Although pantyhose, tights, and stockings may have fallen out of style and popularity America at the end of the 20th century as a ubiquitous and standard everyday article of apparel, they has now transformed into a high fashion item, as well as being commonplace globally due to etiquette, fashion, or customs, especially in the Asian cultures where there are dress codes and custom to dress for the workplace. Europe was less influenced because of each of the constituent countries still maintained their individual and traditional cultures to a certain degree, and retained some formality is dressing for work, and for fashion, and the British were still very passionate about hosiery and retained a certain amount of cultural formality.
It is the U.S. that has become a casual culture adopting “athleisure” dress styles due to a number of influences, but primarily the gender equality movement and legislation in the 1990’s, had afforded women the option of equality in dress, where they could choose to wear pants. This even resonated through the halls of Congress… where the congresswomen defied tradition and chose to wear pants. Airlines and other industries and enterprises could no longer legally require to wear dresses, skirts, and hosiery. However, in America’s financial centers, dresses, skirts and hosiery were, and still are strongly encouraged– with exception of the concession of casual Fridays. Even the U.S. Marine Corps dropped their women’s hosiery requirement and made their female uniforms optional to wear pants just a few months ago. The Air Force scrapped its hose requirement in 2021, and the Navy followed suit in 2022. But the Army’s rules appear to call for women to wear hosiery in certain uniforms.
Sheer hosiery has been since it invention, has been both adored, and been the bane of women due to its propensity to snagging, ripping, and running– a verb to describe the longitudinal deconstruction or unraveling of the knitted mesh due to a broken fiber, a delicate thread prone to snagging from any rough edge. The thinner and sheerer the hosiery, the more delicate and prone it is to being snagged– sometimes– right out of the package. Every single woman who has ever worn hosiery– understands this feeling of angst and distress all too well.
In the spectrum of hosiery, there is a special standard of measurement to measure its sheerness, and therefore durability, called denier, or “D”– with a number in front of it. It is similar to a thread count on bedding and sheets. See our explanation of denier here. Semantics also differ– the higher the denier, the thicker and more opaque the mesh– so traditionally
The Renaissance of Pantyhose
Although tights, pantyhose, and stockings never went away, and had enough adherents and fans world wide to support over a hundred hosiery manufacturers and over a billion dollars in global sales, hosiery. It is now experiencing a revival, and hosiery sales are booming. Hosiery has morphed into a very fashionable item to feature legs, with advances in computerized knitting technology that allows for a myriad of designs, patterns, multi-textures, toeless, crotch-less, and virtually anything that designers can dream-up… including weaving their own branded designer names into the mesh. New synthetic materials are constantly developed to make the yarns more durable and impervious to breaking (like Kevlar® used in bullet-proof vests, and for the tent-structure terminals of Denver International Airport), and a new Canadian company called Sheertex® has developed a new yarn incorporating this durable polymer into a virtually indestructible pantyhose. They are however pricey, and come in at 30 denier, so they are only somewhat sheer and limited in styles to qualify as fashionable. The new knitting technologies has created mesh weaves that are dubbed “run resistant” and don’t run, however they are equally or even more prone to snagging, and will develop holes anywhere the diameter of a pencil eraser to a dime.
A Matter of Semantics
For the new generations of X Y and Z (the largest demographic of consumers) the term “pantyhose” conjures a mental image of something one’s grandmother would wear to church. As an apparel article– pantyhose are not viewed as fashionable, and evokes the perception that they are archaic and anachronistic. Therefore, the marketers have borrowed the term “tights” from our British cousins, and adopted it– distancing themselves from the negative connotations associated with the anachronistic label of pantyhose. The word “pantyhose” carries with it the stigma of being obsolete to young consumers.
Although we still retain our distinctly brand of English nomenclature and call vehicles trucks instead of “lorries”, the “trunk” instead of the “boot”, a “hood” instead of a “bonnet” (and numerous other examples)– “tights” is the one terms that American marketers have adopted to distance themselves from the stigma of the perception of the perceived obsolescence of pantyhose.
A Google search defines the traditional distinction between pantyhose and tights, as the difference between hosiery that is sheer and lightweight (without any “tight” compression), and the heavier semi-opaque to opaque knit– with a tight compression squeeze– thereby called “tights”. The American marketers (without mentioning their iconic names), to cater to their young demographic, have abandoned using the term pantyhose and re-categorized all their hosiery by adopting the nomenclature “tights”, which they have sub-divided into “sheer tights”, “semi-sheer tights”, and “opaque tights”, thereby condemning the noun “pantyhose” to hospice. It will eventually (and gradually) become an obsolete and extinct term… eventually expiring with the aging baby boomers and Gen X’ers.
For the time being, aside from generational marketing, most everyone who purchases or wears pantyhose, still refers to them as such, but the new generations of conspicuous consumers who buy and wear the new textured and patterned hosiery, snub the sheer hosiery that Kate Middleton wears, or Taylor Swift, J-Lo, and numerous other performers wear on stage, or Hooters servers wear to make their legs look sexy as hell.vehicles