I would do a kneeslide across the room, if that were a physical possibility in this outfit. It’s not, but that’s how happy I am about the return of the pencil skirt. I have grown very fond of the floaty midi skirts I’ve spent the last few years wearing both on these pages and off. They are marvellous, those skirts. Comfortable in every season, appropriate for any scenario. They behave themselves, never show you up, never let you down. They have done me proud. So I feel kind of bad admitting this, but if I’m being brutally honest, I don’t think it was ever true love.
A pencil skirt, though. It’s just… different. This is a skirt you can develop a proper crush on. This is a skirt you resist buying the first time you see it in a shop window, find yourself thinking about and then, before you know it, stalking online. A pencil skirt can raise eyebrows, it can make you miss your train. A good pencil skirt is just the right amount of wrong.
I’m not talking about the shapeless pencil skirt. That deathly, uniform-issued boxy number that adds slightly less frisson to your day than the temptation posed by a stationery cupboard newly restocked with Post-it notes in your favourite colours. Absolutely not. In fact, having spent the last year bludgeoning you over the head, week in and week out, with instructions to buy your clothes loose rather than tight, I am now ordering an about-turn.
A pencil skirt has to cling, just a little bit. It can’t play it too safe. Not too tight, though, and not too short. “Jell-O on springs” is how Jack Lemmon describes Monroe’s back view in Some Like It Hot, as she wiggles into the middle distance in just-above-the-knee skirt and heels. Delicious though she is, that particular look is probably best left to Marilyn. She looks like a goddess, but a too-squeezed pencil can more often be a bit, sort of… am I allowed to say second wife? Oops, just did. Like I said, this is a skirt that teeters on the edge of bad taste.
To make up for this indiscretion, it should be demurely long. The same below-the-knee length as the midi skirts that went before. A long-line pencil skirt is approximately 35 times more flattering than a shorter one, which is surely all the justification you need. The line is sharper, and you can more easily go without tights if you so wish. You may miss the odd train, it’s true. But the course of true love never did run smooth.
• Jess wears sleeveless jumper, £69, cosstores.com. Pencil skirt, £295, by No21, from matchesfashion.com. Red suede heels, £99, kurtgeiger.com
Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Hair and makeup: Samantha Cooper at Carol Hayes Management
