Q: I was just wondering, why is it considered sexy to wear panty hose?

A: Beats me. I didn't know it was.

I always think of pantyhose as easier and more comfortable but less sexy than the stockings and garter belts (or girdles or corsets) they replaced, but there's no point in looking for too much in the way of intrinsic reasons for what's sexy and what isn't.

For centuries, Americans and Europeans thought it was indecent for women to wear anything approaching men's trousers, so women wore lots of petticoats but no underpants. Because underpants were forbidden, they came to be thought sexy -- there are engravings of Venetian prostitutes flouncing around in knee-length bloomers that now look like something Grandma Moses would've worn but then were considered the height of wickedness. (This is why the cancan seemed so indecent at the turn of the century.)

Even when decent women started wearing pantaloons, the pantaloons they wore were two separate garments, one for each leg, held together only at the waist, with no crotch seam. Imagine: Our great grandmothers in crotchless panties! I came across an elderly pair of open-crotch drawers in an old junk store in the South of France last year, along with a lot of old nightshirts and closed-crotch bloomers. Apparently, some women continued to wear open-crotch underwear into the 20th century. And you can see how practical they would've been, since you wouldn't've wanted to take down your long lacy drawers in an outhouse of questionable cleanliness. Although dress reformers did complain that it was weird that men who claimed to be interested in preserving the virtue of women required them to wear underwear that left them so available to vice.

When pantyhose were introduced in the 1960s, there was a lot of grousing (mostly by men) about how unsexy they were because they sealed women up like sausages. But, without pantyhose, the miniskirts of the late 1960s and early 1970s couldn't've happened -- women wouldn't've worn dresses that showed their stocking tops and garters every time they sat down or bent over. Pantyhose kept them covered.

Also, naturally, pantyhose manufacturers have done their best to make pantyhose seem sexy by making the panty part sheer, showing them on gorgeous models, etc. Also, anything you're not meant to see has a decent chance of coming to be thought sexy…

As Cole Porter reminds us, in the days when dresses came to the floor, "a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, heaven knows, anything goes." Well, almost anything.

Patricia McLaughlin is a nationally syndicated fashion columnist.
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