Figure 1.--A catalogue of large Finnish clothing chain (Seppälä) had a photo of a girl wearing orange tights. The text said "Great value tights for girls and boys.". They were available in sizes up to 160 cm, in many different colours. This ad made me think how it was targeted towards mothers, not kids. It could be possible that they could have used foreign image material but I doubt that.

Boys appear to have worn tights in Germany, Poland, Russia, Japan, and several Scandinavian countries, principally they were warm garments during the winter. Some mothers also considered them dressy attire. Younger Finnish boys also appear to have worn them, but they do not appear to have been very populae with Finnish boys.

Girls Clothing Trends (1960-80)

I was born in Finland, northern Europe. I don’t have many clear memories of boys clothes during my first years. From what I’ve been able to gather from family albums is that in the late 1960s and early 70s girls wore skirts much more than later in the 1970. A skirt was part of casual clothing for girls, and living in Finland where most of the year can be considered cold by the standards of many, skirts were worn with cotton tights most of the time. What does this have to do with boys? I don’t know exactly when, but in the early 1970s, maybe earlier, with some trend towards unisex clothing in general, many boys also were wearing tights under their pants during the winter time. By the mid-1970s, girls were more commonly wearing trousers and jeans, and skirts were increasingly wirn only for special occasions. The cold winters required them to wear tights under trousers, if I’m not mistaken, tights were about the only warm undergarment for girls that time. In many families young boys were dressed in the clothes of their older sisters, including tights.

Personal Experiences (1976)

An event I will never forget took place when I was around 4 or 5 years old, i.e. around the year 1976. Being the oldest child in my family I didn’t have to wear hand-downs very often, but on this occasion I received some old clothes from a girl cousin of mine, one year older than me. The only thing I remember is that those clothes included a pair of ribbed brownish-yellow cotton tights. My reaction was very strong. By that time I had seen many girls wearing tights with skirts, mostly relatives in family meetings. I objected to wearing those tights. The though of having to wear a pair of tights which I saw as girlish was really embarassing. I don’t really remember having to wear them ever, but their very presence in that box of hand me downs claerly made an impression on me.

Fashion Trends (1980s)

Fashions changed but footed cotton tights remained very popular for girls well into the 1980s. Sometimes they were worn with skirts but mostly under trousers for warmth. I had mostly forgotten my own experience with tights. Around age 8 or 9 years of age I began to pay attention to the gender role of tights. I didn’t know any boy who was wearing them, but in the school locker room I heard some jokes about boys wearing tights and that made me think that someone, even around my age, could be wearing them. It was also a common belief among young boys that if a boy was dancing ballet, he’d have to wear tights, and that was though to be very humiliating.

Mail order catalogues and packaging of tights in Finland always pictured with a girl wearing them but the text was usually gender neutral "childrens’ tights". In some packages there were drawn figures and, to me at least, it looked like there was a boy in the background along with a girl in the foreground.

Around 1983 in a family meeting my cousin, a boy around the age of 3 or 4 was wearing dark blue sailor style velvet suit with short, below the knee, pants. Under those pants he was wearing a pair of light blue lace pattern cotton tights. Lace pattern in those tights was not very noticeable. Similar tights were quite popular among girls (with skirts) that time, they were available in white and light blue.

In the mid-1980s the biggest mail order company in Finland at that time had a photo of girl wearing mint green tights with large script-font text beside the picture saying "For girls and boys". The text still said "childrens tights", but I remember being surprised. Those tights were only available in size up to 130 cm and in colours of white and mint green, not exactly the colours you could imagine a boy wearing without considerable resistance.

A year or two later in the catalogue of large Finnish clothing chain there was a photo of a girl wearing orange tights. The text said "Great value tights for girls and boys.". They were available in sizes up to 160 cm, in many different colours. This ad made me think how it was targeted towards mothers, not kids. And what a young boy thinks after browsing through this catalogue and finding this (attractive) girl in tights with the text saying that tights are also for boys. Would it be equally confusing for him as my first encounter with tights years back.

Figure 2.--This advertising for a pair of tights was noted in Stockholm, Sweeden during the 1990s. While sold in Sweden, the tights and package are not Swedish. The country of origin was not stated anywhere in the package, but I'd bet Asia or Eastern Europe.

Fashion Trends (1990s)

After that years passed without any further evidence of tights advertised for boys. Fashions changed, girls started to wear also other types of long underwear during wintertime, and traditional cotton tights were being replaced by tights made of synthetical materials.

When I was in high school, I had couple of girl pen friends. I made some kind of informal survey, and asked what they thought about the topic of boys and tights. The girls were couple of years younger than me. Their opinions were quite clear, half of them (3 I guess) thought that it’s quite common and perfectly OK for boys to wear cotton tights. One was little bit hesitant and two of them, if I remember correctly, were strictly against it and found it to be humiliating for boys older than babies.

A year ago I talked to a Finnish girl using ICQ and she said that she remembers well that some boys were made fun of (by girls) for wearing tights in her kindergarten in the mid eighties.

During the summer, 1999, when I was in Stockholm, Sweden, I noticed a label (package) of tights with photo of a girl and a boy wearing tights, first one of its kind I’ve even seen. It looked quite old, the print quality was very low. Either it's old or made in some eastern European countries. I’ ll include it to this email. The most interesting thing in it is that it’s the boy who’s wearing red tights, not the girl.

Today I was browsing through a Finnish sewing magazine and it had a sailor style suit with over the knee short pants for the "little prince of the party" as they said it. The interesting thing to me was that this suit was modelled by a girl (or a boy really looking like a girl, around age 5) and she was wearing dark blue cotton tights underneath the short pants. The company providing the tights was also mentioned in the image caption, like it was intended to be worn with tights.

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Created: February 15, 2000
Last updated: February 15, 2000