Figure 1.-- This snap shot is undated, but looks like the latee 1940s to us. Note the boy here has white knee socks with tassels. It looks to us as if the tassels are the end of draw strings to old up his socks.

We thought that these tassels were basically an ornamental fashion without any practical fuction. We wonder though if they were fashioned to serve as garters to hold up the knee socks. A German reader writes, "well, I don't know much about these tassles. For me they do look just somewhat decorative. I have never heard about them being a device of holding stockings up." Yes that is what I also thought, but it is interesting that the boys that have thectasseled knee socks do not seem to have them falling down. Also note that the tasseled knee socks always had two tasses on each sock. Now if the tassels were purely ornamental, why are they always two? Surely there would be some wih only one. The fact that there were always two suggests that there was a utilitarian component--one on each end of a draw string.