Figure 1.-- School class portraits are a good source of information in fashion trends. This is a detail from a Hermsdorf school class photo in 1934. We see boys wearing tan long stockings with their school clothes. One boy wears dark tan or brown stockings. Two wear light tan stockings. Hermsdorf is a Swiss town close to the German border. These boys seem to be about 12-13 years old..

Tan long stockings commonly worn in Europe during the 1930s. They were very popular in Germany which affected trends throughout central Europe. We see large numbers of German children, both boys and girls, wearing the nautral tan/beige shades. They were not the only Colors worn, but they were very common. Czechoslovakia has a long tradition of contacrt with both Austria and Germany. Clothing styles inclusing hosiery were very similsr. We note a several Czech schoolboys wearing short pants and knicker suits with both dark and light-colored stockings in 1934. The boys look to be about 12-13 years old. One boy wears beige long stockings with his dressy short trousers suit (1934), although other boys in the same class seem to favor black or brown stockings. School images like this are good indicators of relative popularity. We notice the Muller children, presumably a German family in Czechoslovakia wearing what look like light-colored long stockings during the 1930s. Again we probably have two shades of beige or very light tan long stockings. The girl’s stockings could be white, although they are more likely off-white or beige. The boy’s are pretty clearly a light shade of tan. The girl's stockings seem to be white while the boy's are apparently tan. Two Prague boys are seen in a 1936 photo wearing two shades of light and dark tan long stockings as they become interested in a toy airplane. Estonia like the other Baltic republics was a country strongly influejnced by Germany. We note two Estonian Boy Scouts wearing tan long stockings with their uniforms in 1934. Even in Italy, where for largely climatic reasons, long stockings were much less common for general wear, we see a group of Balilla boys (the Fascist youth group) wearing beige or neutral colored hosiery with their uniforms in 1938. The long stockings were apparently not official, because we note various colors of long stockings as well as knee socks (the officially mandated hosiery). In this photo the long stockings seem to have been worn for formality as much as warmth and may have some political implication (since the style tends to be more German than Italian). A group of Jewish Lithuanian children, photographed about 1935, show various colors of long stockings; in the center first row we see both white and black, but on the left and right, both a boy and a girl are wearing tan or light brown. A 1936 photo of a Swedish family shows boys of four different ages wearing tan cotton long stockings with short trousers and dressy clothes. Swiss school children, like their German counterparts, also wore tan stockings. Sixth graders, both boys and girls, at Höngg School in the Zurich canton in 1932 can be seen in medium or dark tan hosiery, and at Hinwil School (1938) in the same general area, we see a boy with dark tan stockings in the front row; notice also the boy in the second row at the left.