Fashion explains most if not all of the used of stockings.
It seems to me that looking at the 1904 picture shows the answer. Stockings were considered part of normal dress (even for men in earlier times) - both for modesty and warmth. You simply did not expose bare skin - remember the lyric “In olden days a glimpse of stocking was considered shocking…”? Ankles were titillating.
Silk was used for luxury stockings, but cotton and wool were more common. I’d bet that the shift from black or white to flesh colored opaque stockings was daring and shocking - but from that to sheer was a logical step. The dictates of fashion always seem to favor the daring or exotic - and have for a long time. The Roman Senate tried to block the wearing of sheer silk gowns on grounds of modesty (and foreign trade balance). Seneca said
“I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one’s decency, can be called clothes… Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife’s body.”
People wear them under trousers? Do they tighten up your legs?
I guess I don’t have enough jiggly parts so I don’t understand how it holds things up…I think I’m lucky enough (young enough?) that there’s not a whole of jiggling going on, with or without pantyhose. I knew about control tops for the tummy but I had no idea that people needed them for other things…
You’re talking about support hose? I think the idea is they are tight enough to prevent venous blood & interstitial fluid from pooling in the lower extremities. Nurses and waitresses and others who are on their feet all day often wear them.
Oh maybe you’re just talking about knee-highs. Dunno. Maybe some people just like the feel.
Yes, when you’re jiggly, even regular pantyhose (it doesn’t have to be medical support hose!) compress everything, smooth out lumps and bumps, and cover a multitude of sins.
I have often found that wearing pantyhose under tailored pants, especially if they’re made of a thin or clingy fabric, improves the fit and look. It’s like an inexpensive shaper. (Oh dear, you’re still young and firm, you probably don’t know about shapewear either . . .) (ETA: oops, should probably flag that link: pictures of ladies in underwear, not indecent, Penney’s catalog-type stuff, but possibly NSFW)
I love the way they just plop down without a blanket or towel between their nice clothes and the sand.
As for stockings/pantyhose: I grew up in the 60s and couldn’t wait to wear nylons. I wore them into the early 1990s, maybe even later, although I mostly wore black ones. (Not tights like most women wear these days; sheer black pantyhose.) I don’t wear them anymore, but I miss the idea of something between my foot and my shoe. Bare foot against shoe = blisters and sore red spots.
I switched to mostly sandals for my dressy summer shoes; I find it impossible to wear most pumps without hose. I’m not an old lady, I don’t think, maybe I am to a 20-year-old, but it seems like this no-hose fashion policy came on rather suddenly, after a lifetime of being clad in hose.
Of course even in the olden days I wore cotton skirts and flat sandals with bare legs, but never in any sort of dressy outfit. And I cannot see how anyone dresses up without them in the winter! I mean, hose aren’t much, but they’re a lot warmer than going bare-legged in the snow!:eek:
1
ETA: Oh and try wearing wool pants without hose underneath. God almighty, the itch!
Heh. Sorry for the ignorance–I spend most of my effort making sure my face and hair are smoothed out and pretty (make up, styling, etc.) and I just figure everything else takes care of itself. I mean, I go to the gym but just always liked my legs as they were.
I have in the past worn panty hose but it’s so uncomfortable. It’s leggings or nothing for me, I’m afraid.
I occasionally enjoy wearing stockings with dresses or skirts, but generally I go barelegged underneath my clothes. Part of the issue is skirt length, part of the issue is finding stockings that fit my proportions (long thick legs), part of the issue is my loathing of pantyhose, and part of the issue is that it’s so damned hot around here most of the year that wearing anything on my legs with a skirt is just plain awful.
Stocking had seams at first, then sometime in the 1950 the technology came along to make seamless stockings. Which lead to this little story from the Reader’s Digest
A married couple is about to enter a party, the wife who is concerned about her looks says to her husband “Is the seam on my right stocking straight?”
“Yes it is straight” he replies.
“What about the other one?” she then asks
“It’s seamless”
:smack: