What I wore this week: a pencil skirt

I would do a kneeslide across the room, if that were a physical possibility in this outfit. It’s not, but that’s how happy I am about the return of the pencil skirt. I have grown very fond of the floaty midi skirts I’ve spent the last few years wearing both on these pages and off. They are marvellous, those skirts. Comfortable in every season, appropriate for any scenario. They behave themselves, never show you up, never let you down. They have done me proud. So I feel kind of bad admitting this, but if I’m being brutally honest, I don’t think it was ever true love.

A pencil skirt, though. It’s just… different. This is a skirt you can develop a proper crush on. This is a skirt you resist buying the first time you see it in a shop window, find yourself thinking about and then, before you know it, stalking online. A pencil skirt can raise eyebrows, it can make you miss your train. A good pencil skirt is just the right amount of wrong.

I’m not talking about the shapeless pencil skirt. That deathly, uniform-issued boxy number that adds slightly less frisson to your day than the temptation posed by a stationery cupboard newly restocked with Post-it notes in your favourite colours. Absolutely not. In fact, having spent the last year bludgeoning you over the head, week in and week out, with instructions to buy your clothes loose rather than tight, I am now ordering an about-turn.

Source: theguardian