Nylons nail it for peak pins - 75 years of stockings

The ultimate in erotica, still at the cutting edge of fashion and a staple of every woman’s underwear drawer, Jonathan de Burca Butler pays homage to the nylon stocking on its 75th anniversary.

THEY have been known to reduce men to blubbering fools. They have been worn in bank heists, used as paint strainers and housewives of a certain generation swear by them for cleaning the silver.

Nylon stockings were first introduced to the world on October 27, 1939, when they were sold in a department store in Wilmington, Delaware in the USA. The fabric itself had been discovered a few years earlier by the nearby DuPont chemical company who initially used the man made material, the world’s first, for toothbrushes and fishing line. By May 1940, nylon stockings were being sold in department stores in New York.