Roundabout
Showing a Leg
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN But now things are hotting up. The black stocking gimmick has brought coloured stockings in its make; and coloured stockings have twice the counter-appeal of leg-coloured ones. So, to Meet this competition, the flesh-coloured stock- ings are brightening up. There are glitter nylons that make your legs flicker as you walk (they glitter because the thread is triangular), though unfortunately the Thine is on the outside of the leg, so they are hardly flattering. • There are patterned and tex- tured nylons, with and without seams; one inVorted kind is called, with heaven knows what future effect on a well-known phrase, Etchings. No one has yet tried the suggestion of a friend of time that stocking tops should have things printed on them in Braille; but Kayser Bondor have produced a pair that has black tops (other colours, too, but less successfully) to match the underwear above, and other, 'pantie tops' are on their way from America. , It is an interesting attempt to bridge the gap, NI only shows up a basic problem : that while lingerie and stockings have been refined to the utmost limits of twentieth-century ingenuity, there remains between them, archaic and un- inspiring and unchallenged, the suspender. When you come to think of it, it is incredible that this ungainly little knob should not have gone out with elastic-sided boots.
One answer, which I thought I had invented but which was, apparently, tried out by Howard Ford eighteen months ago, Would be 15 denier tights, a combination of stockings and thin pants to be worn under the girdle. They failed to catch on partly because they cost two guineas a time; an American one on sale at 25s., with a thicker nylon for the pants, may well have a better hope. The snag, of course, is that a single ladder ruins the whole thing; so what is wanted is a streamlined means of remov- ing one stocking and replacing another. Why not, then, that system of a thousand infinitesimal hooks that makes a fastening just by pressing one strip of it against another? It has been invented. but is so far mainly used in motoring jackets.
Another way, of course, would be to invent a non-ladderable fabric. It is one of the deepest convictions of British womanhood that the manu- facturers could perfectly well do this if they tried; and they remember, darkly, that the first nylons we had after the war were almost indestructible. Margaret Reekie, of the British Nylon Spinners, however, points out that they were in fact far thicker: they were 30 denier, and nowadays 80 per cent. of women wear 15. (The human hair, for what that's worth, is 50 denier.) She also points out that the 'cobweb thin' silk stockings, spoken of in terms of rapture by the novelists of the Thirties, were in fact never as fine as today's service weight. She remembers, with emotion, 'the great day. December 2, 1946, when nylons came to Britain . . . there were queues in the streets.' Indeed they were practically currency in the post- war years: 'One before,' as a coarse ex-war cor- respondent puts it, 'and one after.' 'There were painted legs, too: the magazines remarked that women who could not get stockings that looked like legs had to content themselves with legs that looked like stockings, and I remember being slapped at the school sports for drawing a damp finger down the painted leg of an enemy.
Miss Reekie says we are bad on sizes: we complain that 'our toes always go through,' or we take a size larger `to get the length' or fail to realise that a too-tight stocking can make feet ache like a too-tight shoe.
We are also, it seems, intensely subjective about stockings, and no one has ever been able to work out why women leading the same lives in the same places still ladder their nylons at different rates. But if there's one thing more temperamen- tal than women, it's machines. If they are too hot, too cold, too old, underpowered or in need of care and protection, the tension will be affected—and that, repeated in a million stitches, means that the stockings come out different lengths; there are highly skilled men who do nothing but match them up. You would think more manufacturers would take advantage of this and sell them in different lengths; but it is sur- prising how few of them do.
The smartest thing to wear at the moment is a seamless stocking in a fairly rich shade, though the fat-legged still look better if the acreage is sliced in half by a fully-fashioned seam: Men are said to feel that there is more adventure in a seam—as Mrs. Ford of Bear Brand puts it, 'After all, dear, a line does lead somewhere.' As things stand, a seamless stocking takes ten minutes to make, a seamed one over half an hour, so for once the smarter thing is also the cheaper. I can- not imagine that situation being allowed to continue.
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