Panty hose.
Textiles were a major force in the industrial revolution. The story of Textiles is the story of the Industrial Revolution. Knitting, weaving, fabrication, and sewing moved out of the home and into factories. All the good and the bad about the Industrial Revolution was true of the textile industry.
The good: Jobs, homes, schools, livelihood for people unable to make it share cropping, tenant farming, or family farming.
The bad: Mill towns, company stores, child labor, unfair wages, financial repression.
The Textile industry in the United States was concentrated in the South-East: in North and South Carolina, and parts of of Virginia, Delaware, Tennessee, and Georgia.
Du Pont invented Nylon and started producing it commercially in 1938. They participated in every aspect of the “good” and “bad” items listed above. Each plant had a Country club for the salaried and a mill town for the wage workers. You bought your safety shoes and uniforms from the plant store and they took it out of your check.
One of the things Du Pont made out of Nylon was yarn. Some of that yarn they sold to knitters who made women’s stockings. Nylon was stronger and cheaper than silk. Women loved “Nylons”. But then the war happened. The war took the nylon for parachutes and other products. But when the war was over women got their “Nylons” back. I remember my mother and my aunt Judy running around all excited:
“Woolworths has Nylons! Get in the car! Let’s go!”
They came back with one pair each. They had stood in a long line to get them. They were limited to one pair per customer. They didn’t have any choice of color or size. The hose came just above the knee. They rolled the tops down over a garter to keep them up. There was a seam in the back that had to be straight. I was six year old.
The leg part of hose is usually made form 20 denier yarn. The heel, toe, and top are made of 30 or 40 denier yarn.
Denier is a measure of the weight or size of the yarn. The definition of denier is the weight, in grams, of 9,000 meters of the yarn. So, 20 grams of 20 denier yarn is 9,000 meters long. 9,000 meters is about 5.6 miles! A pound of 20 denier yarn is over 204 kilometers (127 miles). Du Pont sold hosiery yarn for about $8.00 per pound. $8.00 per pound is a lot to pay for anything, but just think how many Nylon hose it takes to weigh a pound. And they sold for about $3.00 per pair.
Then garter belts became a requirement to keep the tops of the hose higher and make them lie flat.
The next major advancement was seamless hose. The knitters learned to make circular knit machines that would knit a tube that would vary in size along the tube length, eliminating the sewing of the seam in the leg. The heel and toe were still sewn in separately.
Once they learned to incorporate the knitting of the toe and heel into the knitting of the leg the sewing step was eliminated. It was then a short hop to add a top and sew two tops together to have panty hose.
Women loved them more than money.
Joe Namath wore them in an ad.
Each one of my daughters started wearing them at an earlier age than her older sister…9th grade, 7th grade. Brencie wore panty hose on our trip to Birmingham that Sunday afternoon, and she was only EIGHT! I was such a lenient parent.
One time Kelley tripped on a curb, fell down and ruined her panty hose in the East Gate Shopping Center parking lot. I almost cried for her.
During that time of the boom in panty hose my job was hosiery. When I got on salary with Du Pont I started as a process engineer assigned to making hosiery yarns. After about a year and a half I moved into Quality assurance and customer service for hosiery yarns. I got to travel all over North and South Carolina to the Textile mills. I loved it. I got to meet a lot of customers and Tech Service guys. My job was “Intimately” involved with panty hose.
Then something happened that almost shut down the hosiery business. There was an epidemic of vaginitis all over the country. By the time the medical profession realized how widespread it was, and that it really was an epidemic, it only took a minute to realize it was caused by panty hose. Women were getting vaginal infections, but they loved those sexy panty hose. What a Dilemma.
Over the next few months the industry scrambled for a solution. At first we all thought we were out of business. But all the knitters started trying all kinds of crotches: no crotch, cotton crotch, open weave crotch, and I don’t know what all.
I know you might think that with my job I might have gotten involved with checking the fit of those crotches on live models of various shapes and sizes. No I did not. But what bugs me is: Somebody had that job.
I had a circular knit customer in Cleveland, Tennessee that capitalized on this catastrophe by knitting cotton sleeves and slitting it into flat sheets. He then stacked them up about six inches high and with electric scissors cut the stacks into diamond shaped crotches. In about a hour he could make a million cotton crotches. He shipped cotton crotches all over the world. He was the crotchman!
Well the problem was solved. Eventually fashions changed.
I think it is very interesting that the price per pound of hosiery yarn hardly changed - ever. In 1938 Du Pont was selling hosiery yarn for about $8.00 per pound. That was a lot of money for a pound of anything. But you could make a lot of stockings out of a pound of Nylon. In 1980, when I was working in hosiery, Du Pont was still charging about $8.00 per pound for the light denier hosiery yarns. Other Nylon fibers, such as tire cord, were selling for $2.00 to $3.00 per pound. The price of the ingredients had increased continually over that period, and therefore the profit margin had shrunk significantly.
That was during the last century. Now textiles have mostly moved to China and other Asian countries. When Du Pont decided to get out of the fibers business it took them 20 years to do it. But, shortly after the turn of the century most of their fibers plants were sold or closed.
Now Du Pont doesn’t even exist.
Do women still wear panty hose? Can you even buy panty hose?
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