Hosiery News

Pantyhose Aren’t Dead Yet

Do you wear pantyhose to work? What about your friends? Or your adult kids?

This fashion accessory, once a staple for working women, seems to be seen less frequently at some workplaces. But why?

How to Put on Fully Fashioned Stockings

Trending: Colored Tights for Fall

Stockings Series, Part 2: Paint-on Hosiery During the War Years

So it’s Saturday night in 1941, and you want to wear stockings with your cocktail dress, but the new wonder material nylon has been rationed for the war effort and has disappeared from department store shelves. What do you do in such times of patriotic privation? You get resourceful, and cover your legs with a layer of nude-colored makeup, and line the back of each leg with a trompe l’oeil seam.

Read more...

To Luxury Legwear and Beyond: Wolford AW12 Collection Hits Stores

So September has come around quicker than ever and whilst it doesn't seem quite the time to put summer dresses away, it's definitely time to pile on the knits and to become reacquainted with your tights drawer. Wolford - the high end hosiery company established in Austria after the war - held a timely event last week to reveal their new Autumn/Winter collection and to show that there's more to the brand than just luxe legwear.

Stocking Series, Part 1: Wartime Rationing and Nylon Riots

Nylon stockings made their debut in my hometown, Wilmington, Delaware, on October 24, 1939. That’s because Wallace Hume Carothers, the chemist who invented the synthetic material in 1935, worked for the DuPont company, which is headquartered there. In fact, the first test sale to DuPont employees’ wives took place at the company’s experimental station, just up the street from my childhood home. Not long before the 4,000 pairs of stockings sold out—in only three hours!—DuPont had had women modeling nylon hosiery at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, touting nylon as a synthetic fabric made of “carbon, water and air.” A prototype of that initial run (get it?) can be found in the Smithsonian’s collection.

Read more