Socks

The term “hosiery” in contemporary usage is generally defined as stockings or socks, more specifically as tight-fitting knit goods that cover men’s feet and varying portions of the lower leg, or as knitted feet and leg coverings for women (such as panty hose or tights). The related term “hose,” while used synonymously, is even more specifically historically defined as a man’s garment that fully covers the legs, like tights, and is tied to the doublet (a short, close-fitting jacket).

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Hand knitting of socks was an important industry in medieval Europe and by the sixteenth century had advanced to a fine craft. Silk hose for those who could afford them were hand knitted in the round on needles as fine as wire with very fine silk threads. Well-fitted hose were an important fashion item for men of the gentry and nobility during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hose worn by lower status men were coarser, knitted by hand in the round from wool or linen fibers, or still made from bias-cut woven fabrics. The production of hose to meet the demands of men’s fashion sparked important innovations in knitting. The first knitting machine (called a flatbed frame) was invented in late-sixteenth-century England to make hose. It produced coarse, flat pieces of knitted cloth with eight stitches per inch. Although it could be knit ten times faster than by hand, the cloth was considered suitable only for peasant hose. By century’s end this technology was refined to make silk stockings using approximately twenty stitches per inch, creating a very active industry and market for higher quality, high-priced hose that lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. Innovations to the knitting machine in the eighteenth century included refinements in shaping hosiery on the frame during the knitting process. Cotton, from India, was introduced for knitted hosiery in England in 1730.

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Until the late sixteenth century, both woven and knitted hose were held up by being tied to the waist of a man’s doublet with laces called points. By 1540, the full-length style of men’s hose was broken up into two or three different sections up the leg called stocks. Each section was sewn or tied to the one above it in order to hold it up on the leg. The lower hose, from toe to knee, were predominantly held up by garters, and, after the 1540s, were almost exclusively knitted. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, knee-length hose or stockings were worn with breeches. Garters were the most popular method for holding up one’s hose until new developments created highly elastic manufactured fibers in the mid-twentieth century. From the 1770s until into the 1820s, many men padded their hose with “artificial calves” strapped to their legs, if needed, to create the shapely leg demanded by fashion ideals. (Encyclopedia Of Clothing And Fashion, Hosiery, Men’s)