Nils Pickert put on a red skirt in August 2012, and it wasn’t for fashion.
His 5-year-old son had grown up in Berlin wearing his older sister’s dresses, and nobody minded. Everything changed when the family moved to a conservative town in southern Germany: his kindergarten classmates started making fun of his clothes, and the boy stopped wearing them.
Two weeks later, he made a simple request of his dad: that he join him for what they would both call “Skirt and Dress Day”. “As if he were going to play a soccer match”, Pickert said. And he said yes.
If any child pointed at them in the street, they calmly responded with a question: “It’s Skirt and Dress Day, didn’t you know?”. It worked for many of them.
Pickert wrote about that walk in the German feminist magazine Emma, alongside a photo of the two holding hands, both dressed in red. Six days later, a user translated it into English, and the story went around the internet. According to Pickert himself, other children stopped teasing his son after that.
As for skirts, his only complaint is very down-to-earth: almost none of them have pockets.