FASHION: The Tights Have It

“They’re mad, simply mad,” cooed a Los Angeles coed out shopping for her fall regalia last week. What drives the girls mad—and may well make the boys a lot madder—is this fall’s latest fashion: a glove-tight, foot-to-waist cross between Ebenezer’s red flannel long Johns and Fonteyn’s ballet costume. The biggest thing since Bermuda shorts, the new tights emphasize that slender, leggy look everyone strives for. Children wear them for play, college girls in class under skirt or kilt; working girls and young matrons buy them for lounging costumes, fortyish ladies don them for exercising. They even have a certain vogue among lady golfers preparing for chilly days on the course.

Like Bermuda shorts, the tights (variously known as leotards, leotights and legotards) got their start last fall in Eastern women’s colleges, where the girls like to be demure in a worldly sort of way. This summer, after the Manhattan fashion shows, they swept the U.S. Detroit’s Winkelman Bros, department store sold out its entire stock of 1,000 leotards the first week they went on sale. Boston’s Filene’s has stocked them on each of its seven selling floors. On one day alone, a single Manhattan newspaper carried nine ads for the tights. In Dallas, when the tights appeared in a fashion show last month, spectators burst into loud applause.

Never slow to slip into a good thing, the fashion industry already counts more than a dozen firms making tights, selling all they can produce at prices ranging around $4 to $5 for adults. Most are made of stretch nylon, come in a rainbow of colors—witch black, seaweed green, wild teal and fire orange. They are often worn with shell shoes, sneakers or moccasins. Says a Detroit buyer: “Did you ever hear of warm, comfortable, fashionable glamour? Well, this is it.”

Worn by themselves, tights demand a near perfect figure. Lacking that, many a lass who tries to look like Peter Pan may wind up, alas, looking more like Sir Laurence Olivier playing Henry V.