Did you guys want to talk about this?
Are we handicapped by internalized values of prudery?
I was reading wikipedia and noticed this bit.
Microskirts were very popular in Japan, where they became part of school uniforms, and microskirts came to be worn within the kogal subculture[4] and by young girls practising panchira, a form of exhibitionism.
Hmm, wikipedia, you have issues.
I’m curious to read what people might say on this.
avant garde - to me that is synonymous with very little material. I mean, runway looks often show more skin than most lingerie. They also are shown on women with so little fat and boobs that there is almost no sexuality to these looks when shown.
As to prudery vs. normal women’s fashion - I had the kind of body when I was young and skinny that tended to look stripper-esque rather than cool when wearing revealing clothing. So, the occasional low-cut shirt is about my limit, but even as a teen I never wore tube tops or shorty-short skirts.
Regarding the light up skirt, I’ve been at cons where people are wearing skimpy outfits, and in person these looks tend to be a lot more fun and wearable than when photographed. Usually when I see a picture of a woman in a tiny outfit I think, “slutty,” but when I see an actual woman wearing something like that I think, “She looks like she is having fun and she looks great!”
So, maybe it’s related to the “selfie” effect…
Maybe, or just the way that women pose and are caught on camera.
I knew an author who was working on a book set at the turn of the 19th century. He talked about how stereographs were used to distribute the porn of the day. He showed us some of the pictures, and it was remarkable how un-sexy they were. It would be a woman with her shirt lifted up but the way the photo was composed, it would be National Geographic rather than Playboy. They hadn’t developed that vocabulary of framing the shot in the way we do now. I think there’s a lot to how a picture is composed and the model poses to give that sexy effect.
people can wear what they want, but i have a feeling this may drive up sales of tights and leggings 
I just think the clothing item in this case isn’t much more than decorative. I don’t think it looks slutty as much as impractical. May as well wear a bikini bottom. Other than that I am all for the showing of legs…errnowaitthatdoesnotsoundright.
I’d say that many people tend to be. Most of it, I think, comes down to an automatic cultural association between nudity and sex. It often defies reason, but people go with it anyway. I do not worry that people being naked or semi-naked are doing it because they want me to be aroused, as this would be a very self-centered and immature thing to assume. So I take a quite dim view of claims of “sluttiness” and/or slut shaming. I like clothes that show skin and are form-fitting because I think people are beautiful.
That said, I am not much of a fan of microskirts. Design-wise, there just doesn’t seem to be much interesting to do with them. I prefer minis, by far. But that’s just me. I am not bothered by them.
I like the idea of avant-garde fashion, but I don’t encounter much of it. Coming from a music, sculpture, multimedia background - my feel for avant-garde is that it strives to be challenging, it strives for new forms and plays with new materials/technologies/etc while avoiding the familiar and the capitulations to popular taste one encounters in the commercial world. And fashion tends to be very much about popular taste. So, to my thinking, avant-garde suggests clothes which are “anti-fashion”. Not in the classical, literal sense of fashioning things. But in the sense of “fashion” as used to describe aesthetic/tribal trends.
I think that there is a lot of potential to be explored in electronic clothes. Especially using sensors for “biofeedback” in clothing displays. How about using shape memory alloys for moving parts/shapes? Like many, I’d completely flip for flexible graphic displays in t-shirts, tights, etc. Easier might be more fiber-optic approaches, so that the LEDs are changing colors of the garment, or parts of it, from within.
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