She's got legs

Wednesday 16 December 2009

Here in the US the girls have a fashion trend of wearing extremely tight spandex-blend tights with no feet which they call 'leggings'. Of course at HOH we all wore school uniform and never had to deal with this. For one thing it's much, much colder in England during the winter and plain spandex-cotton blend would feel about like wearing underwear or a swimsuit round your whole body in winter, which would hardly be warm at all. In England we all wore skinny jeans or just regular jeans when we were not at school, and that was really only practical.

(All right, I am a priss and wore skirts and winterweight tights a lot too.)

I have been wearing skirts and winterweight tights most often since about the middle of November. This is my usual costume for school (and shopping and church and really anywhere else). The tights are not too warm for indoors and do stop a lot of draught outside-- they are really about the equivalent of wearing close-fitting jeans, plus they have the added benefit of being supremely comfortable with plenty of 'give' and almost feel like they're not on at all, except they're warm. I get most of mine from Land's-End. I have lots of colours, mostly dark ones.

Jessy and some of her friends were shopping at Lynnhaven recently and she came back with what they are calling 'leggings' here. I always thought 'leggings' were just leg-warmers, you know, with no top and no feet, just for your legs, like in ballet. Apparently they are either really close-fitting pants or really heavy tights. Girls at school have been wearing them for a while. Anyway she bought some for me as well.

A few weeks ago I heard a girl in the school corridor say, 'I am so tired of not wearing pants.' And I looked, and she had cute black leggings on. So apparently you do not consider leggings 'pants'. They are a thing apart. Most girls wear them with some kind of long shirt that covers up most of the top of the leggings, at least to the very bottom of their bottom. It's considered very bad form to show more than that-- for example you must never show the TOP of the leggings. This is probably because most girls pull them up drastically high on their tummies to keep them up and keep them tight all round everywhere else. I can see the logic of this. Jessy's so slender that only the very smallest size will do for her.

And of course, there is the issue of what to wear under them. Of course I always wear panties under my tights-- this isn't ballet or gymnastics and the tights I wear are more spandex and microfibre and less cotton, so they're not exactly the most sanitary or comfortable thing to wear without, you know. (I really should give less information!) But leggings are mostly cotton, or at least more breathable fabric, because they're meant to take some amount of abrasion, like jeans, and not be fragile, like tights. After all, you have to sit on them. Jessy modelled hers in her room for me and then said, 'Janine, I think we may have actually found the elusive logical reason for thong panties.'

I wrinkled my nose at her. 'Ugh. No.'

She turned, clapped her hands to her own bottom, and looked in the mirror. 'Well,' she said, 'these aren't too bad....'

The black leggings, pulled up on her tummy, revealed very little of her panty lines. I stood there staring at the mirror too. 'Well, if you had flat seams and flat hems....'

'Yes,' Jessy said. Like me she abhors thong panties. She is even more of a priss than I am. 'Well,' she said, 'I do have some somewhere.'

I thought a little more. 'Well,' I finally said, 'you shouldn't be showing that much of them anyway. I mean you're going to wear something over that. A pulli, or a shirt, or jacket or something.'

'A jacket would be cute,' she said.

'Sure it would. Or just a nice long flannie.'

'Yes,' she said.

'A girl's got to have standards, love,' I said. 'Just because the pants fit doesn't mean you have to show all you've got.'

She turned and smiled at me. 'I know. You're right. You're always right about these things.'

I made a smile at her too. 'I'm going to wear mine with the blue-and-white flannie.'

She giggled and then spun round, in her bare feet-- for she had nothing else on but the black leggings and the almost-invisible panties-- and flung open her wardrobe to find a shirt. I went back to my room and chose carefully from my wardrobe for what I would wear in the morning.

Of course you have to wear socks with them too, because they stop before your ankles. I prefer to pull up socks outside them, because I find the ends of the leggings as undesirable as the top. They're really just a skintight body covering between two more important fashion statements-- your shoes and socks and your top. I think that once you embrace that concept, you will choose leggings that are a pretty neutral colour and that don't take away from what else you are wearing. I mean, they're not supposed to be the fashion statement themselves, right? They're just... there.

The first morning I came down stairs wearing leggings, my dad was there to say good-bye to us. I had on the deep-navy leggings and a pale-green-and-white flannie with a white sash tied round my middle as a belt and white socks with my Reeboks. (For some reason only sneakers look good with leggings.) And I had my hair all pushed up with a little white Scünci. 'What's this,' Daddy asked, 'the pixie look?'

'Pixie look?' I wondered. Then I remembered when he had been a performer in the '80s and had been somewhat famous (if I may use that word) for wearing dance tights with long shirts and thick socks (or leg warmers) and ballet shoes, like some sort of modern-day Robin Hood or Romeo Montague, and he had got known for being cute like that, you know. Of course when my dad was in his 20s he was deplorably cute. I suppose there really is nothing new after all.

'It's cute,' Daddy said. 'Just remember to take your pepper spray.'

I blushed. 'Daddy....'

So for the last five or six days at school I have been wearing leggings, not skirts. I admit they are warmer than tights, though not quite as warm as jeans but they are cuter than jeans. I tend to wear a long shirt with curvy tails, which is acceptable. One time last week I wore a polartec pulli, which I had to keep tugging down-- standing up it was fine, long enough to hook over the bottom of my bottom, you know, but whenever I sat down I had to really tuck it underneath myself and then of course it rode up in my lap. But that was manageable and anyway it's a cute look... though I prefer something I have to worry about a little less, you know.

Then, of course, there are the boys who stare at you. Well, I don't mean stare in the way that half the males in the known universe stare at girls. I mean they practically examine you to see what they can see of what they shouldn't be seeing. Leggings tend to invite that-- maybe that's one of the cases in which we girls bring it on ourselves. It is a cute look, and if it's worn properly it's perfectly modest. I mean we all have legs and bottoms and everyone knows that. But to see guys staring up stairways at you, bending down in the class to see up your legs, dropping pencils in the corridors-- it's just horrid. The leggings aren't quite THAT revealing! Maybe they're just hoping to see if they can tell if we're wearing thong panties-- though I can't possibly imagine what importance that knowledge could ever have to some loser guy's life. Why would it matter? I mean, for a real lady, it shouldn't matter what kind of underwear she's wearing because it should never be shown in any way. So I could have on any sort of underwear at all-- even none-- and you wouldn't be able to tell and you wouldn't ever find out. So why should anyone else care?

Even though I'm NOT wearing thong panties with my leggings anyway!

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