I own eleven cotton skirts. I counted them Sunday night while procrastinating on actual work, laid them all out on the bed like some kind of intervention, and texted a photo to the group chat with the caption “this is a problem right.” Half of us think a cotton skirt is the easiest thing you can put on a body, the other half think it’s a trap dressed up as simplicity, something that looks like a five minute decision and turns into forty minutes of standing in front of a mirror wondering why it’s doing that thing at the hip. Both are correct. That’s the whole category.
The ones I ruled out fast were the ones that needed a slip underneath to not be see through, because if I wanted to manage two garments I would have bought a dress. Gone in the fitting room, no second thought, didn’t even bother explaining it to the girl folding nearby who clearly wanted an update.
The one that took forever was a midi with a wrap front that I tried on four separate times over three weeks at the same store, like I was courting it. My friend Renata finally told me to just buy the damn skirt or stop talking about it, and she was right, and I bought it, and I’ve worn it more than anything else in that pile of eleven.
Washing is where cotton either behaves or ruins your week. I threw one in with a regular load, tumble dried it on a whim because I was in a hurry, and it came out looking like it had been through something emotional. Shrunk at the waist, weird stiffness along the hem that never fully went away. That was a forty dollar skirt acting like it owed me nothing.
You Might Also Like
Meanwhile a completely unremarkable straight skirt I bought two summers ago has been washed probably sixty times, air dried every single one, and looks the same as day one, which tells you the fabric was never the problem, my laundry habits were.
The gamble in my closet is a bright yellow mini I bought on a whim that looks fantastic on approximately one person I know, and it isn’t me on most days, only on the days I feel like myself in a very specific loud way. I don’t recommend it to everyone. I recommend it to the person who already knows if they’re a yellow mini person, and if you have to ask, you’re probably not, and that’s fine.
I’m not going to pretend there’s one correct cotton skirt for every body and every laundry routine, because that’s the kind of flattening nonsense I started this whole site to argue against. Some of you want the wrap front. Some of you want the boring straight one that survives sixty washes. Buy the one you’d actually wear on a Tuesday, not the one that photographed well on someone else.
