Silk Stockings and How to Know Them

WILLIAM LEE, a fiery young English curate with radical leanings, went one day, some three hundred and fifty years ago, to call upon Cecily Yorke, soon to be his bride. Like most men and all radicals, William enjoyed an audience, and as he paced the cottage room he rehearsed his next Sunday’s sermon to Cecily’s demurely patient ears. As she sat quietly listening, her hands were busy with her knitting needles and her eyes were intent on the stocking taking shape there.

But suddenly William paused. In a fury he asked how a man was to talk against the accursed sound of clicking needles, to say nothing of how he was to know whether a maid listened or not while she watched naught but a miserable stocking under her hands! And he flung out of the cottage vowing he would not come back until he had invented a machine to do mechanically what Cecily’s fingers so nimbly did with her needles.

To-day, long after William actually did invent the first hosiery knitting machine, something like five hundred million pairs of silk hosiery are produced each year in this country alone. Stockings have built up a business worth many billions of dollars — and a singularly American industry at that. This shows very plainly in the fact that of an average price, let us say eighty-five cents, for a pair of silk stockings ten cents goes for the raw material imported from the Orient, but seventy-five of it must be chalked up against the American industry itself. According to the National Association of Hosiery Manufacturers, ninety thousand people are employed in making the hose, thirty thousand in preparing the yarn for the knitters, and uncounted thousands in selling the finished product to the American market.

The silk stocking has become for virtually every woman — rich or poor, young or old — the symbol of liberty, democracy, and an undisputed self-respect. Yet, strangely enough, few women appear to be satisfied with the silk stockings they buy and wear. The same woman will vacillate back and forth between brands and between price ranges, swinging from a belief that she must pay the most to get the best to a rebellious conviction that she might as well buy the cheapest, since all stockings are alike in the long run — and no pun intended! The difficulty lies in two factors. One is the lack of understanding of general hosiery construction on the part of the consumer, the other a lack of standardization on the part of the manufacturer. The consumer often expects too much or the wrong thing, while the manufacturer often capitalizes upon the ignorance of the general public.

It is quite true that the manufacture of silk hosiery is highly technical and complicated. A trip through a hosiery mill is apt to make one wonder, not that there are so many imperfections in hosiery, but that there are not a thousand more. There are more delicate precision operations involved, more chances for trouble, and more opportunities for ‘chiseling’ in the stocking business than in almost any other. But no consumer needs to know all the technicalities or terms or processes. What she does need to know, first and foremost, is that at the heart of all the practices which cut down on wearability and increase the hazards of silk-stocking buying lies one pertinent cause — the attempt to save silk. Silk is, after all, definitely limited in production volume. Yet it has certain unique characteristics which make it irreplaceable for stocking manufacture. Cotton and rayon are both occasionally offered as substitutes, but silk is the only fibre which can be made into a yarn so fine it will produce the sheerness consumers require while retaining strength and elasticity enough to carry some degree of practical wearability. As a matter of fact, neither cotton nor rayon in a yarn as fine as is generally used for silk could stand the strain of the actual manufacture on the knitting machine.

To get some idea of the almost fabulous strength of silk, consider that in its natural state it is the strongest textile yarn known to man, yet the filament is so fine that it takes 256,000 yards to make one pound of silk. But silk is costly. As with precious metals, the tendency in using it is to get its effect with as little actual use of the raw material as possible. Yet, unfortunately for consumers, a silk stocking is as good, from the wearability standpoint, as its silk content, and almost in exact ratio. Many of the complaints a woman makes about her silk stockings are due to the skimping of silk, somehow, somewhere. Other difficulties come usually from incorrectly fitting her purchase to her purpose.

We must begin our scrutiny with the yarn that goes into the stocking. There are, of course, grades of silk thread, and the finer and sheerer the stocking, the better the grade of silk used, for anything else would show its defects too clearly in a fragile, clear construction. The next breaking up into grades occurs as the throwster, who prepares the yarn for the knitter, takes two or more threads and twists them together into yarn. If two threads are used, the stocking made of that yarn will be called a two-thread stocking, and a delicate gossamer thing of no wearability it will be. Three threads make a stocking nearly as sheer, four and five threads produce the semi-sheer, and from there up to about seven or eight make the service stocking.

Until recent years a yarn twisted only slightly, three to five turns per inch, was usual. But, as women demanded increasingly sheer hosiery, the throwsters developed high-twist yarns to maintain some degree of durability. In a fourthread crepe yarn, for instance, according to hosiery standards (not wholly accepted by the trade), one pair of threads must be twisted from sixty to eighty turns to the right per inch, the other pair from sixty to eighty turns to the left per inch, and then both pairs together again to the right a few times. Obviously this uses an enormously greater amount of silk. Twist a string yourself into as many turns and you will see how much silk can be swallowed up by high-twist yarns.

Nevertheless it is a fact that a proper crepe twist increases the durability of even sheer hose almost unbelievably. True crepe stockings resist abrasion, snagging, and strain to a high degree, and are naturally most desirable from the consumer’s standpoint. But unhappily a great many stockings are sold as ‘crepe’ which have not the slightest real claim to the word. Since the hosiery industry has not yet accepted its own prescribed standards and begun to label hosiery so that such terms may be officially checked, there is no way for a consumer to know by sight or touch whether the stockings she buys are truly crepe. But after the purchase, when the stockings are washed, it is a fairly simple matter to check the point. A real crepe stocking will twist into a spiral around its seam as it hangs to dry, whereas the hose with less than standard crepe twist will hang fairly straight. In this way a buyer may at least check the brand she buys, so that if it is satisfactory she may safely buy it again — or, if not, avoid it.

There are, as most women know, two kinds of stockings, one called seamless, the other full-fashioned. The first is knit without shaping to the leg, on a circular bar, and has the same number of stitches at top as at bottom. Its ribs up and down will be parallel with each other. It may have a faked seam to imitate full-fashioned hose, but a true fullfashioned stocking has slanting ribs at the back where they run into V-shaped angles at the seam. Full-fashioned stockings are knit flat, starting at the top or welt with the required number of stitches according to the gauge of the machine, and narrowing automatically by dropping out needles at the knee, calf, and ankle. Where these narrowings occur there will be tiny dots, called fashion points, on both sides of the back seam.

Standard procedure calls for stockings to be knit on a fourteen-inch needle bar. Occasionally, to save silk, some manufacturers will use less than the full width of the needle bar, and thereby immediately decrease the elasticity of the fabric. Also they may narrow too rapidly and too often, so that again the silk is skimped and the strain unevenly divided. In ‘bargain’ stockings you will often find too many of those little fashion points under the knee. A double row of four or five dots under the knee is normal, but more should make you suspicious. A knee, when bent, measures two inches more around, and needs every bit of stretch possible in a fabric that covers it. A very sheer stocking, as a matter of fact, should have no needles dropped out at the knee at all.

The foot of a stocking is knit on a different machine from that which knits the leg or boot. The transfer of the infinitesimal loops from the needles of the legger to those of the footer is a delicate and highly skilled performance. Every single loop must meet every proper needle — and skill as well as time here costs money. Carelessness or haste is apt to result in that familiar line of junction where foot meets boot, which women dislike for its ugliness. That line, and those others called ‘rings,’ can be eliminated to-day in stocking manufacture, but this inevitably adds to the cost of the hose. Rings in the leg of a stocking are caused by variations in color, texture, or thickness of the yarn; and, since it used to be common practice to knit from only one cone of yarn to a machine section, obviously these variations could pile up, course on course, into a distinct defect. Now the threecarrier system can be employed, which uses three cones of thread alternately, one course at a time, so that variations become almost invisible.

The things that make for beauty in a stocking are easily checked at the point of sale, but the durability factors are not so easily tested. Once it is understood that durability depends, first upon the number of threads used in the yarn, and secondly upon the amount and kind of twist given the yarn, the consumer buyer can go on from there to the next vital point, which is to discover if enough yarn has been used, and how much ‘live’ elasticity the stocking has.

To determine these qualifications you must first check the length of the stocking. Thirty inches is standard length, with a tolerance of one inch each way. That is, a stocking may measure twenty-nine or thirty-one inches and still be considered standard. But many stockings are knit far short of this standard, and stretched and pressed into a greater length. To test for this, grasp the stocking at both ends evenly and firmly and pull gently. If it has an easy stretch of several inches, and if it jumps back into place instead of crawling back, you may safely presume that the stocking was knit the length it measures, not stretched to that length on the finishing boards.

Next measure the foot. A foot should measure the exact number of inches indicated by the size. A nine and a half size stocking should be nine and a half inches long in the foot. There are, alas, manufacturers who commonly knit but three foot sizes, stretching these into measurements to fill in the other sizes. Obviously, as soon as washed, this sort of foot will return to its knit measurements, and the purchaser will wonder complainingly why the stocking shrank so badly in laundering. After measuring the foot, give it the ‘stretch test.1 It should stretch several inches and make a quick comeback, like the leg. The welt, too, should have a margin of stretch, — at least four inches for the doubled stocking, — and the ankle should have at least two. But in every case remember it is not the amount of stretch alone which is important, for the manner of stretching and the comeback are vitally significant. These three things show up silk skimping better than any other means of testing available to consumers.

Finally there are a few extra points of warning which will help any woman to eliminate unsatisfactory stockings. The ‘gauge’ is often referred to in advertising and selling hosiery. All other things being equal, it is true that a fine gauge, such as forty-five or fifty-one, means a better stocking, more closely knit, and more resistant to snagging than a lower gauge, such as forty-two. But occasionally ‘bargain’ or special sale stockings offer the phenomenon of high gauge at a low price. High-gauge stockings properly should not be cheap, for they use more silk and require costlier labor, but it is possible, as I have mentioned, to put a stocking on a full fourteen-inch needle bar with the gauge truly set at fifty-one or fifty-five — and then drop out some of the needles! In this way, although the stocking may truthfully be described as ‘51 gauge,’ meaning that there were fifty-one needles for every inch and a half of bar, the number of ribs will be far below standard. Silk has been skimped again. This will cut wearability in half at once.

Again, in shopping for silk hosiery, notice two small but important details: the reënforcement over the big toe should be well over the joint, otherwise the friction will wear this point through in short order; and the seam at the back of the stocking and under the foot not only should be flat, but should have about sixteen stitches to the inch. Twelve is much too few, though often seen, and the consequence is a heel seam that opens on the first wearing.

Again, if you wish longer than standard hose, buy those which have been knit longer. The familiar speech of the salesgirl about there being a ‘long one in each box’ is based on a fallacy. It is true that there appears to be a long one in each box, but the variations in the box come, not from different knit measurements, but from the way the hose dried on the finish board. Washed, it will drop back to its normal knitted length.

As to price, one reputable manufacturer states that a consumer has the right to expect the maximum wearability and a large amount of beauty in stockings at the retail price of eighty-nine cents. At a price over that, you may get additional style and beauty, but no more durability and very likely less as sheerness increases. Under that you must expect to sacrifice some standards; and below fifty-nine cents, if both beauty and durability are present, then someone has suffered a loss to present them to you at that price.