I’ve always been a fan of going bare-legged, cold weather be damned, but it seems black tights are having a renaissance
Black tights are fashion Marmite. If you love them, you look forward to the first brisk September or October day when it is acceptable to stop pretending that “late summer” exists on these shores and layer a thick pair of tights under your dress. You have strong views on optimum denier count and can debate the relative merits of Falke and Wolford at length. You could happily give a Ted talk on the whether the Edie Sedgwick modern jazz vibe of a matte pair is more chic than the lustre of a velvet or satin finish.
The other camp – my camp – would sooner brave horizontal snow and sleet bare-legged than be seen dead in a pair. In fashion, not wearing tights has long been a badge of honour. Around the time that tottering around in high heels all day stopped signalling elegance and began to make you look a bit deranged, going bare-legged took over as the style set’s equivalent of a club tie. Going bare-legged through winter requires a high tolerance for windchill and, depending on your skin colour, a time-consuming fake-tan habit. Still, the bare-legged brigade eschew tights because we think it looks better.
I suppose this is all an elaborate justification for the fact that I stopped wearing tights because no one else on the front row was wearing them and they felt kind of scruffy. Going bare-legged made me feel like a contender. Style is a way of insisting on something, as Susan Sontag said, and black tights felt like giving up, like throwing in the towel.
In the noughties, when Prada was all about a knee-length skirt, and through the 2010s, when the midi skirt ruled, going bare-legged didn’t mean being cold. I could wear ankle boots with socks, a long-ish skirt and a coat, and I was technically bare-legged but only a tiny bit of flesh was exposed.