copyright by Bettina Network, inc. 2012 for Marceline Donaldson
Estate Sales are one of my passions. I have been involved with them since about 1965, having owned an Auction Gallery in the Sheraton Ritz Hotel years ago and have barely missed a weekend without some stop at an estate sale in some city.
I haven’t been to a mall nor any other kind of retail store spending money for a very long time and we are doing quite well, thank you. My money goes further and the ‘things’ that I have acquired are much higher quality than I could afford otherwise.
In spite of that long history, it never ceases to amaze me when I find something extraordainary – like this weekend.
Saturday was full of stopping at different sales in the Greater Boston area. My best find was in Belmont where I bought a basket full of stockings – not knowing if they would fit, but knowing they were all still in their original plastic wrappers and I know enough people of different sizes that I could share what I couldn’t use.
Going over the packages – which cost about fifty cents each – there were several under the “Sears” name. Therein was my amazement. They were called “Cling-alon”. Now, as old as I am and having seen as much as I have seen in life, I had never come across stockings which one could wear out to an event, find a run in one leg, change that leg with a “replacement nylon” and keep going. Did women have these replacement legs in their pocket books in case one leg got a run and they didn’t want to look kind of messy?
There were two kinds of nylons in my many “Sears” packages. One kind was called “Replacement Hose” – those are one leg and the original cost on the package said $1.47 with a sale price of $ .49. So the woman who bought these originally – now dead – must have bought stockings by the gross. Another package is called “Spare Parts” and cost $1.35 originally with a sale price of $.69.
The marketing plug on the package says “if one hose runs re-match with hose from another pair. Reversible and interchangeable to fit either leg. Two separate seamless hose with opaque panty-type panels…open at front and back.”
Where were these panti-hose all of my adult life, especially my young adult life when I was raising three children and scrapping every penny to make ends meet? Going without stockings in a Minnesota winter because it was either my stockings or something my daughters needed was no fun. Could these stockings have eliminated a few of the colds I caught in that horrendous weather?
And why did the industry give up these kind of panti-hose to give us two legs permanently attached to the panti part of the hose necessitating our buying a new pair if we get runs on only one side of the panti-hose, which is often what happens to me. I suspect it happens to a lot of women because we tend to be harder on one side of our bodies than the other.
Before this “find” I didn’t even think of such a possibility. Now, I want to know why the panti-hose industry is making me spend money unnecessarily so they can make more. I can’t think of any other reason as to why they would integrate both legs into one panti and make me buy ‘new’ before I had totally worn out the ‘old’ because they found a new-fangled way to create an expensive and short-lived necessity for women.
I notice they are reversible – neither todays’ panti-hose nor stockings are reversible. If you wear them on the wrong side you have an obvious seam at the tip of your toes where it will show if you are wearing open toe shoes. How come with all of our technological advances there could be “reversible” stockings years ago and today only stockings with the seam on the ‘wrong’ side and the smooth finished part on the ‘right’ or outside side?
A second pair of these panti-hose is a replacement for the panti-part of the hose. Were women more conscious of what they spent on such things years ago and were not ready to throw out a perfectly good panti-hose just because the left leg or the right leg had a run in it?
I remember girdles with the hooks on the bottom for stockings to be hooked to so they wouldn’t fall down, but I don’t remember anything like this. What a fantastic find!
Now, maybe it is time to get these modern companies to become more cost conscious about women’s underwear. They are fast becoming the most expensive part of a woman’s wardrobe and the part of our wardrobes which wear-out, break, run very quickly necessitating immediate replacement.
Panti-hose can range from about $4.50 all the way up to $20-30.00 and beyond and you can’t take off one leg of those expensive hose and replace them with another leg at a fraction of the cost if you run or poke a hole in only one leg.
Sears, Roebuck and Company was very popular at one time. With this estate sale find, I understand why. These stockings were sold by – Sears in Chicago, Ill. 60607. The package for the two parts has an original price of $2.27 on sale for $ .49.
In the end, however, it looks as though both kinds of panti-hose were sold for the same amount when they went on sale, with the “Spare Parts” being a bit more expensive. As I take the packages apart, the “Spare Parts” is more flexible because you can either use them as one side of the panti-hose or they are stand alone with the panti part of the panti-hose being replaced. One can hook these “Spare Parts” onto the panti part of the panti-hose or onto your girdle with what looks like some kind of precursor to todays’ velcro.
I paid fifty cents each for these stockings at the sale. They are worth the money. I will probably never wear them, but I will put them in my ‘clothes history’ file which I have put together for my grandchildren so they can see a bit of what was, to judge for themselves the value or lack of value for what is. Did we live up to our history and move onward and upward or did we learn from that history how to rip-off the next generation.
At the risk of being trashed I will speak truth to power by saying – todays’ fashion industry is about as bad as todays’ food processing industry. All for the company – taking as much money as possible from the consumer, while giving them either the ridiculous or the empty. With the cost of the equipment today to get into either industry it is unlikely that a competitor with the real deep-down interest in the consumer will surface.
Because we follow a leader like sheep, such outrageousness by such industries are not only possible, but thrive. All they have to do is spend millions on marketing to get all of us sheep to follow their latest trend. They can tell us we are not ‘smart’ ‘fashionable’ ‘one of the beautiful people of the world’ if we don’t follow and we go crazy with the amount of money and time we will spend trying to imitate.
Our paths do diverge however. They go to the bank where they are welcomed with smiles and open arms, we go to the poor house where everything we have managed to accumulate, save, keep, is stripped from us so we can start all over again trying to dig out of an unnecessarily deep hole. Who are you? Want to wear ‘replacement parts nylon hosiery’ or content with more expensive and easily ripped contemporary hosiery?
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