Getting a Leg Up

By Martha Duffy

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, as Cole Porter noted. But now, God knows, anything goes. And now what's going is a new wrinkle in hose credited by some fashion experts to Ralph Lauren. In magazine ads, Lauren's young line, called Ralph, features a model straddling a chair. She wears a skirt about the length of a large handkerchief, and her stockings, such as they are, reach only to her thighs. Thus is born a fad. The stockings are called thigh-highs and a lot of women are making a run on them.

Thigh-highs are all over the stores, selling for between $6 and $60, in black, navy and white, and even plaids, Argyles, fancy lace and silk blends. "It's a lot of fashion for a little price," says Kal Ruttenstein, Bloomingdale's veteran vice president for fashion direction. Comments Benny Lin, Macy's fashion director: "It's not just a metropolitan thing -- it's selling well all over."

The new length, which accentuates not so much the stocking as the ample amount of thigh above it, did not spring spontaneously from Lauren's sketch pad. Its 19th century antecedent is the gartered stocking. In those times, for reasons that probably escape today's young generations, that fashion was considered disturbingly sexy (but then, so was the bustle). Nowadays, what % women seem to want is unhampered, ungartered, unmitigated eroticism a la Lolita. Underwear is already worn on the outside -- stuff that looks as if it comes from the lingerie department (and often does), and thigh-highs only complement the picture.

What the picture shows is an attempt to look as tarty as possible in an impossibly safe-sex world. "There's a blurring of the boundary between the taboo and what's acceptable," says author Valerie Steele (Women of Fashion), "with a constant testing of deviant or sexual styles." The effect is that of the "naughty schoolgirl" -- somewhat more innocent than that found in a child-porn magazine, but suggestive of it nonetheless.

Designer Geoffrey Beene, who scrupulously avoids ephemera, says, "I wouldn't make fun of women by dressing them as children. It's a trick that has been used by streetwalkers in Paris for years." That does not seem to bother other rulers of fashion. Karl Lagerfeld likes the style, though he thinks it looks best on women with "runway bodies."

Women also need the nerve to wear only a hint of a skirt to make thigh-highs work; others need not apply. The question that remains, however, is whether this trend has legs. So far, the answer is yes, though some customers are cautious. Louise Voelker, 26, a San Francisco sales representative, owns three pairs of thigh-highs and wears them to the office. But she also wears skirts that cover her thighs, so nobody's the wiser. "The world sees me in one way," she explains, "and I know I'm wearing thigh-highs. Wouldn't they be shocked if they knew!"

Meanwhile, a Saks Fifth Avenue salesclerk reports selling a pair of Lauren red plaids to a 64-year-old grandmother who plans to wear them, thighs flashing, with a mini-skirt. That's more like it. Still, fads being what they are, Grandmother might well be advised to save her panty hose, God knows.

With reporting by Hannah Bloch/ New York