Barriers – between real and fake, home and office, dressed and undressed – are eroding all around us. One manifestation of this tendency is fashion’s new no-pants look. More covered up than the Y2K-inspired “naked” aesthetic and yet not quite work-appropriate, it is as unresolved as the current state of the world. At the same time, through the figure of Edie Sedgwick, who pioneered the style, the trouser-less look is connected to another disruptive era, the 1960s.
An heiress who landed in New York in early 1964, Sedgwick studied jazz ballet and quickly fell in with Andy Warhol and the Factory, succeeding “Baby” Jane Holzer as one of the artist’s superstars. She appeared in a number his films, including Chelsea Girls and Poor Little Rich Girl; the latter, like Ciao, Manhattan, was loosely based on her life. Sedgwick made her debut in Vogue’s 1 August, 1965 issue, in which she was photographed by Enzo Sellerio as the magazine put it, “arabesquing on her leather rhino to a record of The Kinks”. The picture and the fashions still look modern, as does the elegant defiance of the subject. Interviewed by The New York Times soon after the story was published, Sedgwick said: “It’s not that I’m rebelling. It’s that I’m just trying to find another way.”
Fashion was one of her compasses on that journey. As if peeling off her past, Sedgwick shed her wardrobe of Dior and Balenciaga, and adopted a daring and youthful signature style of briefs worn over opaque tights or fishnets, and T-shirts (often accessorised with shoulder-grazing earrings), which borrowed from the dance studios she was so familiar with. The writer of a Life Magazine feature called “The Girl with the Black Tights”, described Sedgwick’s unique aesthetic as having a “spirited wackiness”. This quality was similarly at work in the designs of Mary Quant, who also found fashion via the dance studio.
There are two schools of no-pants dressing in 2023: bare- and stocking-legged. Edie belonged to the latter. Sixties fashions were revolutionised by the advent of seamless tights (made using circular knitting machines). “Women rebel with pantyhose,” read the headline of a 1965 Boston Globe story, which explained that tights eliminated the need for girdles and stockings and made possible “the fashion possibility of the miniskirt and hot-pants – both impossible to wear with anything but a smooth line of stocking to the waist”. Higher hems meant more emphasis on the legs, traditionally a symbol of women’s mobility and progress.
Sedgwick told The Times her “uniform” was devised “never with the intention of being clever but because it’s easy”. A similar instinct might’ve inspired Miuccia Prada’s fall 2023 Miu Miu collection, in which elegance and “real life” collided with imperfectly perfect results. If the no-pants-with-stockings look on her runway was provocative, it was also streamlined and comfy.
The immediate antecedents of the no-pants-with-stockings look might be waist-up Zoom culture and balletcore, but Alexandre Samson, curator at the Musée de la Mode at the Palais Galliera, takes a broader view, linking it to the work of Vanessa Beecroft, Skims, and Balenciaga’s stocking boots. That Boston Globe article from 1965 quoted a hosiery survey done at the time, in which some women equated stockings with freedom, others with protection. The latest update to the no-pants look shows that these qualities needn’t be mutually exclusive, a visible sign that women have plenty of legs to stand on, thank you very much.
— From “The Girl with the Black Tights,” Life, November 26, 1965
— From “Pop Goes Society”, by In Time, The Gazette, September 3, 1965
— From “Edie Sedgwick, 28, Andy Warhol Film Star”, by David Leacock, The Boston Globe, November 28, 1971
— From “Chit-Chat”, by Nancy Randolph, The Daily News, September 15, 1965
