Fashion was one of her compasses on that journey. As if peeling off her past, Sedgwick shed her wardrobe of Diors and Balenciagas, and adopted a daring and youthful signature style of briefs worn over opaque tights or fishnets, and t-shirts (often accessorized with shoulder-grazing earrings), which borrowed from the dance studios she was so familiar with. The writer of a Life Magazine feature called “The Girl with the Black Tights,” described Sedgwick’s unique aesthetic as having a “spirited wackiness.” This quality was similarly at work in the designs of Mary Quant, who also found fashion via the dance studio.
There are two schools of no-pants dressing in 2023, bare- and stocking-legged. Edie belonged to the latter. Sixties fashions were revolutionized by the advent of seamless stockings (made using circular knitting machines). “Women rebel with pantyhose,” read the headline of a 1965 Boston Globe story which explained that tights eliminated the need for girdles and stockings and made possible “the fashion possibility of the mini-skirt and hot-pants—both impossible without to wear with anything but a smooth line of stocking to the waist.” Higher hems meant more emphasis on the legs, traditionally a symbol of women’s mobility and progress.
Sedgwick told The Times her “uniform” was devised “ ‘never with the intention of being clever but because it’s easy.’ ” A similar instinct might’ve inspired Miuccia Prada’s fall 2023 Miu Miu collection in which elegance and “real life” collided, with imperfectly perfect results. If the no-pants-with-stockings look on her runway was provocative, it was also streamlined and comfy.
The immediate antecedents of the no-pants-with-stockings look might be waist-up Zoom culture and balletcore, but Alexandre Samson, curator at the Musée de la Mode at the Palais Galliera, takes a broader view, linking it to the work of Vanessa Beecroft, Skims, and Balenciaga’s stocking boots. That Boston Globe article from 1965 quoted a hosiery survey done at the time, in which some women equated stockings with freedom, others with protection. The latest update to the no-pants look shows that these qualities needn’t be mutually exclusive, a visible sign that women have plenty of legs to stand on, thank you very much.
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