Stockings and pantyhose and cheescake photos and bent over

For the last 15 years, sales have been going down, down, down, the victim of leg tanner, open-toed shoes, more casual dress codes, and the general fickleness of fashion.

But in recent months, pantyhose makers have sighted just the faintest glimmer of hope. The new ad first ran in the spring and is now back as part of an even bigger campaign for autumn, traditionally an important season for hosiery. It features Stockings and pantyhose and cheescake photos and bent over young woman changing into several cute outfits complemented by different pairs of pantyhose and Spanx-style shapewear, and prancing down the street to a dance song.

The End of Pantyhose? In the late s, DuPont introduced stockings made from a new material the company called nylon, one that was both cheaper and less snag-prone than silk.

It may seem like a stretch to call a pantyhose ad revolutionary, but these ads arguably were. They ran in major publications—this one appeared in Life in —and in place of euphemistic language, they showed three capaciously proportioned women, naked but for their pantyhose, smiling and laughing.

Joe Namath hawked an unseemly number of products in his time, including Olivetti typewriters, La-Z-Boy recliners, Noxzema shaving cream, and Ovaltine, but this ad for Hanes Beautymist pantyhose is probably his most memorable. The camera pans up along a pair of shapely legs, to a pair of rather muscular thighs, and up along a football jersey to the dimply, laughing face of Namath.

Eye-catching in distinctive plastic eggs, this was the first pantyhose brand to be made widely available in such convenient outlets as drug stores and supermarkets. In one memorable TV ada fashionable young mom is mortified when her daughter points out her sagging hose.