Almost anything is acceptable in fashion, especially if you live in a seen-it-all-before city.Women turn up at celebrity bashes wearing transparent clothing and no underwear. Bottoms and bellies are regularly bared. Fetishistic garb is no longer restricted to nightclub outings. But deliciously, there is still one taboo. Men wearing "women's" clothing. If this is considered at all by the average bloke, it's usually as a joke. This is one reason why a new exhibition, Men in Skirts, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, is so fascinating.

   Interestingly, and despite appearances to the contrary, men in skirts doesn't equal men wearing women's clothing at all. Skirts aren't the preserve of women - men wore skirts long before they wore trousers. They have only really worn trousers, as we know them today, for the last 200 years. Before that they wore breeches of varying length, depending on the fashion of the day. Sometimes breeches were worn so short that men's frock coats covered them so that they looked as if they were wearing what we now call a coat dress. Before the development of tailoring in the 14th century, men wore gowns, just as women did. And let's not forget the ancient Greek and Roman versions of the skirt.

   All this is before you even begin to consider the various cultures for which skirts are a part of national dress to this day: the Scotsman's kilt; the Chinese man's changshan or robe, which was regularly worn until the late 1940s; the Middle Eastern man's djellaba; the Indian man's lunghi.

   By the late 1700s fashions had changed, and the skirt had become the embodiment of femininity. The word "skirt" itself originally referred to the bottom half of men's coats. The word only became associated with women's clothes when outerskirts ceased to be known as petticoats.

   Up until the early part of the last century, little boys still wore dresses until they were "breeched" between the ages of four and eight. This was a little like "coming out"; they would no longer dress in gowns, but would wear what other grown-up men wore: trousers. It was a big occasion in any household. In the late 17th century, a member of the aristocracy wrote, describing the breeching of her grandson to his father, who was not able to be there, "Never had any bride that was to be drest upon her wedding night more hands about her, some the legs, some the arms... and so many lookers on that, had I not a finger amongst them I could not have seen him. When he was quite dreste... he looks taller and prettyer than in his coats [petticoats]."

  
The man behind the new exhibition is Andrew Bolton, joint research fellow at the V&A and the London College of Fashion. He doesn't wear skirts himself ("I've worn a sarong on holiday"), although after immersing himself in the subject, he is seriously considering adding some to his wardrobe.

   The idea for the exhibition came to him while on the Tube. "There was a guy who looked just like he worked in the City. He was sitting there holding hands with his girlfriend, wearing a smart jacket, shirt, tie... but instead of trousers he was wearing a long skirt." It didn't go down well, apparently, with the rest of the passengers; some called him names. "They were desperately trying to put a label on him - queer, weirdo, asking him if he was going clubbing - to try to explain to themselves why he would be wearing a skirt." Bolton had long wanted to do something that looked at the restrictions of menswear and the ways in which gender determines our clothing. It now occurred to him that an exhibition exploring the notion of men in skirts could be the ideal platform.

   Despite designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier - whose designs feature heavily in the show - doing their level best to make men's skirts fashionable, they have never really taken off as a serious alternative to trousers. In the winter of 1998, Jigsaw menswear collection featured a fabulous black wool kilt. It sold well, yet it was rarely seen in the street. Bolton says he's seen it, and other skirts on men, worn in clubs and at arty parties and openings. But in everyday life a man in a skirt remains an extremely rare sight.

   "The sarong and kilt seem to be the only acceptable form of skirt on a man" says Bolton, "and even then you can't really call a kilt a skirt." Bolton also found, during the course of his research, that nearly every designer he encountered seemed to feel the need to justify putting a skirt on a man. Doubtless this is because the rest of any menswear collection will tend to fade into the background if a skirt is featured; all the photographers will snap it, and as a result the skirt will be all that the public sees. It will become the subject of various silly vox-pops on morning TV, and the designer will be called upon to explain him- or herself.

   The exhibition has five themes: historical; the kilt tradition and innovation; exoticism; counter cultural; and futuristic. By way of actual historical samples and reproductions made specially for the exhibition 20,000 years are covered. Twenty-five designers are represented. And it's not just skirts on display. The voluminous black satin ballgown by Gaultier is a must-see, as are the floral dresses by Anna Sui and Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. Michiko Koshino shows a denim skirt that from the knees down looks just like a pair of jeans, and there are also plenty of other examples of hybrids for the cautious - skirts at the front, but shorts at the back.

   Apart from the question of when society will allow men to wear skirts to the office, the other burning issue is what the well-dressed man should wear with a skirt. Bolton says he has seen them teamed with big walking boots and chunky socks. Rarely - as with the Walter van Beirendonck miniskirt suit, part of the autumn l999 collection - are men's skirts worn with anything remotely like a pair of tights (in that case a full black body stocking was worn by the model). Even rarer is a skirt worn with anything other than flat, masculine shoes. Which is, of course, a cue for another exhibition: Men in Heels.

   Men in Skirts opens at the V&A on 8 February and runs until 12 May. Admission to the museum and exhibition is free. For information, phone 020 942 2000, www.vam.ac.uk.
'Men in Skirts' by Andrew Bolton will be published by V&A publications in June.

   © Independent(UK) Ltd 2002