Moaning death of the skirt

By Ted Malanda

When my former boss strode into the office one morning a couple of years ago, the whole place came to a standstill. Every male, including the office cleaner, gawked.

And then, as one, we gasped, "You own a skirt?!" In the seven years that I had known her, not once had she won a skirt. It was always trousers. And even when occasion demanded that she dress like a ‘lady’, she still found ways of getting away with a pair of trousers.

That piece of clothing is extinct. Out of 20 women, probably only two wear skirts on a regular basis. It’s no longer even fashionable for our voluptuous sisters to hide their curves in balloon-sized vitenges like our mothers used to. Everyone just squeezes their assets into the tightest jeans on the market and moves on.

Ask any young woman how many skirts she owns and she will break into deep thought and then giggle and say, "None!" In the rare event that she actually owns one, she would be hard-pressed to say exactly where it is, or when she last wore it.

Equality

It’s not just Nairobi. These days, even rural barmaids wear jeans while village elders have long stopped pontificating about the evils associated with women in trousers.

In truth, trousers for women are good for gender equality because they allow women to sit ‘like men’ as opposed to the delicate operations required for one to ‘sit properly’ when in a skirt or dress. Women in their 40s and over will confess that they learnt how to sit properly the hard way — courtesy of stern grandmothers who shoved hot embers in their direction and conditioned them to snap their legs shut, always.

But much as skirts — and the petticoats that men of a certain age once thought sexy — have vanished, girls are still forced to buy them whenever they visit their boyfriend’s parents for the first time.

The argument is that they have to make the ‘right’ impression. So prospective parents-in-law — whose own daughters don’t own a skirt — look at the visitor in her new skirt and say, "Yes, she was well brought up."

When the ceremony is over, everyone — including the mother-in-law who was in her best ‘African outfit’ for the event — peels off the offensive gear and squeezes into jeans, ready for ndombolo.