Tights

(see also Stockings). The classic definition of tights is a women’s leotard up to the waist, however, this simple description does not do justice to their social and technological importance. They have even been referred to as “the invention of the twentieth century.” The evolution of silk and nylon stockings helped women on the path to dressing and behaving for their personal comfort rather than to please men. This trend, in tights at least, has continued, even beyond the boundaries of post-feminism, due to the discovery of increasingly less apparent and more resistant materials. However garish, patterned, slinky, or invisible they are, tights owe their success to their functionality and practicality. In the 1990s, though, they entered a period of crisis: across the world, between 1991 to 2000 the consumption of tights dropped by 30%.