The Rara Skirt

The rara skirt is one of those fashions that seems to burst onto the scene, take over every high street and school disco for a couple of years, and then vanish. In Britain in the early 1980s, it was everywhere.

The design is simple and bouncy. A rara skirt is very short - well above the knee - and made of layers of flounces or tiers, gathered one above the other, so it flares out and bounces as the wearer moves. The name comes from American cheerleaders' "rah-rah" skirts, short pleated or flounced skirts designed to flip up during routines. The 1980s fashion versions were usually made in cheap cotton or jersey, often in bright colours, stripes, or polka dots, sometimes in more than one colour, and they were worn with an elastic waist so they pulled on easily.

It was a young, fun, inexpensive look. Rara skirts were sold cheaply in high-street shops and markets, and they were easy to sew at home from a few strips of fabric. They were worn with leggings or thick tights, ankle socks, flat shoes, pixie boots, or leg warmers, and on top with baggy sweaters, off-the-shoulder sweatshirts, or T-shirts, plus plenty of plastic jewellery and hair accessories. Pop stars of the early 1980s wore them in videos and on television, and with the new importance of music video, those images spread the look fast.

I think the rara skirt deserves more credit than it usually gets. It's a genuinely youthful fashion, driven by teenagers and pop music rather than designers, and it reflects the early 1980s love of mixing bright colours, textures, and patterns - the same thrift-store, magpie spirit that ran through a lot of street style. By the mid-1980s it was being replaced by tighter, sleeker shapes like the tube skirt and by the grown-up power silhouette, but for a few years it was the sound of a skirt swishing across every school playground in Britain.