The table had gone quiet in that specific way it does right before someone says something that splits the room in half. Someone had just mentioned an interview outfit, tights got brought up as an afterthought, and then one guy across from me said, flat out, “does anyone actually still wear those,” and I watched four different people react like he’d insulted a relative. One woman got visibly offended on behalf of every funeral she’s attended in the last decade. Another guy just laughed and said he genuinely thought pantyhose stopped existing sometime around 2009, like it was a discontinued snack. That’s the argument I ended up refereeing for the next twenty minutes instead of eating my pasta, and it’s the one I’ve been turning over since, because both sides were sort of right and both were being a little smug about it.
It depends entirely on which room you’re standing in
Here’s the thing nobody at that table wanted to admit, myself included for the first five minutes. The answer isn’t yes or no, it’s “compared to what room.” Walk into a wedding, a funeral, a courtroom, certain law firms, certain airline crew briefings, and you will find pantyhose alive and well, quietly doing their job, not making a statement, just present because someone’s boss or someone’s mother or someone’s dress code said so.
Walk into literally anywhere else, a coffee shop, a Tuesday office in tech, a first date, a dinner party like the one I just described, and you’d be hard pressed to spot a pair on anyone under fifty. So the honest answer isn’t “no one,” it’s “depends whether you’re in a room where bare legs would read as slightly disrespectful,” and that room is a lot smaller than it used to be but it still exists, and it still gets booked every single weekend of wedding season.
I think the confusion comes from people assuming their own social circle is a representative sample of the entire world, which it never is, ever, about anything. The guy at dinner who thought pantyhose vanished works in a casual office, dates casually, attends casual weddings apparently, and so his lived experience genuinely has zero pantyhose in it. Meanwhile the woman who got offended works somewhere with an actual dress code, attends church regularly, and has been to enough funerals in her thirties that bare legs at one would feel wrong to her on a cellular level. They’re both reporting accurate data from completely different rooms, and then arguing like they’re describing the same room, which is the actual mistake, not the hosiery.
I’ll admit my own bias here too, because I spent about six years assuming pantyhose were basically extinct until I had to attend my cousin’s funeral in February, in the kind of cold where bare legs under a dress felt actively unkind to my own body, and I stood in a drugstore aisle at nine at night realizing I hadn’t bought a pair since I was maybe twenty three. They were still there. Whole rack of them, several brands, control top and sheer and the ones that promise not to run and then run anyway. Someone is buying those, restocking those, keeping that entire rack alive, and it clearly isn’t the people at my dinner table.
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The reason it feels like nobody wears them is really about occasions shrinking, not hosiery disappearing
What’s actually changed isn’t that pantyhose got discontinued as an item, it’s that the number of occasions where someone tells you to wear them has quietly shrunk, and most people’s calendars just don’t include those occasions very often anymore. Interviews went casual. Offices went casual.
Even a lot of weddings went casual, or at least went “bare legs are fine now” in a way they weren’t fifteen years ago. So the container that used to hold pantyhose, formal dress codes and formal expectations, got smaller, and the pantyhose inside that container didn’t go anywhere, there’s just less container for most people to bump into in a given year.
My coworker Denise, who’s worked retail almost as long as I have, put it better than I did at the actual dinner table, she said pantyhose didn’t die, formality died and pantyhose just happened to be riding along with it. I think about that a lot because it reframes the whole question. Nobody wakes up and decides to abandon hosiery as a category, what happens is the wedding goes from black tie to “cocktail attire, beach adjacent,” the office goes from suits to whatever, and one day you realize the last time you wore tights that weren’t opaque and thick for actual warmth was a work event three years ago that required a blazer.
And there’s a colder practical layer under all of it that nobody at dinner mentioned either, which is that hosiery didn’t lose to fashion, it lost to central heating and casual dress codes at the same time, from two directions, and it’s still standing in the one place those two things don’t reach, which is genuinely cold weather under a dress or skirt where nothing else does the job the same way tights do. So no, not everyone wears pantyhose, and no, they haven’t vanished either. They just moved into a smaller, more specific set of rooms, weddings, funerals, February, certain offices, and they’re doing perfectly fine in there, waiting for the rest of us to need them again without noticing we ever stopped.
