People hated Paris designer Paul Poiret’s jupe à l’entrave (“the skirt that fetters”). “It is more than grotesque to see the girls of to-day doing the turkey trot, the Argentine tango, and the grizzly bear in skirts that should be worn with the lancers and the minuet,” sniffed The New York Times in 1910. The next year, the Post-Dispatch crowed that the hobble skirt had gone to “lie down in forgetfulness with the hoop skirt, the Directoire, the Chanticleer craze and the great dollar-a-word hunting trip.” And yet here we have a hobble skirt race in 1912. If you think these girls “minced” (always the verb used vis à vis the hobble): Nope. One awed journalist, who’d witnessed a hobble skirt race at the Rockaway Country Club in New York two years earlier, wrote that the women “negotiated the distance in seconds—not minutes. The start of the race looked like a trunk opening at the customs house, but the finish line was like the American’s runaway around the Isle of Wight.”
