Pantyhose Still Holding Up After 30 Years On The Market

Easter 1972. Jerri Lynn Hogg, then a sixth-grader, gets a basket with a plastic egg in it.

Inside the egg are l'Eggs. As in nothing beats a great pair of. As in Jerri Lynn Hogg's first pantyhose.

Hogg, now of West Hartford, Conn., says she remembers it vividly, as a rite of passage.

"I remember being in sixth grade and getting my first pair of nylon stockings," says Susan Craig, a Hartford-based image consultant. Craig's moment came exactly 10 years before Hogg's.

Now there's a generation gap. It runs from mid-thigh to the waist. The nylon stocking is 55 years old this year. Pantyhose are a dewy 30.

Pantyhose. Yeah, they make your legs a steaming rain forest in the summer and a wind-scarred tundra in the winter. Sure they scootch down and droop and squeeze and bind. But it's tough to find a woman who wants them to go away.

"You don't have to think about anything," says a grateful Rita Papazian, editor of Woman magazine. "You just pull them on. Do I consider them binding? No, I consider them a timesaver."

And once on, says Papazian, they free the mind from certain thoughts that might plague the bestockinged. Such as, can anyone see up my dress?

"They can be a form of birth control too, in terms of keeping limits on things," she says.

"It was a wonderful invention," sighs Alison Lurie, novelist and author of "The Language of Clothes," a 1981 study of the interpretations and intentions of our duds. "You have no idea what it was like to be a woman before pantyhose. There was all this hardware and scaffolding you had to wear. There were straps and elastic and rubber and wire, and with all that paraphernalia, there were still very large areas that were cold and unattractive."

Pantyhose are such an improvement, says Lurie, "that when they were invented, you wondered why they hadn't been invented sooner."

Well, they sort of had been, says Sid Smith, president of the National Association of Hosiery Manufacturers.

"We made a waist-high garment in the 1950s," he says. "But nobody paid much attention to it until 1965."

And then?

The miniskirt.

The miniskirt made pantyhose honorable by being necessary, to paraphrase Nathan Hale.

"Once liberated from all that hardware and paraphernalia, consumers never went back," said Smith. "No matter what hemlines did, American women had chosen and accepted pantyhose."

It's tough, we said at the outset, to find a woman who wants pantyhose to go away.

But not impossible.

"They ought to be outlawed," says Allison St. Pierre, a secretary at the O'Neal and Prelle advertising firm in Hartford. "They're uncomfortable, they hurt, and they serve no purpose."

And yet, they have apparently come to symbolize, in certain quarters, a type of opulence.

Consider what FBI agent Gene McClelland found when making an inventory of the house of Aldrich and Rosario Ames after their arrest last year, as reported in the new book "Killer Spy" by Peter Maas.

McClelland counted 165 unopened boxes of pantyhose.