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How To Wear Striped Tights Or Stockings (Without Looking Like A Mall-Rat Baby Bat)

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Some Don’ts:

  • Don’t wear them with black Converse All-Stars
  • Don’t wear them with a tutu
  • Don’t wear them with a hoodie
  • Don’t wear them with eyeliner on the inner rim of your eye
  • Don’t wear them if they are laddered or have holes in them
  • Don’t buy them from the supermarket or cheap accessories store at Halloween, get a pair from a decent brand
  • Don’t wear a pair that have orange, purple or green stripes with any clothes in the other colours (e.g. if you’re wearing purple and black striped tights do not wear orange or green as well) unless you want to look like the embodiment of Halloween.

At this point I must confess that I have in the past worn my black and purple striped tights with black Converse All-Stars, with eyeliner on the inner rim of my eye, and that they have a mini-ladder by the right toes and were bought from a cheap accessories store by my sister, the original owner.

The first two sins were committed on Halloween 2005, which was before I really learnt how to dress myself, the third is covered by shoes, and the fourth can’t be helped now. They are slightly see through so I sometimes wear them with black tights underneath for best results. However, they are slightly too big width ways and I have to keep pulling them up so the stripes stay even.

I am actually currently wearing them with a skirt that has a layer of netting underneath the top layer of black cotton. However, since I am otherwise perfectly neat, tidy, and hopefully elegant, it looks okay.

I also slightly spoiled my all-purple-and-black outfit when I went out today by taking along a carrier bag with orange on it. I suddenly realised I was channelling Halloween and was not happy to say the least!

Now for the Dos!

  • If your striped tights or stockings are black and one other colour, do wear (cute) shoes that match perfectly the colour that is not black. If they are stripes without black, match them to one of the colours.

An example is on the right. In reality, the purple of the shoes is the exact same shade as that of the tights. I’m just a bad photographer.

  • Do wear them with more dressy/formal clothes. This will prevent you from being mistaken under any circumstances for a teenager.
  • Do wear them with cats-eye eyeliner, it looks elegant and again will prevent you from being mistaken for a teenager.
  • Do wear them with co-ordinating colours. Again, it will make you look grown-up.

Here are a couple of outfits I created on Polyvore based around striped tights or stockings. Unfortunately, Polyvore is extremely lacking in decent pictures of striped tights or stockings, so I could only do black and white stripes and black and red stripes, and no purple outfits! There are quite a few pictures of one leg in stripes, which is odd and pretty useless when trying to give a good idea of what it will really look like! Seriously, WTF?

In this I aimed to make the look softer and gently colourful. I love this outfit. I wish I had it! It would be perfect for so many occasions.

I love red and blue worn together and I decided to see what they would look like with some little black dresses. This is an example of me putting the “Dos” from above into serious practice! Ohhh, I wish I had these clothes…

Book Review: Green Is The New Black

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If you’ve followed this blog for a while, or dipped into the archives, you’ll know that I am really interested in ethical fashion. When the book Green Is the New Black came out, I was excited to read it. The blurb suggests that it will “show you how to salve your desire and your conscience, enjoy the good life in style, and look eco-fabulous in high heels (and hemp knickers)”, and I think it pretty much does what that says.

I would describe it as mostly a shopping guide, although there are chapters on DIY, entertaining (yourself & others) and travel. I read a comment on its Amazon forum which complained that it didn’t acknowledge the part that over-consumption plays in the environmental crisis, but I would disagree. It does accept that people need to stop being so wasteful and emphasise that it is always best to thrift, mend or DIY, but it also accepts that it is hard to change old habits and that there are some things that people will need or want to buy. Clothes, accessories and make-up do wear or run out so it is impossible to stop shopping completely, and this book is a non-preachy, useful guide to what to do when you do need a new bra or pair of shoes, for example.

I did find the information on cosmetics to be somewhat lacking. It doesn’t explain what to avoid and what to look out for when buying make-up, hair or skin care products, and I could have made a few more suggestions of recommended brands myself. Perhaps that’s because I am a makeup nerd. Compared to every other section, the cosmetics one was the worst.

This book is pretty gentle. It will not make you feel bad for all the unethical shopping you have done in the past, or shock you into developing a conscience you didn’t have before. It doesn’t talk about why you should be concerned about ethical fashion , it assumes that you are already. Some people may consider this a weakness, but I actually think it is a strength. Global warming is a controversial subject, and there are still many people who don’t believe it exists and so are not concerned about the environment. This seriously annoys me! There are many other reasons why we should be concerned about the environment, besides global warming. Amongst other things, fossil fuels are running out, the natural habitats of many species are being destroyed, and industrial waste is damaging to our health. It would irritate me and alienate some people if the book were to only talk about global warming, the issue du jour. Green Is The New Black also takes social ethics (fair trading, et cetera) into consideration and it would be a much longer book if it were to deal with all these things. I’m happy it skips that bit and gets on to the fashion, I find that more respectful of my intelligence and awareness of current affairs, however, the book does include a list of “Green Reads” for anyone who wants to know more about the science and issues, and provides letter templates to encourage readers to write to clothing companies and demand they be more responsible.

The writer has obviously done a lot of research and tested a lot of products. However, this book is intended primarily for readers in the UK, and people in other countries would probably be doing more harm than good if they were to get products shipped from the companies Blanchard recommends! As I said before, it is very gentle in its approach, so if you are already a hardcore paragon of ethical consumption, this book would probably not be very interesting for you, but for everybody else it is an inspiring read and I would recommend it.