Word of the week: Midi

The skirt. The snack. The newsletter. The healthcare company. Plus a few words about "mid."

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A couple of items prompted this midi-tation. The first was the news last week that Midi Health had closed a $60 million Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $100 million. I’d never heard of Midi Health, which was founded just three years ago and which calls itself “the virtual care clinic created by specialists in perimenopause and menopause.” The Midi name, it’s safe to surmise, is derived from “midlife,” a word that recurs throughout Midi’s marketing. Is 50 years old “midlife”? For some people, no doubt.

Midi Health wordmark

I spotted the second item here on Substack.

Kelly Williams

, who had been publishing a personal fashion newsletter called Any Given Day, introduced the word “midimalism” in an April 19 post. Some women, she wrote, dress in maximalist style: lots of layers, accessories, and cutting-edge choices. Others prefer a minimalist aesthetic. Still others are what Vogue magazine calls Expressive Minimalists, adding a little something extra to their minimal looks.

Willliams’s own preference, she wrote, is midimalism:

Where Expressive Minimalism (according to Vogue) adds unexpected cuts or accessories; Midimalism leans even further into building tension through color, texture and layers. Some might say “oh add accessories” but I think it’s more nuanced than adding things without thinking about the tension that item brings.

By the following day, Williams had decided to rename her newsletter Midimalist¹.

I like the Midimalist name too: It’s definitely more distinctive and evocative than Any Given Day. I wish I could assign full credit to Williams for coining it. In fact, though, “midimalism” has been circulating for several years among designers and artists.

In April 2021, for example, Benjamin Antoni Andersen published “A Midimalist Ponders Midimalism” on the Swedish apparel site Red Hat Factory. “I have finally turned into a Midimalism²,” he wrote. “Neither a minimalist or a maximalist, but somewhere in the boring, gray, middle.”

Los Angeles artist/designer Ben Cuevas tweeted in July 2022 that “Midimalism is the next trend in design, following early 2020s maximalism and late 2010s minimalism.” In March 2024 House & Garden (UK) asked whether midimalism was “a valid decorating philosophy.” (“If you’re not a minimalist or a maximalist, is that a whole other aesthetic in its own right?”)

I even found Facebook user Madison Emery’s Midimalism playlist from 2018 (“deconstructed minimalist song covers”).

It’s not only midimalism and midimalist. The midi- prefix — along with mid, which I’ll get to presently — is having what’s known as a moment.

I found registered U.S. trademarks for the Midi-Tub pet bath (“Not a full-size tub, not a Mini-Tub, it’s a MIDI-TUB™) and for Midi Bites, an Arizona snack manufacturer (“We’re more than just a protein snack. We’re a lifestyle solution”).

Midi Bites peanut cookie bites — sorry, lifestyle solutions.

Drunk Elephant³, a division of cosmetics juggernaut Shiseido, sells an Itty Bitty Midi Committee. I couldn’t find an explanation for the name: bigger than the customary mini-size samples? Cute rhyme, though.

Itty Bitty Midi Committee, a skin-serum kit from Drunk Elephant, which has registered a trademark for “The Midi Committee.”

Some MIDI trademarks are for computer products that use a Musical Instrument Digital Interface. The technology and its acronym were introduced in 1983 by the Roland Corporation of Los Angeles, which had developed what it called “a universal standard of interface for synthesizers, electronic musical instruments and computers.” It appears that Roland, which is still in business, did not obtain (or maintain) trademark protection for MIDI, which is now used throughout the industry.

Midi is also, of course, the French term for the South of France. It translates to “midday.”

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We’re familiar with midi today in large part because the word was used to describe a late 1960s–early 1970s fashion trend that has never wholly disappeared. In part as a pendulum-swing response to the steadily rising hemlines of the miniskirt⁴ era, some French designers introduced mid-calf skirts in their Fall 1969 collections. (The French tended to prefer the term “longuette,” which failed to catch on, at least in North America. We didn’t have the midi/Midi confusion that the French had.) The look, if not the ready-to-wear garments, had already been suggested to American audiences via the Depression-era costumes Theadora Van Runkle designed for Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, which had been released in August 1967 and which became one of the five top-grossing films of the year and garnering ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture (it won only for best supporting actress and cinematography).

Midi-skirted Faye Dunaway with Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

It’s hard to fathom today, but there was huge opposition to the midi skirt when the style began showing up in U.S. department stores. Fashion historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, writing in The Atlantic in 2014 (gift link), set the scene:

Today, the term “midi” is applied to knee-length skirts as often as tea-length skirts, and pencil skirts as well as flowing A-lines. But it originally denoted a specific, unforgiving shape: not mid-leg, but mid-calf, widening from the waist to four inches below the knee. It was (and is) a tricky silhouette to pull off without looking stumpy or frumpy. With the wrong shoes, it was a disaster. While not as obviously youthful as the mini, it looked best on young, tall, slim women with the confidence to cover up. Like so many fashion trends, it won style points for degree of difficulty as well as for execution.

Heterosexual men in general, it may go without saying, mourned the loss of the free peep show that miniskirts had afforded them. Time magazine called the midi “ungainly, unflattering, and unwarranted.” Some women agreed: Coco Chanel, who had hated miniskirts, was no fan of the midi, either; she derided it as “awkward.” And feminists were up in arms over the coverup of legs, too, writes Chrisman-Campbell:

In an October 1970 article titled “Fashion Fascism: The Politics of Midi,” the San Francisco counterculture fashion magazine Rags decried the midi as a capitalist “conspiracy”; in addition to being “cumbersome and matronly” it had “built-in obsolescence.” (How this differentiated it from any other fashion trend, the magazine did not specify.)

(Ah, Rags! A reminiscence for another day.)

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I was already deep into “midi” when I read television critic James Poniewozik’s essay in the New York Times headlined “The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV” (gift link).

I’d been tracking the slang modifier mid since late 2021. (As a word element, mid — “the middle part,” “intermediate” — goes all the way back to Old English, its senses reinforced by imported Latinate medium.) In January 2022 mid was an American Dialect Society (ADS) nominee for the Most Likely to Succeed Word of the Year for 2021. We don’t see the category winner, antiwork, very much now, but mid has thrived.

Here’s how the ADS defined mid: “of average or poor quality, or simply decent, in the amorphous slang of Generation Z.”

“Simply decent” is the meaning Poniewozik wants us to infer in his critique of shows like “Poker Face,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” and “Hijack.” He’s not cheering, though:

Mid is not the mediocre TV of the past. It’s more upscale. It is the aesthetic equivalent of an Airbnb “modern farmhouse” renovation, or the identical hipster cafe found in medium-sized cities all over the planet. It’s nice! The furniture is tasteful, they’re playing Khruangbin on the speakers, the shade-grown coffee is an improvement on the steaming mug of motor oil you’d have settled for a few decades ago.

Apple TV+, Poniewozik writes, “might be the HBO of Mid”:

Its shows feel professional. They look like premium products that no one skimped on. “Palm Royale” has a loaded cast (Kristen Wiig, Laura Dern, Carol Burnett[!]) and an attention to period detail that recalls “Mad Men.” But its class farce is toothless, its atmosphere of ’60s cultural ferment warmed over. Comedies like “Shrinking” and “Platonic” and “Loot” are more nice than funny, dramas like “Constellation,” “The New Look” and “Manhunt” classy but inert.

Only one letter separates Poniewozik’s damned-with-faint-praise Mid from the intriguingly stylish midimalism. But the rise of both terms draws attention to in-betweenness, an interesting concept in an age of extremism. Could “middle of the road” be due for a comeback?

1. Because someone is going to bring this up: standby is the noun. The verb is two words: stand by. Likewise setup vs. set up.

2. Sic. He may have meant “midimalist.”

3. “Drunk Elephant is named for the woozy way elephants walk after they eat fermented Marula beans. In other words, this is not a brand that takes itself all that seriously.”

4. “Mini” as an abbreviation for “miniskirt” is attested from 1966, but it had been used to describe cars since 1961. The British Motor Corporation [not Cooper — thanks, Grays Boron!] introduced its Mini model in 1959.