The reason a mini skirt looks wrong on you and right on the model is almost never the size. It is that a skirt has a fixed length and your legs do not. A twelve inch skirt is mid thigh on one person and considerably shorter on another, and the difference between a skirt you wear and a skirt you keep pulling down is often two inches. This is the single most useful measurement in secondhand and the one most often missing, so ask for it. Ask for the length from the waistband to the hem, taken flat, and compare it to a skirt you already own and wear. The second measurement worth having is the waist, taken flat and doubled, because a skirt sits at the narrowest point and has nowhere to give. A skirt that is tight at the waist rides up, which shortens it further, which is how a skirt that measured fine turns out to be unwearable in practice.

A skort solves the length problem by having shorts underneath, which is why it is a genuinely good secondhand buy: it is comfortable in the way the photograph suggests, and it does not depend on your exact proportions. Check the inner short for pilling between the thighs, because that is the only place a skort fails. Pleats are the other variable. A pleated skirt reads shorter than its measurement because the pleats lift when you walk, and a pressed pleat that has fallen out never fully returns, so check whether the pleats are still crisp in the photographs. Faux leather and coated fabrics crease at the seat and stay creased. Lace and feather trims are the two things we would look at hardest, since a feather trim thins with every wear and a thinned trim is obvious. On price, this is the cheapest edit in the group, running from five to thirty dollars, which means a mistake costs you very little and is worth risking on a fabric you have not tried before.

At these prices the sensible strategy is to buy two and expect to keep one, because the fit variance on short hemlines is genuinely high and no amount of careful reading eliminates it. The skorts are the safest purchase in this edit and the ones we would recommend to anyone buying secondhand for the first time. The feather and lace pieces are the most fun and the least durable, and that is a fair trade at twenty five dollars. What we would avoid is anything faux leather with a visible crease at the seat, because that crease is permanent and it is always in the photograph if you look for it. If you take one thing away, make it this: ask for the waistband to hem measurement, compare it to a skirt you already wear, and treat anything more than two inches shorter as a skirt you will not leave the house in.