Oh my stockings and garters

[clevermanka]

When I was a pre-teen, my mother tried to teach me how to put on my own tights. This was the way-early 80s, and heavy cable-knit cotton tights were popular and easily-found for little girls who liked to wear skirts in the winter months. My childhood body was shaped something like a potato, so skirts were a year-round necessity. Despite my mother's patient instruction, I still wound up with the cable pattern wonky, the waistband twisted out of shape, and the crotch somewhere around mid-thigh. By my teens, I'd graduated to Actual Pantyhose, and I never got more than three wearings out of a pair before I'd put a finger through the panty top or somewhere in the thigh.

Shortly before she died, my grandmother took me aside and said "Why don't you buy a garter belt and some stockings. They're easier. I never liked pantyhose, either." This, along, with her wedding ring and KitchenAid mixer, I count among her final and most precious gifts to me. I should note, this was a woman who didn't like underwear in general.

So, at the tender age of fifteen, I began my love affair with stockings and garter belts as a practical alternative to pantyhose. I didn't think of them as terribly sexy. They were simply a welcome relief to my struggles with that hated pantyhose waistband. Any prurient appeal took a backseat. A way back seat. Like the back-facing seat of an old station wagon back seat.

I remember the first time I put them on (for church!). I got them on perfectly (in short time, I would graduate to seamed hose with nary a crooked line), clipped them, and then paused. I put on my robe and headed out to the kitchen, where grandma sat with her coffee. "How do I go to the bathroom?" I asked. She didn't even look up from her newspaper. "If you're wearing shorts, they go on the outside."

After that, the only thing I didn't understand was why pantyhose had become so popular. The only use for them I could see was for wearing under miniskirts. I knew for darn sure that 90% of the women I saw wearing hosiery under their knee-length or longer skirts were not wearing stockings. I just couldn't understand why.

Now I know. Probably most of them didn't grow up with my grandma. Poor things.

Note: If you are interested in purchasing a practical garterbelt, not some silly frilly thing that wouldn't hold up a piece of paper much less a stocking, but don't know where to start looking, please see my suggestions in a comment to pointoforigin about garter belt styles.

Comments

[zhukora1.livejournal.com]

I bet most of us who start with decent (i.e. real) garter belts and stockings stick with 'em.

Too true, too true. Also with the underwear-on-the-outside trick. I had to figure that one out on my own (wearing them on the sly and all), but I always find it sort of astounding that when I try to share this tip with other friends who are trying out stockings and garters (on a lark, rather than out of serious consideration for switching, usually), they just think I'm crazy. I guess it's been so inculcated in recent generations of women that underwear is always the closest garment to your body, underneath everything else, that even if putting a garter belt underneath doesn't affect the function of underwear, they just can't conceive of doing so. And then they wonder why garters are so "inconvenient"!

[clevermanka.livejournal.com]

People who refuse to remove themselves from ignorance do not deserve the joy of garters and stockings.