August 27, 2006
Past Present
A Great Pair of Leggings
Don Ashby
This season's windowpane tights at Pucci, left; seamless Donna Karan in 1989.
By SUZY MENKES
Leggings? Ah, yes. I remember them well. When I wasn’t watching models crawling over the catwalk in psychedelic Lycra leg wear from Body Map, I was following the trend myself. Somewhere at the back of my hosiery drawer I probably still have those relics of the 1980’s:
Donna Karan’s shiny black superstretch pantyhose, which went with the bodysuit and wrap skirt that made her reputation; and those embarrassing purple ribbed leg warmers that I still use for skiing. (Although I would go purple in the face if any fashion friends saw me wearing them.)
So what to make of the fall
Marc Jacobs show? There were those very same ribbed wool leggings (now in gloomy earth tones) come back to haunt me. Mr. Cool decided that
global warming has taken a turn to global freezing and showed warmers piled together, finishing off the look with a pair of hefty wool socks. Meanwhile,
Ralph Lauren, King of Class, sent out cashmere leggings as a luxurious alternative to drainpipe jeans. The models wore tailored jackets and matching vests with leggings tucked into boots, and pretended to not even notice that they weren’t wearing pants or a skirt. And finally, I swear Yves Saint Laurent’s Stefano Pilati must have found some pictures of me dancing at the Camden Palace circa 1985 and redid my gilded minitunic and semisheer leggings for the daddy-longlegs model Maria Carla Bosconi.
It was with deep shock that I realized that Swinging London pantyhose are nearing 50 this year. And those 80’s leggings are hitting 22. That’s probably why a new generation that until now has only known shivering winters of bare legs and open-toed mules is suddenly embracing the leggings thing.There is certainly a big comeback for thick black pantyhose as a foundation for swelling new volumes at Chloé, Lanvin and Balenciaga; the latter showed spindly legs, under a cocoon coat, in clumpy shoes with club-sandwich soles.
There are also polite, pretty pantyhose: lacy patterns from Alberta Ferretti and vivid colors with sparkling ankle embroidery at Christian Lacroix Couture. On the sober side are Derek Lam’s black opaque legs. And Matthew Williamson’s windowpane tights at Pucci recall Madonna’s heyday as the Material Girl.
If girly style put the focus on frilly tops, then this summer’s craze for shorts (mostly groin high) put legs back on the fashion agenda. Hemlines, too, seem to be rising, whether they are Balenciaga’s bell skirts or just those cute, short dresses that have finally reached the red carpet. Because hemlines rose in the 20’s and again in the 60’s, a glimpse of stocking is never going to feel like something shocking. Yet there may be more than a wacky new winter look to leggings and thick hose.
The clue lies in the recent tendency among young women to wear skirts over pants. This covered-up look didn’t originate with designers but seems to have grown organically from how Muslim women dress and how Western women feel after a decade of visible bras and diaphanous dressing.
Karl Lagerfeld even picked up on the trend for his Chanel couture show, with denim leg wear ending in a boot, worn with a minidress.
Other influential designers have made covering up a mantra. At the aptly named Undercover, the Japanese designer Jun Takahashi hid every last inch of exposed flesh, not the least of which included heads and faces. Indeed, thick hose sometimes peeked out from long skirts, rarely seen since the 70’s and not shown previously by lively designers like
Michael Kors. Jacobs, too, for both his own label and for Louis Vuitton, did more than merely eliminate girly sweetness. His thick layers represented something much darker.
It is hard to claim that bare legs make women feel vulnerable. Or that clingy pantyhose are necessarily a sober new way of dressing. Yet there is a suggestion of protection. Where leggings in the 80’s were a product of new fabric technology and the exploding club scene, now they are more serious, something to finish off an outfit and help one face a more turbulent world.
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