I Thought I Was Done With the Leopard Midi Skirt. I Was Wrong.

Three weeks ago, I was sitting at a bright red sidewalk table outside a wine bar on the Lower East Side, picking at radishes and butter and steak tartare with a friend, when I saw her for the first time in years. At first, I wondered what she was doing here. Didn’t she know her reputation? But then I saw her again. And again. I admit, she was just as striking as she was back then, but something about her was different. Was she finally…cool?

Her name is Naomi, and you probably know her, too — the satin leopard midi skirt by Réalisation Par that had nearly every woman in every major city in a chokehold the summer of 2018. Up until that night, I hadn’t thought much about the leopard midi skirt. Its existence — once unavoidable — had been reduced to a distant memory. Of course, I should have known the leopard midi skirt was bound to make a comeback. Leopard print is a neutral, after all. But seeing it parading through Dimes Square not once but three (3) separate times feels like running into an ex-best friend I’d blocked on every platform, including Spotify, Depop, and Letterboxd. But the memories were slowly coming back to me, its silky swish, its sexy, timeless pattern, the promise of finally — FINALLY — achieving that elusive French girl effortlessness à la Jeanne Damas.

I remember lusting for it on Réalisation Par’s website in 2018. “We know you saw it here first,” said the product description. “So go ahead…take a walk on the wild side,” I added it to my cart only to be scared off by the $180 price tag. I settled for a knockoff from & Other Stories instead.

That was the summer I finally understood the Jenny Holzer truism, “Protect Me From What I Want.” Over the course of a few short months, the leopard midi skirt became synonymous with rooftop happy hours and boutique fitness classes, white Air Force 1s, and the scent of Le Labo Santal 33.

When I recently posted a photo of the leopard print skirt to my Instagram stories, my DMs were flooded with young women having war flashbacks of that fateful summer, terrified of being featured on @leopardmidiskirt, an Instagram account dedicated to posting sightings of the skirt in the wild. In fact, just the image alone gave writer and model Carly Dagen “anxiety.” “Midi revival has to be a recession indicator. Like, practically, why does anyone need tea length?”

Unfortunately, back then, I needed it. The leopard midi skirt was for the girls who hadn’t figured out who they were yet but wanted desperately to look like they had, girls like myself who spent their nights clubbing, chasing after skaters, and contemplating grad school while working a boring job in Midtown.

“It tapped into something very specific, which was party girls who now had to be serious at their job. This skirt was the crossover,” says writer Alessandra Schade. “Seeing all these leopard skirts on the way to work at 8 a.m. was so sad, in their sad, indecisive length.”

Dani Olsen, a recruiter, also remembers it as an office staple. “I associate that skirt with work….like, this is a classic girl who needed a print to spice up her life a tiny bit, but nothing over the top.”

By September of 2018, I sold the skirt on Depop for $30. But was that the right decision?

I’ve been wondering this week after encountering Naomi (and her knockoffs) multiple times on the Lower East Side. After all, leopard print has always been in style in some capacity. It shows up decade after decade, shapeshifting to fit whatever mood the culture is in. Mel B, AKA Scary Spice, made it her uniform in the 90s, Dolce & Gabbana built an empire on its exotic sex appeal, and TikTok revived it the winter that the Mob Wife aesthetic took hold, along with fur coats, French-tip acrylics, and overdrawn, frosted lips. Anne Hathaway wore head-to-toe sequined leopard at Valentino’s couture show in 2023, complete with matching leopard tights. Amaya Espinal (Amaya Papaya to her fans) wore a “Leopart” dress on Love Island US, charming an entire nation with her style and Shakespearean ability to create new words and phrases on the spot.

But the leopard midi skirt itself is starting to make its way onto TikTok and Instagram, this time with thigh-slits or styled with sexy cropped graphic t-shirts and chunky red heels. One of my favorite creators on TikTok, Tamika (@prettycritcial), posted a video of herself in the Naomi skirt with text that read, “When girls act like they’re too good for THE leopard midi skirt when it’s just as cute now as it was in 2019” along with the caption, “the naomi skirt CHANGED LIVES.”

Well. She got me there.

Sydney Frost, who works in fashion and social marketing, is also a fan of the skirt. She pointed out that basics have evolved since 2018, layering has become way more creative, and what once felt like the “sad” indecision of a mid-length hem can now look like a canvas for personal style, whether that’s the slick-backed Clean Girl aesthetic of the West Village or a Bushwick baddie in “a million belts” and the “dumbest T-shirt you’ve ever seen” (said with love, obviously, as Frost is a proud Bushwick baddie herself).

“I bought an Urban Outfitters dupe in 2018 or 2019,” Frost reminisced in the voice messages she sent to me on her way to work, the train roaring overhead. “When I studied abroad in Italy, I was wearing it so often with my film camera on my hip that it rubbed into the seams….[After a while] it was ready to fall apart. And it did. [Around the time] I was in London…Réalisation Par was doing a pop-up. So I made it my mission to get the OG skirt, and I wore the fuck out of it. And then it fell off, and I gave her a rest. I actually started wearing it again last fall, and [now it’s] coming back.” She’s been styling it differently than she did “back in the day,” with a “chic little tank top” or “fun elevated basics.”

With that in mind, I can’t help but think of the ways the leopard midi skirt could work going into the fall. Personally, I can envision her living somewhere in between the boho revival we’ve been seeing and the kind of maximalist, heavy-on-the-accessories trend forecasters like Mandy Lee (@oldloserinbrooklyn) have been predicting. I can see it styled with polka dot tights or with sheer black knee socks once the temperature drops enough to even consider hosiery. Or a red mockneck and cowboy boots for those in-between days in October. Or what about leather gloves and a big ass belt?

Perhaps one day Naomi and I can settle our differences and be friends again. But for now, I’m going to ease into the trend instead of jumping into it the way I did back then. There’s a mesh leopard print thong somewhere at the bottom of my dresser. That seems like a good place to start.