Nylon for the Nonconformist

After their debut in 1939, Nylon stockings were celebrated as a scientific miracle that made women’s lives easier. Nylons provided the same sheer, skin-tone sheen as silk stockings—the leg covering of choice for a respectable and lady-like appearance—but were more durable and simpler to wash. In the years after World War II, even as nylons were selling out across the nation, nylon chemists quietly marched on. They rolled out updates and innovations, including the first commercial stretch yarn. This new type of nylon was knit into hosiery that eventually found a customer among young women, more and more of whom were beginning to question the mores their mothers were so eager to uphold. Although nylon initially helped some women maintain mainstream femininity, by the mid-1950s, it was helping others to subvert it.

In 1947, the Heberlein Patent Corporation unveiled Helanca, a process that transformed nylon filaments at the microscopic level from straight fibers into coils. Since nylon is thermoplastic, the coil was permanent; after you stretched a Helanca nylon yarn, it bounced right back. Once knit into a garment, it retained its shape after repeated wearing and washing. That stretchy coil also made the garment thick, opaque, matte, and absorbent, with a hand more like cotton or wool than silk. Because these aesthetic qualities were opposite those most valued in women’s hosiery at the time, fashion forecasters suspected that American women would not warm to Helanca.

The forecasters, however, had overlooked one niche market: dancers. They had long worn tights, different from stockings in that they are a one-piece garment covering the legs along with the thighs and lower torso. When Helanca tights hit stores in 1954, they were a sensation among dancers. More than workaday women, dancers needed stretch to accommodate strenuous movement as well as a textile that could soak up sweat and wash back into shape time and again. Dancers had no problem with the opaque, matte finish of Helanca since their tights were usually light pink or black.

Black tights in particular were associated with modern dancers, who since the 1930s had commonly wore them during both practice and performance. Unlike the storylines of classical ballet, which were usually of the princess-saved-by-the-prince variety, those of modern dance often featured strong, independent women like the poet Emily Dickinson or Clytemnestra, the husband-killing queen from Greek mythology. The choreography too was unconventional, meant to embrace the individuality of each dancer and allow her to express her raw emotions. It was not meant to be pretty.

Modern dance was also relatively easy to pick up, so easy that it was incorporated into many U.S. high schools and colleges as a standard part of girls’ curriculum. Reaching even more young women, professional companies toured the country and performed for free in public venues like auditoriums and community centers. By the mid-1950s, modern dancers in their standard black tights seemed to be everywhere, from popular magazines to primetime television.

The homebase of the most renowned modern dance companies was Greenwich Village, where they practiced, lived, and socialized. Soon, non-dancers in the Village were also sporting black tights as everyday dress. The trend spread to college campuses, adopted by students who abhorred the sea of cardigans and pearls they found themselves swimming in. According to the trade newspaper Women’s Wear Daily, it was after black tights were made in Helanca that their popularity swelled outside the dance community. Rebellious young women were unbothered that their legs did not look as shapely as they might in nylons, nor that their skin was completely concealed. Helanca tights were much stronger and warmer than nylons and less fussy since they allowed you to forego a girdle with its cold metal stocking clips. The boldest young women continued to trim away what Helanca made redundant, tossing out their skirts along with their girdles and simply wearing oversized sweaters or tunics on top.

In 1958, the term beatnik was coined and quickly deployed to denigrate young people who were repulsed by the materialism, conformity, and oppression they saw rife in American culture. The mass media portrayed beatniks as gloomy and bookish, with esoteric interests like Zen Buddhism, Abstract Expressionism, and bebop jazz. Such interests were hard for much of the public to wrap their heads around, but anyone could pin a beatnik down by how they looked. The Saturday Evening Post, The Atlantic, Life, and Seventeen all tipped their readers: a telltale sign of a female beatnik was black tights.

Within a handful of years, black tights would be nothing to blink at, having been assimilated into mainstream fashion. Polite society would be up in arms over new garments that revealed and concealed young women’s bodies in a manner denounced improper. And Helanca, the fiber that brought black tights out of the dance studio and onto the streets, would be rendered obsolete with the invention of an even more miraculous material called Lycra.