It sounds like something out of The Onion, but this one’s no joke. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Mayo Clinic just this month relaxed its edict that female employees have to wear nylons at work.
Apparently that rule was also enforced at the Mayo up in Phoenix, where summertime temps have occasionally softened runways to the point that airplanes have been forbidden to land.
I can relate, having in the past had to cross an acre of parking lot at the Star while wearing nylons. Hard to say which was oozing more, my legs or the asphalt.
There was no edict, as I can recall. It’s just the way things were back then. Thankfully, the Star had a copy desk chief who understood the limitations of mere mortals. A dress-shirt-and-tie guy nine months of the year, come June, he’d swap out the tie for a guayabera. Before long, we came to an informal agreement: The day he donned the guayabera was the day I ditched the pantyhose.
By the time he retired, I had pretty much switched to trousers, shortening my hosiery needs to mere knee highs. Today, I can hardly remember the last time I struggled into a pair of pantyhose, but I do remember the journey.
I was probably in high school the first time I slipped my skinny legs into a pair of nylons – the kind that had to be secured with a garter belt. What fun was that. Not only did the nylons make my legs sweat, the metal fasteners on the garter belt were soon digging into my flesh. I swear, only a chastity belt could have been more uncomfortable.
Luckily, my high school did not require that girls wear stockings underneath the requisite skirts and dresses. However, there was at least one high school in Tucson that did. Urban legend has it that the girls sometimes tried to get around the rule by running a black line up the back of their legs to simulate the seam.
Seamed stockings. Yes, I am that old. Fortunately, by the time I was a working girl, pantyhose had come along. Unfortunately, one size fits all had not. What fun to walk around with what was supposed to be one’s crotch stuck at mid-thigh — a condition more than one woman has described as “low rider pantyhose.”
Eventually, pantyhose makers recognized that not everyone is 5-foot-2. By that time, nylons known as thigh-highs were taking hold. Similar to stockings meant for each individual leg, these nylons included some sort of elastic band at the top to keep them where they belonged.
Theoretically. More than once, I’ve had to step out of a wayward stocking that lost its hold, slithering all the way down to my foot. Try doing that gracefully at a cocktail party.
It’s amazing to think how women once prized the wearing of nylons. During World War II, nylon manufacturer DuPont switched from making stockings to churning out parachutes and other wartime materials. Inevitably, a black market for nylons emerged, along with a Fats Waller song wistfully titled, “When the Nylons Bloom Again.”
Little wonder riots broke out after the first post-war shipments of nylons started arriving in the fall of ’45. By the spring of 1946, DuPont was churning out 30 million pairs of stockings a month. Even so, demand remained unabated. According to Chemical Heritage Magazine, in June of 1946, 40,000 people lined up for more than a mile, hoping to buy 13,000 available stockings.
Today, about the only time you’ll see that kind of line is when Apple unveils its latest gizmo. In fact, according to Experian Marketing Services, between 2009 and 2013, the number of women who said they bought pantyhose in the USA declined by 40 percent.
I’m betting those new relaxation rules over at the Mayo Clinic will only add to that decline, as more and more women opt to “Liberate the Leg!”
