With old fashioned stockings, the ones that had seams running up and down the legs in the back, is there any reason it was located there? The seam is so visible there, whereas it would seem to be less conspicuous on the inside of the legs.
I know that the seam itself came to be seen as sexy, with women painting them on during the nylon shortage in WW2, and now some see it as an attractive part of the retro stocking look. But why did it start out there? Is there a manufacturing reason? A comfort reason?
(I’m not asking why they had seams then and can be made without them now. I’m asking specifically about the design choice to put them on the back of the leg.)
It seems that it was just the natural place to put the seam:
I always assumed that there were two reasons: most of all, it’s a lot harder to sew a flat piece of cloth to wrap around a foot and ankle if you stitch it along the bottom and then straight up the back of the leg, than if you try to stitch it from the side, simply because the cloth can be cut symmetrically that way; that, plus that the assumption is that you would want to look at a woman from the FRONT, making it better to hide the seams in back. But I have no direct confirmation.
ISTM that if the seams were on the inside of the legs, they would rub against each other. And having a seam on the inside of the leg would look funny.
Plus you would then have a right sock and a left sock. Tough to keep straight when you are sneaking out in the dark.
Aren’t left and right stockings identical? Or more precisely aren’t the two stockings in a pair identical with no distinction between left and right? If you put the seams on the inside, you’d have to make different left and right stockings which, I assume, would be more expensive.
Did the technology exist at that time to manufacture seamless stockings?
Read the article I linked to in #2
<Looks at his trousers with a seam on the inside of each leg.>
Okay.