Judge — October 13, 1923 — page 10: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# Analysis: "Now that the longer skirts are permanent" This 1920s cartoon by John Held Jr. satirizes women's fashion debates. The piece mocks anxieties about the newly lengthened hemlines that had become standard after the shorter "flapper" skirts of the early Jazz Age. The cartoon suggests solutions to the "problem" of longer skirts: deliberately stepping in mud puddles to soil them, discarding skirts entirely, or adopting a sitting posture to minimize visibility of legs. The humor lies in the exaggerated desperation—treating modest hemlines as a crisis requiring absurd workarounds. This reflects real contemporary tension between traditionalists who approved of longer skirts as more proper, and younger women who resisted returning to pre-1920s fashion restrictions. Held's satire gently mocks both the moral panic over women's clothing and the notion that hemline length was genuinely catastrophic.