Credit for the miniskirt has never been settled. Mary Quant was experimenting with shorter skirts in the late 1950s for her King's Road shop and is said to have named the style after the Mini Cooper; Andre Courreges showed skirts four inches above the knee in January 1965 and insisted he had invented the mini and that Quant had merely commercialised it; the journalist Marit Allen argued for John Bates, also in Vogue in January 1965. The fashion historian Valerie Steele reads the evidence as favouring Quant. The polling records a dispute of a different kind. YouGov finds American men split 63% positive to 15% negative and women 36% to 33%, and the write-up notes men are 27 percentage points more likely than women to say they love or like miniskirts, the largest gender gap in the 40-item survey. Setting changes the answer again: asked what women should wear to an office in 2026, 27% of Americans said a miniskirt was acceptable and 63% said it was not.