Call me a big square but the micro-mini trend is a few inches too far for me
The biggest fashion musthave of this season is the tiniest skirt you have ever seen in your life. In case you have somehow missed the Miu Miu micro that has gone mega, let me describe it. Imagine you took a pair of pleat-front chino trousers and cut both legs off just above the crotch seam, so that you were left with the waistband and the few inches of fabric that end at the exact height of your knicker gusset, with the inner part of the pockets poking out below. That.
The skirt is from Miu Miu’s spring collection, and, despite its diminutive size, you probably have seen it, because it has been everywhere. It was on the cover of i-D, on “plus-size” model
Paloma Elsesser. It was on the cover of Vogue Korea. Lara Stone wore it in Czech Vogue; Zendaya wore it in Interview magazine. Emma Corrin wore it to a New York fashion week party. In the season of the miniskirt renaissance, this is the homecoming queen of them all.
I am quite cross about this skirt. It’s not that I disapprove, mind. I’m not, to be clear, like one of those 1960s men who used to rap their umbrellas on the window of Mary Quant’s boutique in disgust, railing about the lack of morals. I have no objection to the wearing of any skirt, visible to the naked eye or not.
No, my disappointment is that, when the miniskirt revival began late last year, I was kind of into it. Yes, I thought to myself, I actually am a bit bored with my floppy skirts that flap around my shins all the time. Hurrah for the miniskirt! When this trend sails into town, I will definitely be jumping on board.
But then the miniskirt revival turned into a micro-mini one. And the invisi-mini doesn’t work for me at all, because – call me a big square, but I basically like quite normal-looking
clothes. So the miniskirt I want is a skirt that ends somewhere in the middle of the thigh. A skirt that finishes at the midway point between knees and bottom. A macro mini, not a micro one.I realise this makes me sound about 45 million years old, but it’s not entirely an age thing. Nicole Kidman is 54 and wore this skirt on the cover of Vanity Fair. Each to their own, but to me the micro looks cold and draughty.
I hope it goes without saying that I would defend to the hilt the right for any woman to wear the most minimal of skirts. But the way I see it, clothes are a way of telling the world who you are and what you’re about, and I guess I’m just not sure I want to put the very top bit of my thighs at the centre of my public identity. So a slightly longer miniskirt is where my heart is at. All the joyous energy of a mini, but with a bit less song and dance.
I’m talking Monica in Friends, who had a very good line in A-line miniskirts worn with, say, a ribbed polo neck and a pair of mid-heeled knee-high boots. So good. I’m talking Alana Haim in Licorice
Pizza, in the long-sleeved short dress in chocolate brown she wears for the first date, and again later in the movie. Ali MacGraw in a kilt in Love Story, never not on the moodboard.
The macro-mini was on the catwalk at Max Mara for this spring, in a grownup version that was dubbed the “boardroom mini”, and it looks great at Fendi for autumn in a sturdy check, with a petticoat frill beneath adding an extra couple of inches.
The tiniest skirt of the season is the one making the biggest noise. But it is the not-so-mini that has legs.
A slightly longer miniskirt has all the joyous energy of a mini, but with a bit less song and dance
the mother of his son Everly, when he was 41. That’s not to say that men over twice the age of someone can’t write about them as an object of sexual desire, or flash back to their younger selves. But it doesn’t stop others from getting the ick.
The stickier subject is Kiedis’s 2004 memoir, Scar Tissue. Among the wellpublicised revelations about his lost childhood is a passage where he admits to having sex with a minor when he was 23 or 24, knowing that she was 14, which he also said inspired his 1985 song Catholic School Girls Rule. This is all out there on bookshelves, though reviewers at the time tended to focus on the shocking experiences Kiedis had as a child himself (drugs, sex, partying), under the guidance of his father, who died last year. The book was of its time in the sense that no one batted an eye – or even dared question it.
He has thought twice about some of Scar Tissue now, surely? “I had lowlevel regret the minute the very first person ever read that book,” says Kiedis. “But as time went by, my regrets disappeared into realising that the book did something much better than I ever intended for it to do. In the end, the stories were not the important thing, as much as this thematic notion that one could be at death’s door, and somehow survive.” He would receive messages from people in rehab and prison saying: “‘Your book kept me company and it made me realise that it could change my life.’ That’s a much better reason to have written the book.”
I say I was thinking more specifically about the Catholic School Girls Rule passage, but before I’ve got a chance to ask whether he has reflected on what he wrote, Kiedis shoots back: “I don’t know what you’re searching for with that one. But it doesn’t seem like any good can come out of discussing that.” Then the line goes dead.
Conveniently, Flea and Kiedis claim not to have thumbed each other’s autobiographies. “I’m scared to read his book,” says the bassist. Outside the studio, the Red Hot Chili Peppers appear to operate as four separate entities, with Flea’s and Kiedis’s knotty double helix at the centre. Says Flea: “If Anthony and I sat in a room and spoke for an hour like we’re doing right now, he and I would walk away with completely different impressions of what happened. I’m not saying one truth is more important than another truth. We just are different people.”
Perhaps that’s the key to the band lasting like it has: ignoring each other. “A long time ago, we established a sort of unspoken musical language, where we don’t need to speak a lot,” says Flea. “We don’t, like, hang out on a Friday night,” says Smith. “But we have this thing that’s special.”
In that respect, Unlimited Love is both a necessary sentiment and a bit of a cop out. It speaks to the current moment of a divided world – left versus right, masked or unmasked, says Flea, who also talks a lot about building bridges – and it surveys the Chilis’ past while making them relevant in the present, as rock titans who have lasted against the odds. Although I do wonder if the earnest bridge-building sidesteps accountability.
Each period of the band, says Flea, is “a growing experience. Every record is a time capsule, and to tie anybody, especially an artist that always continues to evolve and change, to something they did 30 years ago, 10 years ago, even five years ago … People might do something idiotic and have awakenings.”
But what if that something is illegal, or unforgivable? Flea, in his tiedye Miles Davis hoodie, remains philosophical. “If you go back through history,” he says, “through all the greatest, timeless art [that] changed culture for ever, and then you have to go through every single person and investigate the quality of their character, to see if the words [or] music is worth paying attention to because of the quality of the character of the person that made it … At what point … ?
“I know this one thing for sure,” he continues. “The art remains the same. You could look at a painting 20 years ago you didn’t understand and you didn’t like it. Twenty years later, you look at [it and think]: ‘This is touching my heart in a way that I can’t believe’, because the art stayed the same, you changed. Wagner’s operas sound the same, the way that we look at them changes. Picasso’s art stays the same. A hundred years from now, people will look at it, and they’ll think about it completely differently than we [do] now.”
Is it possible, then, to be fun-loving, sleazy rock’n’rollers now? Or has culture moved to a point where it no longer accommodates that? “It’s absolutely possible,” says Flea, with fizzy vim. “Let your freak flag fly. Say what you need to say, don’t worry about what people think. And build bridges of love out into the universe.”
But Smith is not so sure if you can be that band in 2022. “Probably not. You have to be a little more careful. Things have changed. And good, as it should. Change is good. Nobody wants to see 60-year-old guys with socks on their dicks.”
• Unlimited Love is out now on Warner Records. Red Hot Chili Peppers tour the UK and Ireland in June
Anthony and I have a bond that is so deep, from having nothing and hustling together
Flea