Fully fashioned stockings are often described as the ultimate vintage stocking, which is perfectly true but not especially helpful if you have never handled a pair. What makes them different is not simply the seam: it is the way the entire stocking is constructed.
They are knitted flat on vintage Reading machines, shaped during knitting and then joined at the back with a seam that holds the stocking together. Made from fine, non-stretch nylon, they look, feel and fit quite differently from modern stretch seamed stockings. They also require machinery, knowledge and patience that are becoming increasingly rare.
Katie's Fully Fashioned Stocking Story
I had been wearing seamed stockings for several years before I encountered fully fashioned stockings, and at first I did not entirely understand what all the fuss was about. A seam was a seam, surely?
That changed in the mid-1990s, when I was working at the fetish boutique Skin Two in Ladbroke Grove. We imported Sweet Caroline fully fashioned stockings, made by Magnolia Mills in the United States, and they seemed impossibly exotic. The nylon felt different, the fit was more precise and the seam had a definition I had never seen on modern hosiery.
They were also expensive, particularly once I left Skin Two and lost my staff discount. My solution was not to resign myself to cheaper stockings, but to set up a small website so that I could buy them wholesale and sell enough pairs to justify my own hosiery habit.
It was not the most ambitious business plan in the world, but it worked rather better than expected. That little stocking website became What Katie Did, and we have been selling fully fashioned stockings ever since.
A Short History of Fully Fashioned Stockings
Fully fashioned construction predates nylon. Fine silk and rayon stockings were knitted flat to the shape of the leg and then seamed at the back. The seam was necessary because the stocking did not begin life as a tube: it joined the two sides together.
Nylon transformed the hosiery industry. It was introduced to the American public at the 1939 New York World's Fair, before going on sale nationally in May 1940. Women quickly embraced it because it was sheer, smooth and stronger than many of the fibres used before it.
Civilian enjoyment was short-lived. During the Second World War, nylon production was diverted to parachutes, ropes and other military necessities. When nylon stockings returned after the war, demand was so great that thousands of women queued for limited supplies. Fully fashioned nylons went on to become one of the defining pieces of legwear of the late 1940s and 1950s.
Their decline was less dramatic but ultimately more permanent. Circular knitting machines made it possible to produce stockings as seamless tubes, while new stretch fibres made sizing easier. Tights became increasingly practical as hemlines rose during the 1960s, and the market for traditional stockings gradually contracted.
Factories closed, skills were lost and many of the enormous Reading machines were scrapped. The few that remain are not modern reproductions of vintage equipment: they are the original machines, still doing the job for which they were built.
Fully Fashioned vs Modern Seamed Stockings
Modern stretch seamed stockings are knitted as tubes on circular machines. The seam creates the familiar vintage line, but it is not needed to hold the stocking together. Elastane allows the stocking to stretch around the leg, which makes sizing comparatively straightforward and gives a close, forgiving fit.
A fully fashioned stocking contains no elastane. Its shape is created during knitting by increasing and decreasing the number of stitches, allowing the stocking to narrow at the ankle and widen over the calf and thigh. The two edges of the flat knitted stocking are then sewn together at the back.
This is why the seam has such a precise appearance: it is part of the structure rather than an embellishment. It is also why fully fashioned stockings need to be chosen more carefully for size. They will not simply stretch to accommodate a longer leg or fuller thigh.
For regular wear, travelling or a first encounter with stockings, our modern seamed stockings are often the more practical option. For historical dressing, collectors and anyone who loves the feel of traditional nylon, fully fashioned stockings offer something modern hosiery cannot quite reproduce.
How Fully Fashioned Stockings Are Knitted
Reading knitting machines are extraordinary pieces of engineering. The machines used to make our stockings are more than 57 feet long and weigh around 17 tonnes, which makes moving one rather more complicated than finding a large van and a few willing friends.
Each machine has approximately 30 knitting heads, with around 500 needles working on each stocking. Rather than producing one continuous tube of hosiery, it knits a row of individual stockings flat and shapes each one as it goes.
The needles work with extremely fine yarn and inevitably break from time to time. Replacement parts are no longer waiting on a warehouse shelf, so specialist components frequently have to be made from scratch. Maintaining the machines demands the same sort of accumulated knowledge as operating them, and neither skill can be replaced quickly.
This is one reason production cannot simply be transferred to a cheaper factory elsewhere. Moving 17 tonnes of vintage machinery would be difficult enough; installing, recalibrating and finding people able to operate it would be another matter entirely.
From Knitted Flat to Finished Seam
Knitting is only the beginning of the process.
When the stockings come off the machine, they are still flat and undyed. They are tumble dried and ironed before seaming so that any initial shrinkage takes place while the stocking can still be accurately prepared.
Each stocking is then sewn individually on a specialist industrial overlocker. The seamstress guides the stocking by hand, maintaining an even tension as she works from the toe to the top of the welt. It is skilled, remarkably quick work, although "quick" is relative when every stocking still has to be handled separately.
If you look closely at the finished seam, you can see the individual stitches holding the stocking together. At the top sits the distinctive finishing loop, sometimes called a keyhole, which marks the point at which the seaming was completed. The tiny picot marks running beside the seam show where stitches were added or removed to shape the leg.
After seaming, the stockings are sent to the dye house. They all begin as greige nylon—the textile term for undyed material—and receive their colour only after construction. They are then steamed into shape and inspected on illuminated benches where small faults in the fine nylon can be spotted.
Non-stretch stockings can vary slightly during production, so finished pairs are also matched by hand for length and appearance. Stockings that fall short of the required standard are graded as seconds rather than being packed and sold as perfect pairs.
Why Genuine Fully Fashioned Stockings Are Rare Today
People sometimes ask why fully fashioned stockings cost more than modern hosiery, or why we cannot simply order larger quantities and expand the size range.
The answer lies in the process. Production depends upon ageing machinery, delicate yarn and a relatively small number of people with the expertise to keep everything running. If a part breaks, work may stop while a replacement is made. If a thread snags during knitting or seaming, the stocking becomes a second. Every stage involves more time and manual handling than modern circular-knit hosiery.
The surviving factories, and we're possibly down to two now, are already working within the limits of their machinery. Increasing production is not simply a matter of adding another shift or buying a new machine, while developing substantially different proportions would require capacity that these factories do not currently have.
We are fortunate that the UK is still home to a specialist manufacturer with the equipment and skills needed to make genuine fully fashioned stockings. Working with them requires patience when production is delayed, but it also helps to preserve a small and important part of Britain's hosiery heritage.
Why We Still Love Them
Fully fashioned stockings are not the most practical stockings we sell, and I would never pretend otherwise. They need careful sizing, a good suspender belt and a little more attention when putting them on, washing them and storing them.
What they offer in return is difficult to imitate. The nylon has a silky feel without the springiness of elastane, the shaped leg creates a beautifully clean line and the seam has a definition that comes directly from its construction.
There is also the pleasure of wearing something made in essentially the same way as it would have been in the 1940s or 1950s. This is not a modern stocking with a few vintage details added for effect. It is the real article, made slowly on the surviving machines by people who understand how to coax another generation of stockings from them.
More than 25 years after turning my stocking habit into a business, I still think fully fashioned stockings are the ultimate luxury in legwear. They may ask a little more of their wearer, but they repay the effort rather beautifully.