin, not to mention all the ones from designers, such as Marc Jacobs or Alexander Wang, who offered a choice. Yes, a choice. &amp;quot;I just don&amp;#039;t feel I have to confine myself to one look anymore,&amp;quot; says Victoria Beckham, who delivered both minis and maxis in her two collections and who wore a teeny khaki cotton dress with clompy Walter Steiger wedges at her Victoria, Victoria Beckham presentation. Beckham, 38, is at an age that seven or eight years ago would have been considered at the outer edges of what&amp;#039;s appropriate for miniskirt wearing. But thanks to savvy diet and exercise, those edges keep receding. Kate Moss, Gwyneth Paltrow, Gwen Stefani, Jennifer Aniston, Naomi Campbell, Sharon Stone\u2014the number of mini wearers in their late 30s, 40s, and even 50s will only increase. Not that you have to be skinny to pull off a mini today. The aforementioned thick magic hose means that women with bigger legs can look good provided they&amp;#039;re toned. We didn&amp;#039;t have thick panty hose when I was in my 20s. Or we did, but you had to be eight or 80 to wear them. And they definitely didn&amp;#039;t hold you in. Because of this, I didn&amp;#039;t try minis. Well, I did once because, like Everest, they were there, a mountain that had to be climbed. Or climbed into. I looked in the mirror and climbed out again. That&amp;#039;s my mini history in full. Since then it&amp;#039;s been a knee-covering length all the way. In the rare seasons when knee-covering length looked way too long or way too short, I took to pants. In the (even rarer) seasons when pants didn&amp;#039;t do the trick either, I cursed Mary Quant, the woman most commonly cited as the inventor of the miniskirt. I had the good fortune to meet Quant last year. She&amp;#039;s 78 now, and although like a good child of the &amp;#039;60s, at our tea she drank wine instead, she was not wearing a miniskirt. But she could have, because women that age do now. Not the majority, but give it another 10 years. That&amp;#039;s the astonishing thing: Miniskirts, which began in 1964 as a rebellious blip, have become a wardrobe staple worn pan-generationally. (&amp;quot;My goodness,&amp;quot; Quant told me, &amp;quot;all those angry bowler-hatted men banging in protest on my shopwindow in Chelsea were frightened. I think they could see revolution was coming.&amp;quot;) It&amp;#039;s not that teens want to dress like their mothers\u2014they don&amp;#039;t\u2014but some mothers will insist on dressing like their daughters. Of course, not all mothers do. Ruth Chapman, the elegant 50-plus cofounder of the chichi e-tailer Matchesfashion.com, says it&amp;#039;s partly because of her teenage daughters that she no longer wears miniskirts. &amp;quot;I lived in them in my 30s. But they don&amp;#039;t feel right for me anymore. My husband might secretly miss them, but I think there are other ways to look sexy. I&amp;#039;ve filled that void with skinny trousers and dresses.&amp;quot; Chapman does concede, however, that she&amp;#039;ll be sporting the season&amp;#039;s just-above-the-knee looks. &amp;quot;And we&amp;#039;ve bought into very short for the store. The Mary Katrantzou stamp print is key, but my favorite is probably the Balenciaga tweed, which is such an effortless and sophisticated way to do a short skirt.&amp;quot; Averyl Oates, the 40-something commercial director of the luxury Web site Luxup, is not giving up her minis. &amp;quot;A few years ago, people still frowned at women over 30 wearing miniskirts. Now no one bats an eye as long as you have a good pair of legs and cover up on top. As you grow older, maybe it&amp;#039;s not appropriate to wear it on a daily basis, but there&amp;#039;s no reason you can&amp;#039;t pull them out on holidays or special occasions. For me, the grown-up way is to look for a mini that features a longer, transparent overlay, giving the illusion of a short hemline but still preserving your dignity.&amp;quot; Oates is gifted with model-like legs, but for those of us who aren&amp;#039;t, advances in hosiery have made all the difference. In Quant&amp;#039;s day, there was only flesh color and, if my mother is to be believed, no alternative to short. You wore a mini even if you were built like a Sherman tank. Mind you, the payoffs for women who looked good in a mini were huge. Goldie Hawn was a global darling. The Shrimp, a.k.a. Jean Shrimpton, wore a mini to the staid Victoria Derby in Melbourne in 1965 and created a furor, making herself even more famous in the process. Quaintly, it&amp;#039;s still literally a shortcut to fame\u2014or extending your fame. Just ask Gwyneth Paltrow. Or the paps who can&amp;#039;t seem to help themselves. And that&amp;#039;s the first of many flash points where the sisterhood starts to fall apart. How irritating is it, asks Smilovic, &amp;quot;when someone becomes a Pilates guru, and all of a sudden it&amp;#039;s short skirts and bondage at every turn.&amp;quot; The mini is undeniably a liberation. It&amp;#039;s also a tempting way to confound certain expectations. But whether it&amp;#039;s emancipating to show some leg or a reason to worry constantly that you&amp;#039;re putting your cellulite on display every time you cross your legs, there&amp;#039;s no question that the mini is here to stay. And while the censorious reflex may have softened, women&amp;#039;s looks are under greater scrutiny than ever. Ultimately, a mini is an exercise in contextualizing. Powerful as it can be, it can also undermine. For every occasion when it&amp;#039;s assertive, it may make you vulnerable. It can look modern but also retrograde; rebellious or sexually conformist. Worn with biker boots or brogues and grunged up with a boyfriend cardigan or a parka, it&amp;#039;s cool and (actually) grounded. Get it wrong with a top that&amp;#039;s too revealing or shoes that are too showgirl and you can kiss goodbye any ambitions you had to be taken seriously. In this respect, it&amp;#039;s amazing how little has changed since the &amp;#039;60s. &amp;quot;As far as my younger staff are concerned,&amp;quot; says an admirably forthright Smilovic, &amp;quot;my rule is your skirt should cover the seat of your chair when you sit down. If someone&amp;#039;s wearing an extremely short skirt in a way that is completely opposite of my taste and hence my brand\u2014supershort and a sky-high heel\u2014I would send them to the sample closet for a change-up.&amp;quot; And she&amp;#039;s done it. &amp;quot;We had one PR girl obsessed with denim cutoff skirts. It was Tibi or the cutoff skirt. She chose the skirt.&amp;quot; As for our tea last year, Quant chose pants, though they weren&amp;#039;t as tight as the Savile Row ones she wore in the &amp;#039;60s, which, she says, gave her an orgasm. See? There&amp;#039;s more than one way to get a frisson from the way you dress. Lisa Armstrong is fashion editor of The Daily Telegraph in the U.K. Pictured above: Chanel &amp;amp;amp; Marc Jacobs  Louis Vuitton, Narciso Rodriguez, Isabel Marant. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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