DREAMED UP TO LIBERATE, THE MINI IS NOW A TYRANT

WHO invented the mini: Mary Quant or Andre Courreges? Who cares? More important is why they came up with the darn thing. Women in the 1960s no longer wanted to dress like their mothers and the easiest way was to hike their hems. But, as Biba founder Barbara Hulanicki told me, the mini was only to be worn until you grew up. Got married. Ate food.

The original mini died a welcome death in the early 1970s, snuffed out by the maxi: gorgeous, floaty fabric that meant women no longer had to worry about a gust of wind, chapped legs or being treated like a child. But it seems the mini is back. We not only have some scrawny Frenchwoman agonising over whether to knee or not to knee now she’s 50 — and if the snakehipped Charlotte Gainsbourg can’t do it, no one can — but leading designers, including Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior, are sending the mini to limp down the catwalk like the superannuated modern-day equivalent of foot binding it really is.

Fendi x Versace even sent Kate Moss — who’s 329; models are like dogs: they age seven times faster — down the catwalk in a skirt so short you could see her kidneys.

The reason designers love the mini so? A) they have no new ideas. B) simple shapes are cheap to make. That’s it.

And for those reasons we’re forced to do Pilates, and worry endlessly about orangepeel skin, knobbly knees and sudden gusts for ever. If we buy into what Chiuri thinks we should wear next spring, we are forced to wonder: ‘Should I risk walking home, or shell out for a taxi?’ The mini, dreamed up to liberate, has turned into a tyrant. It can render an older woman ridiculous in a way even the toothpick trouser, the legging and the bodycon dress can not.

(My friend Nic gave me a navy stretch body con from Reiss, one of my favourite labels, for a date with a new man. I put it on. It was way too short, mid thigh. ‘This will have him running to the hills!’ I shouted, throwing it at her. ‘I don’t even know him! And he will get to see my pants!’)

And it’s not just women; if a grown man turned up at the office in short trousers, he’d be ridiculed just the same.

I wouldn’t dream of wearing a mini now, aged 63. Because I’m a size 8, people just assume that I want to wear one.

Think of the mini like a nappy: you’re supposed to grow out of it.