Hooray for Male Hosiery

Men's tights by Gerbe 

(the famous French hosiery manufacturer, est. 1895)

 

I. 

 

There are not many advantages to being diagnosed with superficial vein reflux (and associated varicosties) in your leg and then having endovenous surgery to address this. 

 

Indeed, the disadvantages and risks are clear; lumps, bumps, bruises, scarring, pain and discomfort, not to mention possible sensory nerve damage (causing numbness) and the danger of deep vein thrombosis.

 

However, once the layers and layers of mummy-like bandaging and protective gauze are removed 48-hours after the operation, one is afforded the opportunity to parade around in full-length elasticated black stockings and that at least affords a frisson of pleasure. 

 

One can even pretend to be Paul Morel, who famously found it thrilling to pull on a pair of Clara's stockings when alone in her bedroom [1]; or Steve Jones, at the end of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, holding up Malcolm's ten lessons inscribed on tablets of stone, like a punk Moses, whilst wearing black rubber stockings [2].

 

 

 

II.

 

Of course, whilst men wearing stockings is today mostly seen as either comic or kinky, historically this practice was the norm for long periods; from the Middle Ages until the mid-late 16th century men wore hose and proudly displayed their legs (whilst covering their groin with a cod piece).

 

After this date, the fashion was for separate breeches and stockings, but men still loved to show a shapely calf and members of the nobility would wear stockings made of expensive silk or the finest wool (rather than the coarser fabrics worn by the lower classes).

 

Now, sadly, male legs are either hidden under trousers, or bare and exposed in shorts and it is only ballet dancers, super-heroes, and drag queens who get to regularly and openly wear tights [3].

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Chapter XII of D. H. Lawrence's, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 381. 

 

[2] Actually, I have misremembered this scene; Jones wears a black rubber (or PVC) cape with bright red PVC thigh boots; not stockings. See The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, (dir. Julien Temple, 1980).

[3] Thankfully, at least women are increasingly wearing hoisery once more, as the fashion for bare legs wanes and coloured tights are bang on trend for 2023. And there are some who fly the flag for male legwear; see for example the blog Hoisery for Men: click here.     

 

The Nylon Riots

Nylon is a generic term for a group of synthetic polymers known as aliphatic polyamides, first produced in 1935 by Wallace Carothers whilst working at the Du Pont research facility in Delaware, USA. Although it was initially manufactured as a type of hard plastic and used commercially in nylon-bristled toothbrushes, its most famous application came after it was produced in the form of an artificial silk fabric at the New York World's Fair in 1939. After this date, silk stockings gave way to nylons and female legs would never be the same again.

Immediately popular and in extremely high demand, women in the US and elsewhere went mad for nylons and many millions of pairs were sold and worn with delight. Unfortunately, however, after America finally entered World War II, Du Pont were obliged by government order to cease production of stockings and use the new wonder material for parachutes and other such items required by the military. 

Thus, during the war, women had to make do with old or second-hand stockings; or, if push really came to shove, they resorted to a clever use of cosmetics and painted seams on bare legs in order to create the illusion that they were wearing nylons. 

Not surprisingly, stockings became increasingly sought after and (often stolen) pairs could sell for up to $20 on the black market. American women were desperate for the fighting to end, so that they they could have their menfolk back home and - just as vitally - nylons would be easily available once more. So desperate were they in fact to own new stockings, that when Du Pont shifted its production back to stockings post-war, it resulted in what have become known as the Nylon Riots.

One of the largest disturbances was in Pittsburgh, where 40,000 women queued for 13,000 pairs of stockings, inevitably leading to disappointment, hair-pulling, and eye-scratching. Following similar trouble in Augusta, Georgia, a local newspaper ran with the headline: 'Women Risk Life and Limb in Bitter Battle for Nylons' and reported how crowds forced their way into stores and knocked over display counters as well as each other.

Du Pont, who had promised that all women would be able to have new nylons by Christmas, were obliged to revise their forecast. Indeed, it took several months to finally bring production in line with the frenzy of demand, thereby bringing the mass cat-fights to an end. 

The point is this: it's not just men who love nylons; women too know that bare legs lack magic and that one ultimately gets the greatest joy of all out of a pair of really lovely stockings. 

Angela Carter and Lorenzo the Closet Queen

Portrait of Angela Carter by Tara Heinemann in which 

she brings out the almost spectral beauty of the subject

Used with permission

Since her death in 1992, there has, I think, been a marked falling off of interest in the work of Angela Carter amongst readers and critics - even those of a feminist persuasion. Tastes change and her writing now seems a bit too gothic and too queer; the language used is just too rich in an age of austerity (i.e. meanness and fear).

Of course, she still has her fans and loyal supporters and I might even be numbered amongst them, for her books meant a very great deal to me in my youth. But the fact remains that she's now a somewhat less mainstream and thus more marginal figure than she used to be and this is unfortunate, as she is not only a great novelist and teller of tales, but a brilliant journalist and critic.

Her study, The Sadeian Woman, for example, remains one of the best exercises in cultural history and sexual politics produced by an English author and her pieces collected in Nothing Sacred (Virago, 1992) also deserve to be read and re-read; not least of all the essay 'Lorenzo the Closet Queen', which combines two of her great loves and two of my own obsessions, namely, the novels of D. H. Lawrence and the sociology of fashion. 

In the above, Carter offers an all-too-brief sartorial critique of Women in Love - a novel which, as she amusingly says, is "as full of clothes as Brown's". She also argues that if Lawrence catalogues the wardrobes of his heroines with such a loving eye for detail, he does so in order to convince his readers that he possesses a "hot line to a woman's heart by the extraordinary sympathy he has for her deepest needs, that is, nice stockings, pretty dresses and submission" [208].

This, she says, is a piece of literary fraudulence. And yet, as she goes on to add, Lawrence at the same time clearly enjoys being a girl and has a genuine and somewhat touching (if pathologically fetishistic) interest in female apparel. Lawrence, she writes, "is seduced and bemused by the narcissistic apparatus of femininity", even if he only wanted to be a woman "so that he could achieve the supreme if schizophrenic pleasure of fucking himself" [209].

As I noted in an earlier post, Lawrence is particularly fascinated in Women in Love by the thought of brightly coloured stockings and they become a kind of leitmotiv running throughout the novel. Carter writes:

"Stockings, stockings, stockings everywhere. Hermione Roddice sports coral-coloured ones, Ursula canary ones. Defiant, brilliant, emphatic stockings. But never the suggestion the fabric masks, upholsters, disguises living, subversive flesh. Lawrence is a stocking man, not a leg man. Stockings have supplanted legs; clothes have supplanted flesh. Fetishism.
      The apotheosis of the stockings comes right at the end of the novel, where they acquire at last an acknowledged, positive, sexual significance. ... Indeed, the stockings appear to precipitate a condition of extreme erotic arousal in Gudrun; she touches them with 'trembling, excited hands'." [209-10]

The question is, what is Lawrence playing at in this scene of camp ecstasy and girliness? Carter is in no doubt:

"I think what Lawrence is doing is attempting to put down the women he has created in his own image for their excessive reaction to the stockings to which he himself has a very excessive reaction indeed, the deep-down queenly, monstrous old hypocrite that he is." [210]

This seems a bit harsh: but deadly accurate. Lawrence allows himself the "licence to mock the girls for parading about in the grotesque finery he has forced them to don" [211]. He is at once fascinated by female dandyism and the seductive allure of fashion and repulsed by it. If he depicts Gudrun as a kind of whore, then Hermione is turned into a terrifying witch figure by the exotic, aristocratic and self-conscious strangeness of her dress.

Whilst Baudelaire loved women for their unnaturalness, Lawrence hates them for it and many of his female characters end up like drag queens, defined and confined by their own clothing. Carter concludes that for most of the time in Women in Love, Lawrence is like a little boy dressing up in his mother's clothes and attempting to fool us into thinking he writes with the hand (and the eye) of a woman:

"The con trick, the brilliant, the wonderful con trick, the real miracle, is that his version of drag has been widely accepted as the real thing, even by young women who ought to know better. In fact, Lawrence probes as deeply into a woman's heart as the bottom of a hat-box." [214]

The Greatest Joy of All

One of my favourite scenes in Lawrence's Women in Love comes towards the end of the book, when Gudrun presents her sister with three pairs of the coloured silk stockings for which she was notorious.

Ursula, as one might imagine, is rapturous to receive such a beautiful gift: 'One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings', she says, and Gudrun echoes this sentiment. This comes as no big surprise, as throughout the novel the Brangwen sisters often discuss clothes with the same intensity of excitement as they recount their latest experiences of the heart. 

What is surprising, however, is that Lawrence will later chastise George Bernard Shaw for his remark that clothes arouse our desire and not the exposure of flesh, which, in many cases, has quite the opposite effect. For Lawrence, this reveals Shaw to be a flippant and vulgar thinker and he sternly declares: "The man who finds a woman's underclothing the most exciting part about her is a savage."

But actually, Shaw has a point and an important point at that; one developed by Roland Barthes who argues that woman is desexualized "at the very moment when she is stripped bare". It is only via a whole spectrum of adornment (i.e. the furs, the gloves, the shoes, the frilly underwear, the expensive stockings, the jewellery, etc.) that the living body can be projected into the symbolic category of  erotic objects and thereby made magical and alluring.

Thus, far from 'savagery' - and I'm assuming here that Lawrence means by this primitive naivety - fetishism is a sign of human sophistication; a happy exchange of nature for artifice. And so whilst the simplest of men may admire a woman's bare and blotchy legs, the more cultured are likely to admire her legs only when they are made lustrous by nylon. As for those rare individuals who are refined to the point of perversity, such persons are interested only in the stockings themselves and have no real concern for limbs.

Lawrence would probably describe the first type as healthy; for they have naturally directed their desire towards the nakedness of woman. The second type he would doubtless think of as having their sex in the head - though this would surely have to include the Paul Morel type, the Mellors type and, indeed, his own type.

As for the third class, i.e. those who - like the Brangwen sisters - get the greatest joy of all out of a pair of really lovely stockings and whom Lawrence thinks of as crude and savage, well, personally, I have nothing but the highest regard for them. It might just be that those who have recognised that passion not only ends in fashion, but begins there as well, have something to teach us all.