The Bank Clerk and the Soda Jerker: The Silk Hose Is Going Next
When the Bank Clerk drifted in on the Soda Jerker the other morning he found that worthy studying an advertisement of ladies’ lingerie in a New York paper. The advertisement was illustrated with a picture of a young woman in a transparent combination that gave an illusion of almost perfect nudity.
“As filmy and diaphanous as a cloud,” is the way the underwear manufacturer described his product in the advertisement.
“I don’t know what we are coming to,” said the Soda Jerker. “I have seen women’s hosiery get thinner and thinner, skirts shorter and shorter, necks lower and lower, and now they are making women’s underwear so thin that you can see thru it in the moonlight. I guess they’ll be making dresses the same way presently.”
“That’s exactly what we’re coming to,” said the Bank Clerk. “The manufacturer has strived to make hosiery more sheer and diaphanous until they have persuaded most women that the most attractive hose in the world to wear is a hose so sheer and transparent that a man can’t tell whether he’s looking at a bare leg or not.
“You have to look twice to see whether a woman has on any hose at all when she struts a pair of those flesh colored chiffon hose that are all the vogue.
“And there is where the hosiery manufacturers have cut their own throats and are getting themselves in the same fix the corset manufacturers got themselves in. I predict that in another year or so most young women will not be wearing any hose at all, just as they now go without any corsets at all.
“Women have worn their hose thinner and thinner until they have discovered that their own smooth, healthy, beautiful skin is the most attractive thing in the world and you can depend upon them to make the most of it. If legs look better in hose that are so transparent that you have to take a reading glass to find out whether they are hose or flesh, then the next step will be to discard the hosiery entirely and give the leg a shameless showing.”
“I believe you’re right,” said the Soda Jerker. “But I believe you’ve missed one big reason why women are going to stop wearing hose. The main reason is that it takes all the p. w. g. can make to keep herself in chiffon hose at $2 a pair. The money she spends on keeping herself in fine silk stockings would just about buy everything else she wears. One of the things that has kept me from getting married is the terrible thought of what it would cost me to keep a wife in silk hose.
“And there’s one thing that can be said about bare legs; they won’t always be full of runs.”
“Runs!” sneered the Bank Clerk, “Why the legs of these modern girls haven’t even got to walk in ‘em since very Tom, Dick and Harry has got an automobile. They don’t even have corns on their feet any more; they wear their corn plasters now where their mothers use dto wear their bustles.”
From the editorial page of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., Friday, Aug. 13, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn83025812/1926-08-13/ed-1/seq-4/
