The Go-Anywhere Skirt, under $120.

Dear Reader,

My relationship with skirts has been a fraught one. The most scarring skirt-wearing episode of my life was a torture which lasted from age 11 to 16: I had to wear a sludge-brown, A-line, 100% polyester, knee-length skirt to school along with a matching sweater with a garish gold trim, a brown blazer, brown beret (ugh!) and a white shirt. The tie - a fat, nylony thing with white, gold and black stripes, was an item of such hideousity I wouldn’t even use it to tie a trash bag. The school - Walthamstow Hall, which was abbreviated by other local school kids to ‘Wally Hall’ and abbreviated further by its own students simply to ‘Wally Hole’ - which said everything about how we all felt about the horrid place - was the kind of place skirts went to die.

The headmistress would sternly march up and down the tiled corridors in navy blue pleat skirts with stiff matching bolero jackets looking très Margaret Thatcher (not yet an ironic style icon); the art teacher, the unforgettably-named Miss Cowie, drearied around the art room in lumpen floral-print skirts worn with lumimous yellow sweaters she’d crocheted herself, accessorised with wooden earrings in the shape of daisies and the only person not in a skirt - the Latin teacher, Mr. Ross - was mocked by the girls simply for the crime of being a man. I will never forget the Latin lesson in which we, the ‘Upper Fourth’ (translation: aged 14) stole every single wooden board rubber in the Language Block during break time. When Mr. Ross, who was an anxious type anyway, found himself unable to find a board rubber anywhere in the classroom during our lesson, he asked Annabel Bilson (a raven-haired beauty who was, mysteriously, nicknamed ‘Bulge’ by her best friends) if she’d seen one, this was the cue for the twenty girls in the room to open our wooden desks, fish out the hidden board rubbers and hurl them at Mr. Ross as one. (Roald Dahl’s Mathilda was our bible.)