The Victorians certainly took prudishness to the extreme. But they weren't alone in their special relationship with the ankle. In China, a truly pathological obsession with small feet developed. The notorious lotus feet, compressed to less than four inches in length. A tradition that persisted until the 1950s, a ritual somewhere between status symbol and bodily harm.
The contrast with Japanese culture is intriguing. There, the ankle was completely unproblematic when wearing a kimono. Instead, the nape of the neck was considered the erotic zone par excellence. When Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons deliberately plays with concealed and revealed body parts in her collections, it really only shows how arbitrary our notions of "appropriate" and "inappropriate" are.
My personal favorite chapter, however, is the Rococo period. This era was so wonderfully quirky! At Versailles, the strategic flashing of bare skin became a sophisticated social game. A briefly gathered skirt while stepping out of a carriage, a seemingly accidental glimpse of an ankle during a minuet — the subtle art of suggestion.
But perhaps this also says something about our time: When the formerly scandalous becomes the norm, it loses its appeal. The Victorians were certainly not on the right track with their exaggerated prudery, but at least they still understood the power of the unexpected. Sometimes I wonder what our society will be puzzled by in 100 years.