Skorts
The best-of-both-worlds garment: a skirt in front, shorts underneath, so you could do a cartwheel or slide into home without flashing anyone. In the '90s the skort jumped off the tennis court and into everyday wardrobes and school-picture outfits everywhere.
'Skort' is a plain portmanteau of 'skirt' and 'shorts' — but the garment idea is older than the word, with roots in the bloomers and split-skirt styles that grew popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Montgomery Ward claimed to have invented the skort proper in its 1959 Spring/Summer catalog, offering a knife- or accordion-pleated skirt with an attached bloomer beneath.
For decades the skort lived mainly on the tennis court and golf course, where it delivered the look of a skirt with the freedom of shorts. Its jump into mainstream casual fashion came in the 1990s, when it turned up on everyday racks and became a warm-weather staple for kids and adults who wanted a skirt they could actually move in.
Unlike a lot of '90s fashions, the skort never really went away. It's still made and worn constantly — in tennis and golf, on school uniforms, and across the athleisure world — proof that 'looks like a skirt, works like shorts' was always a genuinely useful idea and not just a passing fad.
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