Only prigs wear mini-skirts

Uncle Norman likes to talk about the year the mini-skirt was born. (The name has been changed to protect him.) It was 1965 and he was a law student living in Chelsea. And when the skirt arrived, he took a year off university, and spent it on the No. 22 bus on the King’s Road, following women up the stairs. At this point in the anecdote Uncle Norman usually closes his eyes.

I mention Uncle Norman’s contribution to social history because mini-skirts are in the news again, this time in Italy, which I always thought was a place where men liked women. But if this was ever true, and it probably wasn’t, it is now obvious that this amazing, never-to-be-repeated liking of women was, like the Enlightenment, a blip. A man called Luigi Bobbio, who sounds like a moron, is the mayor of a town called Castellammari di Stabia, just south of Naples. And he obviously has issues with women he’s too grief-struck to hide, because he has made the council ban mini-skirts, along with lying on benches, playing volleyball and touching yourself. (OK, these last two are pending.) Poor Castellammari di Stabia! Poor town!

Bobbio has also banned men going topless, but I don’t really care about that. I hate watching topless men eat spaghetti and it’s nudity. A mini-skirt is not nudity and, although I can rarely be bothered to defend anything fashion cares about, wearing a mini-skirt is a choice and if we can’t defend mini-choices, how can we defend anything? Bobbio, incidentally, is a member of the People of Freedom Party, so he is not only a moron, but a man who can’t read his own leaflets, which say freedom.