Mini skirts and stockings: a fashion enquiry

– With a lifelong fascination with stockings and garters, and a wearer of them under business clothes for decades, I often surf the Internet for new galleries of women wearing this lingerie. I’ve downloaded many pictures, and just love to browse through them.

I’m over seventy years old, so my life has spanned most of the transition in stocking fashions. One thing that puzzles me when surfing the Internet is the huge number of photos of women wearing stockings and garters with miniskirts so short that the stocking tops and garters are exposed even while standing. I don’t remember this ever being the fashion vogue in the US, and I’m sure I would remember if it had been. For most women, the advent of the miniskirt was a fashion crisis because they were so difficult to wear with stockings and garters. My wife, now deceased, had long lovely legs but was in a quandary. She bought longer and longer stockings, and modified her gartered garments to bring the garters up higher so she could fasten the stockings tautly. Finally, one evening, we went to a party, and she was continually pulling down her skirt to cover her stocking tops. Sadly, that was the final straw that sent her to pantyhose.

But my real enquiry is: did I miss something? Or is the prevalence of visible stocking tops and garters below the skirt in these galleries merely modern photographers’ artistic license?

– I think it is a modern photographer’s license. There is a certain fringe group who have taken the garter out from under the skirt and exposed it, for whatever reason. This is mainly among the coloured hair/tattoo and earring set.

It’s unfortunate that it seems to be prevailing in the photo shoots, since in my mind it’s reinforcing all the negative things society believes about stocking wearers – we’re loose, slightly sleazy and unkempt.

– Deliberately showing stocking tops under mini skirts was never a major fashion statement, but I understand it often happened ‘accidentally’ since the mini came in before pantyhose were universally worn.

However, in the modern day when stockings are often worn for “retro appeal” some young girls team them with mini skirts and then (either deliberately or accidentally) find themselves flashing the tops all day. Part of this is that a skirt that covers stocking tops comfortably at 8am even when sitting often doesn’t by 2pm, due to the upward creep of the skirt and the downward slip of the stockings.

Personally, I prefer things not too blatant. An “accidental” flash is sexy, deliberately showing the tops is too “in yer face”. But I stress this is purely a personal opinion.

Incidentally, one would have only to browse this forum for a while to know that stocking wearers are the very antithesis of (quote) “loose, slightly sleazy and unkempt”.