Hose are dead! Long live legs! Great news in the fashion world, and this time it has trickled down to the real world: That scourge of womanly comfort, pantyhose, are dead. This is not a sad obituary. It's official: the Wall Street Journal has proclaimed the death of hose. (See obituary here: Here)
Even the most hose-insistent golf-shirt wearing Midwestern exec, Jim Holt, president of Mid American Credit Union, a small financial institution in Wichita, Kan., formerly adamant that his female employees were not fully dressed without hose EVEN UNDER PANTS, has conceded the point.
Once again, the revolution was led by the young, just as prior generations raised hemlines, shocked their grandmas by climbing into pants and shrugged out of corsets.
The shoe is on the other foot! And now there isn't any hose in it. The pressure is off to conform, for women who might not ever dream of getting breast implants but still had to pretend their legs were an unnaturally tan shade of plastic.
I do believe hose are dead. Further, I believe they were invented by men -- misogynistic ones at that, perhaps the forebears of the few corporate dinosaurs who still want women to suffer like sausages stuffed into casings.
And to those few guy execs still trying to enforce their nylon standards on the legs of women in the workplace, I propose a new bumpersticker: If you can tell if I'm wearing pantyhose or not, you're staring too close.
If men had to wear pantyhose, they would have been chunked long ago. And no, I don't buy the argument that if men have to wear ties, women should have to wear hose. Joe Exec, if you don't want to wear ties, then you'll have to get your own revolution.
Do I feel sorry for Hanes now their leg-irons have gone the way of the hula hoop? No. It was a conspiracy to keep women trudging (hose-bound) to the store, run after run (so to speak), to feed their addicted lingerie drawers, to kow-tow to a misogynistic society.
Next thing you know, women will realize that high heels can kill.
We'll wake up to the fact that, hello, no one is really fooled by hair color -- that everyone knows there's grey under there and we are all, in fact, aging despite our bottled protests to the contrary, and that's okay, and then L'Oreal and Clairol will have to suck it up and find something else to sell to us.
I hear hula hoops and hose companies are for sale cheap...
Hose were predeceased by their mother, Garter Belts. They are survived by their step-siblings, Socks, Bare Feet and Winter Tights.
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J. Louise Larson is the managing editor of The Ennis Journal in Ennis, Texas. She is a Texas-based writer and speaker whose work has been published in magazines and newspapers, including Entrepreneur Magazine, AirTran's Go Magazine, Smart Business Magazine, Midwest Airlines' MyMidwest Magazine, DS News, the Dallas Morning News and others. Her work has been featured on thestreet.com, msnbc.com, entrepreneur.com, business.com and other sites. Her family blog can be seen at http://familyrootsandwings.blogspot.com/ and her writing blog at http://writingporch.blogspot.com/. She is the author of The FabJob Guide to Become A Party Planner (FabJob Publishing 2006) and a member of The Author's Guild and the Writers League of Texas.
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