I grew up in a Catholic household and almost every year the family broke out the same DVD to mark the holiday season: A Christmas Story. So many scenes in that movie fill me with nostalgia, but I can only point to one plotline that I’m sure, without a doubt, was sexually formative to me: the lamp. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s basically a series of vignettes about a suburban family in 1939. In one of them, the father receives a mysterious “major award” in the mail which turns out to be a particularly sensual lamp. It’s a long, shapely glowing leg topped with a tasseled shade designed to evoke a skirt. Most entrancingly (at least for me), the lamp is wearing a high black heel and a thigh-high fishnet stocking that our ten-year-old protagonist Ralphie just can’t keep his hands off. According to the narrator, when the lamp was lit-up in the family’s window “the entire neighborhood was turned on.”
Now that I’m an adult with what some might call a full-fledged fetish for hosiery, this plotline is an easy source to thank for my desires, while also serving as an example of how our culture treats stockings. On the one hand, they seem to be semi-universally understood to be sexy. They’re often part of lingerie sets, they appear in vanilla porn and burlesque shows very frequently, and even mainstream movies like The Graduate use them in ways the audience is clearly meant to process as seductive. At the same time, they’re sort of treated as a safe form of eroticism. A Christmas Story is considered a child-friendly film and I’d be very surprised if I rewatched it with my family one year and discovered a scene of Ralphie groping a statue’s chest or crotch. But for some reason, a long beautiful leg in sensual hosiery is considered just sexy enough that adults will understand but not lewd enough to be inappropriate, despite the fact many people are extremely turned on by them. So how did this little cultural kink for hosiery come to be, what do people find so sexy about it, and how can you start exploring if you want to?
The History of Hosiery
Hosiery is technically any garment worn directly on the feet or legs, so it’s an umbrella term for socks, tights, and even leggings among other things. As far as today’s blog post is concerned, I’ll be using the word mostly to describe woven items like stockings and pantyhose that cover the feet and wouldn’t usually be worn without something like a skirt. I love my sock and legging fetishists, but I think they deserve a separate piece.
People have worn fabric against their legs under other garments for a long time, and in the early 20th century most of these were silk stockings that had to be held on by garters. The invention of nylon in 1939 changed the game by bringing the tight-fitting stockings we know today. Immediately popular, nylon stockings became a staple of the everyday woman’s wardrobe (a fact that became problematic when World War II forced nylon to be rationed for military supplies like parachutes). This ubiquity of nylon hosiery in the early-to-mid 20th Century is probably a big reason why it’s become so sexually charged. Underwear in general tends to be eroticized, but there’s a particularly understandable sexual appeal in garments that constantly peek out from under the clothes of most women you know, but which men and boys never get to see in full until they watch a woman undress. Stockings like this were also associated with women entering the workforce and becoming staples of uniforms (official and otherwise) in a variety of professions. Suddenly, kids were growing up surrounded by professional women like teachers and flight attendants wearing stockings along with more revealing outfits than had previously been considered appropriate, a fact which was probably sexually formative for many. Sexually charged pinup images containing hosiery were also widely circulated in the mid-century which probably affected the sexuality of many people while offering evidence that nylons were basically considered sexy from the get-go.
Nowadays, nylons are far from a staple of everyday women’s fashion except in formal business wear and the outfits of specialized professions like flight attendants and burlesque performers. That hasn’t stopped them from being sexy, though! Not only are they very common accessories in pornographic and semi-pornographic media, they’re also a popular fetish in their own right. Modern-day hosiery fetishists (and I say this word with the utmost respect, I love my fellow fetishists) are into stockings and pantyhose in a variety of ways. For many, it’s simply the texture and appearance. Depending on the material, stockings and pantyhose can be different levels of silky and transparent which has the effect of making legs appear smooth and flawless while placing them behind a sensual veil that keeps them “just out of reach”. There’s a sensuality to be found in the act of pulling the fabric up your (or someone else’s) leg, immediately creating a lightly restrictive feeling as the material tightly holds your skin. Hosiery can make people feel luxurious, sexy and feminine.
Hosiery and Connecting to Kink
Beyond just being inherently erotic to some people, hosiery also overlaps and synthesizes well with a huge variety of other fetishes and kinks. Most obviously, foot fetishism is easily spiced up with some stockings. Stockings can act as light foot bondage that forces someone’s toes to squeeze together. Stockings can also collect the smell of someone’s feet or even just create a tantalizing veil that keeps details away from the viewer before a strip tease is complete, for example. The connection between tights, stockings and professional uniforms is not only perfect for people with uniform fetishes but can also add to power exchange roleplays on both ends. A sexy subordinate secretary or (adult roleplaying as a) schoolgirl could both benefit from some professional hosiery, but so could a teacher in a teacher-student roleplay. There’s also major overlap between hosiery kinks and cross-dressing kinks. If you’re into forced feminization, being “made” to wear stockings can be very fun and, if you want it to be, erotically humiliating. Like women’s panties, stockings can be easily concealed under someone’s everyday masculine apparel which can be sexually thrilling. They also cover leg hair, so someone who generally presents in a more typically masculine way can experience feeling sensually smooth without committing to shaving. This can be very useful for people interested in exploring gender presentation in nonsexual ways as well!
How to Bring Hosiery into Your Sexual Toolkit
If any of this is exciting to you, you’re in luck! Hosiery is one of the easiest kinks to break into – you don’t even need a partner! If you think you might be into stockings as objects in themselves or think it would be sexy to try wearing them, you can easily (and cheaply!) pick up a pair online or probably even at your local drugstore. If you’re not interested in wearing stockings or tights, that’s okay too! There’s just about endless pornography that features hosiery, and because many hosiery lovers have very specific desires, there’s much content catered to those interested in specific materials, opacity levels, etc. A good place to start might be r/Stockings or r/TightsAndTightClothes on Reddit! If you want to explore hosiery with a partner, that’s wonderful too. Because some kinds of hosiery are already sexually coded in mainstream culture, introducing your interest to a partner might be less daunting than other kinks. Of course, you shouldn’t try to pressure a partner into dressing a certain way or make it seem like you’re not attracted to them without certain clothes. However, bringing up how you think your partner would look good in certain garments seems unlikely to cause distress or be coercive. You can also mention to them that you’ve been fantasizing about how they’d look in something. If buying each other sexy gifts is common, maybe try getting them a cute pair of stockings or tights. If your partner is generally masculine-presenting and you’re hoping to get them into wearing stockings, that may be a bit touchier of a topic, though you’d be surprised how many men and masculine people would love to experiment with that sort of thing. Just remember to be respectful, kind, and affirming of their identity. And remember, crossdressing doesn’t have to be embarrassing unless everyone involved wants it to be!
By Aiden/Estelle Garrett