Hobble skirt

[4] At a 1908 Wright Brothers demonstration in Le Mans, France, Mrs. Edith Ogilby Berg asked for a ride and became the first American woman to fly as a passenger in an airplane, soaring for two minutes and seven seconds.

[4] A year later, eighteen-year-old Ida Goyette stumbled on an Erie Canal bridge while wearing a hobble skirt, fell over the railing, and drowned.

[6] The trend began to decline in popularity at the beginning of World War I, as the skirt's limited mobility did not suit the wartime atmosphere.

[10][11][12] Though shorter lengths (from just below the knee to the lower calf) and advances in fabric would enable a little more movement than in the hobble-skirt era,[13] the 1950s sheath skirt's new waist-to-hem tightness, said to reveal the shape of the leg, still created problems of mobility, with split seams a familiar occurrence.

[14] Nonetheless, they were widely promoted by designers and the fashion industry, their narrowness exaggerated even more by having models pose with one leg directly in front of the other.

[19][20] Sheath skirts remained part of the fashion picture into the early 1960s and then went very much out of style with the rise of the flared miniskirts of the mid- to late sixties[21][22][23] and the easy, comfortable clothes of the 1970s.

[24][25][26][27] Toward the end of the seventies, beginning in fall of 1978, some designers began reviving the narrow skirt silhouettes of decades past.

A postcard ( c. 1911 ) depicting a man pointing at a woman wearing a hobble skirt. The caption says, "The Hobble Skirt. 'What's that? It's the speed-limit skirt! ' ", because a hobble skirt limits the wearer's stride.
Eight women participate in a hobble skirt race.
Hobble skirt style, 1911
Journalist Marguerite Martyn drew this sketch of herself wearing a hobble skirt while interviewing millionaire Edward Howland Robinson Green in 1911, with a quotation from him.
Long pencil skirts considered as a modern variation of the old hobble style