This New Year’s Eve was mild, so the spirited young women who stepped out that night in sparkling mini-dresses and high heels, and little else, weren’t too cold. But I was surprised, as I headed home from a party, to see so many of them wearing sheer, flesh-colored pantyhose. New York City ladies aren’t shy about showing off their legs, even in the winter. If they do don hose it’s typically colored or opaque, and for warmth or graphic impact rather modesty. Now, with Michelle Obama attending state events bare-legged, and gentlemen beginning to experiment with the medium (mantyhouse, guylons), it’s a bit old-fashioned for a woman to wear nude pantyhose. Even the word itself – pantyhose - seems outdated.
Kate Middleton, who is required to wear stockings in public by Buckingham Palace, and usually chooses to wear sheer, nude hose, might be responsible for the resurgence. I can remember getting my first pair of pantyhose in the seventh grade, and how impossibly grown up they made me feel. But in college, as I became vaguely politicized, I realized that no shade of nylon could mimic my flesh and abandoned them for opaque black tights. Sheer hose can hide blemishes, but in smoothing over a woman’s legs they also disguise some of the finest, most expressive parts of them, like the tendons at her ankles and knees. They give women eerily shiny, smoothed-over limbs. Sheer pantyhose offer little protection in cold weather and are insufferable in warm weather. Some years ago a group of California artists started a Giant Bra Ball, a collection of women’s most uncomfortable, unflattering and ugliest bras. Isn’t it time to toss the flesh-colored hose too?