Rolled down stockings were street fashion back in 1921, but I can clearly remember doing the same thing back in the early 1990s. Fashions and styles always circle round again and, no doubt, rolled down socks will also come back again.
Rolled Down Stockings Cool And Fashionable
Are women really wearing rolled down stockings with skirts so short that several inches of bare leg are revealed? Women in out of town communities who read about striking styles in New York and other big cities, are asking the question incredulously.
Yes. These rolled down stockings with the very short skirts are being worn at this moment in New York City – and in Chicago and St. Louis and San Francisco and a few other places always excepting Boston. But not all women have adopted the style – far from it! There are always women who adopt any new fashion that has striking and daring features, and most of these women should and do know better. But one cannot assert that women of best taste or of extreme conventional correctness in dress have taken to the rolled down hose and short skirt style. At least no instance has appeared yet.
There is nothing terrible about a rolled down stocking – most of our great-grandmamas wore their stockings that way. It is the combination of abbreviated petticoat and rolled down stocking that is rather appalling to the properties. As a matter of fact a rolled down stocking is cool, comfortable and practical – when a skirt is long enough to cover the leg to the ankle and if you are slim enough to dispense with corsets which have to be anchored fast to the stocking top with elastic hose supporters, you will find rolled down stockings delightful on warm summer mornings. Women who have adopted the style but who cannot dispense with securely pulled down corsets have taken to round garters, or kneelets of belting and the garter elastics are attached to this knee band. Can you imagine anything more uncomfortable than that?
If you really fancy the rolled down stocking, you must learn how to keep it up trimly so that it will not wrinkle at the ankle. Of course, a garter of elastic may be worn around the leg and the stocking rolled over the garter, but a tight elastic band around the calf of the leg is almost painfully uncomfortable in walking. Better to learn the old fashioned way of rolling and fastening a stocking top. Many of the peasants of Europe wear their stockings this way and have for generations; and it was the way our own great-grandmothers kept their stockings from tumbling down in the days before elastic hose supporters were thought of. This is the way to do it!
With finger and thumb pull the top of the stocking out from the leg as far as you can stretch it and while holding it stretched with one hand, roll the top with the other. Roll over and over until you have the stocking as low as you want it; then twist the stretched out portion into a wisp and tuck the wisp under the roll you have made. Rolled thus, a stocking will keep its place all day and never slip down. If it does happen to slip you can readjust it in two minutes – after you have caught the trick.
Source: The Daily Ardmoreite. (Ardmore, Okla.), 18 July 1921. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.
