stockings - tights - panti-legs - panty hose - knee highs - over knees - stay ups
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stockings - tights - panti-legs - panty hose - knee highs - over knees - stay ups 〰️
Runners!!
Already late for a secret rendezvous I rushed into the garden to fetch my dogs. I stumbled, I screamed: I got my silky black stockings snagged by a bush. My hands trembled when sliding into the only other pair I had. The clips of the garter belt slipped off again and again. I couldn’t give up. This was my chance to escape my terribly dysfunctional relationship. I needed the sinful power of these stockings, and their seams to be straight, to convince myself that I wasn’t a woman stuck forever in unhappiness. I was a femme ferocious running off into the summer morning to have the fling of a lifetime. It was the 90s, I hated panty hoses and hadn’t worn stockings for at least a decade.
I made it to the tiny cafe in a remote village where my date had waited for an hour. The weekend changed my life, radically and fabulously and stockings were my accomplice in this fearless adventure.
Yesterday a pair of smooth silk stockings slithered out of their package caressing my skin; my accomplice was back. Three decades later, in midlife.
Am I alone in this? The dreaded panty hose, demanded to be worn in offices, politics and every day life, turned out to be repressive and makes us smirk sarcastically when remembered. Sensual stockings, like stilettos, accumulated a lot of feminist criticism.
A woman’s education consists of two lessons: never leave the house without stocking, never go out without a hat.
At first glance I thought Coco made a sarcastic joke but every stocking has two sides. Their sensual art had been watered down into the must for proper house wives of the 50s. Women were supposed to be polished like their silver. The inventions of nylons in the 40s had made them affordable and more than 60 million pairs were sold in the first year. When the production of nylon had to cover second world war needs and stockings became scarce, women felt so incomplete they that they painted a seam onto the back of their legs to fake stockings. After the war their repressive side shows up in women feeling they had to compete their man’s pin up girl fantasies, others stepped into the role of Stepford wives. Many were jailed in the belief that a proper woman would not be caught dead in naked legs. I panicked about runners in the 90s but just a few decades earlier it was considered shameful.
Have you ever arrested runners with nail polish?
Lucky for many, the invention of panti-legs in 1959 rattled minds and morals. Especially for the younger generations they became a tool of change. Squeezing into girdles and restrictive expectations of femininity wasn’t what girls in the 60’s wanted. Who participated in the era’s revolutionary wave rejected the responsibility of being a wife and mother early on; let’s stay playful a little longer in rompers, girly skirts and knee high socks. Who dreams of child bearing hips when you could be skinny and tom boyish like Twiggy? Practical panty hoses allowed for shorts’ and skirts’ hems to go up; colorful patterned legs flaunted rebellion against tradition.
Being sexy was a life style not mother’s means to catch a husband.
The young don’t often do what they are told and that is, in many cases, progress. Being different than our parents became natural fast, how could we possibly be stuck in rules and regulations we did not create? Knee-highs and over knees added to the mod philosophy of staying forever young and independent.
But rebellions fade and after nylons it was now the panty hose that became a part of the assigned daily uniform for women in business and politics, employees in offices or wives shopping in supermarkets. Like the shaving of legs they were a norm that grew into manipulated obsession.
We humans love to innovate and rebel against the past. Society though has the power to market and assimilate rebellion until it’s the suffocating norm again.
Good news; objects are filled with stories and their initial vibrancy can be revived. Stocking DNA says sensual femininity as much as tights vibe Mary Quant and rebellion.
The practice of fabric tightly wrapped around legs is ancient and its more recent her-story is as emotional as we women are said and meant to be.
The “hose” was initially and famously worn on the hairy legs of upper crust men in the early 17th century. Women of higher standing had to fight for the right to tights. Only when men switched to more comfy trousers at the end of the 18th century, the hose finally trickled down to the masses. After women had finally won the right to show more of their legs, the stocking adorning them developed into the “utmost feminine”, sexually loaded accessory, exactly as it had happened in the history of heels. When we enjoyed their sensual power we were called sluts. When we dissed them as sexist we were judged like suffragettes. We swirled tights in the air like freedom flags in the 60s and banned panty hoses to landfills in the 90s.
Strong feelings are not a weakness but a woman’s underestimated power; the hate and love that comes with outfits are our power tools.
For midlife women like me tights are a rebellion against society’s expectations of how a woman of a certain age has to look and behave; that many women still follow those rules scares me. Mary Quant, one of the mothers of mod in the 60s, feared the drab of adulthood, took the tights and kiddo uniform from her childhood and re-imagined it for young women’s wardrobes. The tights came in Crayola colors, playful prints and with girly embellishments.
Yesterday’s grandma esthetics and the assumption that up in age means going down are his story. We are fashionably relevant going forward.
I suggest we pull a Mary Quant: we reinvent the outfits of our power times, be it the 70s, 80s, 90s or Y2k as a rebellion against ageism and to reconnect to the joy and limitless power many of us have felt in dress ups or fashion adventures of the past. Definitely try tights in their fantastic modern versions. My Insta tights are pop colored, snake and skull embroidered, studded, glittered and appliqued.
Why are stockings and tights the latest trend, especially for women over 40?
Society is in a mood of “more” after being confined to the inside for months. It is dangerous as over-shopping slaps the environment hard and often unforgivably. Accessories like tights are a perfect solution to uplift our existing wardrobes and moods.
After slamming it in pajamas for too long, women want style and love for detail again. And fun! Pop colored tights do for women what popsicles do for kids, they make us giddy.
Experiencing life threatening times we humans react with thirst of life; if not now, when? Liberation is on the bill boards again; over knee stockings are imbued with women’s confidence, knee highs evoke high school shenanigans, garters holding fishnets stockings say sexuality is just fine when it’s mine.
Stockings, knee highs, thigh highs, and tights; there’s hosiery for every mood, occasion, time of day, and look.
The rise of conscious shopping with an eye on sustainability leads to accessories as the perfect less waste tool. We can lift a boring old dress into exiting style with creatively patterned and bright color hosiery. We can tell stories with shimmer, sheer and graphic tights and rebel against restrictions of many kinds. Especially for midlife women tights have become the steam in their closets and blow the lid off beige, mature and average.
2022 is about dopamine dressing. The mood elevation via tights is easily available and affordable. Just search for “patterned tights” at Amazon or Etsy.
We can witness the mindset of a society by what it lets its women wear and by the women who rebel against the norm. It took decades for us to be allowed to show legs and today we let our legs speak a new, ageism-free language. Instagram women have always danced in lingerie but in midlife it becomes a beauty revolution.
Midlife women are a new power source, when we show our legs in tights we make a bold point. Age is irrelevant when we are relevant.
Tights let every woman, no matter the age or size, pop with personality in the slip-on of a moment.
Our legs’ fashion shows how far we have come from the must of panty hoses.
Tights symbolized freedom once and can do it again; let’s get our stockings out and let them be “the barometer” of our outfits and accomplice of our fabulous, unprecedented midlife mindset.
Ripped tights are the ultimate rebellion for a midlife woman.