Those who remember Uganda in the mid-1980s will remember the knickerbocker.

Except we had spectacularly missed the original plot.

Washington Irving’s fictional 19th-century Dutch New Yorker, Diedrich Knickerbocker, lent his name to loose men’s breeches gathered at the knee. Somehow they crossed oceans, reached Kampala - and became ladies’ fashion.

And the ladies rocked them.

Before our knickerbocker came the mini. The 1960s sent hemlines northwards and moral anxiety upwards. By the 1980s and 90s, an ambitious mini through downtown Kampala could earn the wearer an undressing. Or -even, a beating.

Today, enter an Abryanz fashion event. Kampala arrives dressed to kill -sometimes with remarkably little cloth available to commit the offence.

Gen Z calls it fashion. Some of us search for the missing material.

Yesterday, some Ugandan friends of mine attended Eswatini’s Umhlanga Reed Dance -young women celebrating an ancient tradition through song, dance and considerable exposed skin.

There sits our delicious African contradiction.

At Umhlanga, skin can signify culture and heritage. Transfer similar acreage to nightclub lighting and morality suddenly enters the room.

Meanwhile, our neighbours -whose graceful traditional dances mimic birds and animals, symbolising elegance, charm and social bonding -are wrestling with another kind of movement after women were reportedly denied entry to a Diamond Platnumz concert over revealing clothing.

And suddenly an old argument has acquired a new hemline.

When does elegance become indecency? When does charm become provocation? And precisely how much social bonding is too much bonding?

Culture makes this wonderfully complicated. The African body did not suddenly acquire skin with TikTok. Our ancestors danced, celebrated and dressed according to meanings their societies understood. What changes is context -and perhaps our interpretation of it.

So we want the young modern -but African. Free - but responsible. Expressive - but not too expressive.

Yet, somewhere inside those contradictions stands a young woman wondering whether, before leaving home, she needs a mirror, a cultural historian -or legal counsel.

Because once “indecency” has no convenient ruler, who measures the hemline?

Parents? Society? The State? A policeman adjudicating centimetres of thigh?

And here is what bothers me: why does morality so often arrive wearing a woman’s skirt?

If responsible sexual behaviour is the objective, boys surely belong in the conversation too. We cannot leave them roaming like free-range chicken, then appoint girls custodians of everybody’s hormones.

Morals matter. Culture matters. But so do dignity, choice and freedom. Exposed skin does not automatically signal abandoned morality any more than covering it automatically manufactures virtue.

We want morality without repression, freedom without recklessness, culture without fossilising it -and modernity without losing ourselves inside it.

That is one difficult hemline to measure.

Perhaps bring back the knickerbocker. In the spirit of East African neighbourliness, we could even interest our neighbours in wearing them too.

But then, going forward by going back forty years is hardly the progress anyone had in mind.

Although, knowing Abryanz and his weakness for resurrecting the 80s, he may already be sketching the collection.