Does anyone wear stockings on the regular any more? I haven’t, not for years—not even to my cousin’s wedding last year.

And for  a while before I quit wearing them, I sprang for silk over nylon. They felt nicer. I admit, I kinda liked garters. But bare legs were always my preference.

My grandmother wore panty hose all the time. She was also tiny, so she routinely wore heels that gave a couple inches’ advantage. When I was younger, I coveted a pair of her bright red stilettos that had a matching purse. Unfortunately, my feet got too big for her shoes around age 13, so I didn’t inherit those. (And I realized later that the purse was much too small to be practical, but oh, it was so pretty.) Eventually, my grandmother shifted gears and switched to wraparound skirts and sandals and went bare-legged.

My mother, whose native state is T-shirts and blue jeans, wore nylons when she had jobs, and my vivid memory of those times is her peeling them off the minute she hit the kitchen door—if they were still on after her car ride home. I know there were hot, sticky days when she picked me up from school driving barefoot, with her shoes and balled-up stocking in the back seat.

When I was in junior high and high school, patterned stockings were a big thing. Black ones with diamonds or polka dots. Pink lacy ones with hearts. I had a pair of iridescent white stockings run through with silver thread that I thought made any outfit look better, although my mother said white stockings were for nurses and strippers. 

But even when I liked how they looked and was willing to make an effort, I didn’t wear them very often. I was too hard on them. I’d snag them just by looking at them, and I had great sympathy for when it became a fashion thing to wear ripped jeans and laddered stockings, even if it did look slutty even to my broad-minded thinking.

I remember the day I pretty much swore off nylons for good except for special occasions—it was the last day I worked as a bank teller. The bank had a dress code, and even if you wore slacks, you still had to wear nylons and dress shoes. I don’t recall if socks were also allowed; all I remember is buying bulk boxes of nylon knee-highs that I’d wear once, get full of runs, and toss out. The day I quit the bank was the day I said “nope, no more jobs with socks in the dress code.”

I wear a lot of sundresses now—with sandals, like my grandmother. Or skirts, with socks and boots. I still wear tights and big sweaters when it’s cold.

But nylons? Bygones.