Wartime pictures: Leg-painting
One British wartime fashion feature nearly everybody knows about is leg-painting. It’s one of many fashion phenomena that only sort of make sense, like washing your hair nice and clean and then applying expensive product to make it look dirty.
In the age of skirts, legs were on display a lot more, and fashionable legs, then as now, were smooth and tan. (For “tan”, in cloudy Britain, read “stockinged”.) Which meant that razor blade and stocking shortages constituted something of a fashion crisis. A sensible response might have been either to stop wearing skirts or to get used to the sight of pasty, hairy female legs. Admittedly, some women did circumvent the problem by wearing slacks, but you couldn’t get away with it all the time. And standards were standards. So painting up was the only alternative.
From Norman Longmate’s How We Lived Then:
A popular substitute for the real thing was sun-tan lotion, with a seam drawn in with eyebrow-pencil, but the nurses in one hospital produced an attractive tan shade with potassium permanganate crystals from the hospital dispensary, and a Blackpool woman stained her legs yellow with onion skins. Such expedients were not always successful: one Manchester teenager found that her tanned legs attracted more midges than men, and a Norfolk teenager’s ‘stockings’ disintegrated halfway through the evening as the colouring became powdery and rubbed off. Even more embarrassing was the experience of a Lancashire girl who stained her skin with gravy browning, and was rudely greeted by the local boys with cries of ‘Hello, Oxo legs!’
If you were lucky enough (?) to live in Croydon, you could leave it to the professionals. Here women have their legs painted at the Bare Leg Beauty Bar, 1941.
The sign promises, “No more ladders!” (US: ladder = run.) That’s one way of looking at it.
After a coat of paint, you needed a seam effect. Time to switch brushes and call in the specialist.
We seem to have come full circle — leg-painting is very much reminiscent of modern spray tans, although hopefully without the Oompa-Loompa orange so tragically common today. Thanks to black and white photography, we will never know.
I have a small flat, round sponge from wartime in it’s original cellophane that is specifically to apply leg make up – one of my favourite finds of all time!! I also have gorgeous little skeins of thread on cardboard to mend stockings with – in various skin tone colours. Because I have been collecting for a long time I have boxes of vintage stockings – some of the packets are gorgeous, and you can’t beat a fully fashioned stocking for glamour. I have some exquisite stockings which are nude with a fancy black heel and seam. the best look ever!!
I love seamed stockings and find them quite cosy in the winter, but it doesn’t get very cold here in Melbourne. I’ve never seen snow in my life, and can’t really imagine wearing normal clothes and having to cope with that extreme cold. My mother remembers wearing stockings and suspenders when she was a teenager. To get around the problem of chilly upper thighs, they wore “passion killers”, which were basically like woolen bike shorts. Hmm, attractive! My boyfriend’s mother couldn’t believe I actually chose to wear stockings, and said she had hated them and was so pleased when pantyhose were invented! I can’t stand pantyhose because when they start to creep down one’s legs, there is the inevitable webbed crotch dilemma, which drives me bananas. Plus, I find that vintage fully-fashioned stockings don’t ladder nearly so easily as modern sheer stockings. Something about them being non-stretch I presume.
A friend of mine has seamline tattoos, but they are stylized, kind of a narrow art nouveau pattern with small finial flourishes at ankle and upper thigh- really lovely. She is able to pull a look like that off though, and I think there are probably few that can.
As for the rest of it, oy. As I get older I try to be more embracing of my body how it is, but — today, the first day in a spring skirt without tights up here in Not-Quite-Canada, keenly aware of how sort of aggressively plucked-chicken lavender my legs are and thinking I’m going to have to start applying the stinky chemicals to take the day-glo edge off. As far as I can tell they quit making the “for fair skin” stuff I used to use that was super-subtle the way I need it to be, so I’m reading this thinking… hm, DIY? …potassium permanganate? LOL
On the cold legs problem:
If you look at it in another way, the period we’re talking about fell smack in the middle of what I’ll call “the window of bare-legged insanity” in fashion history. Think about it:
Most of human history – 1920s: All women wore skirts. Skirts were long and hosiery thick. Result: nice warm legs.
1920s – 1960s: (Nearly) all women wore skirts, but skirts were short and hosiery thin or nonexistent. Result: freezing cold legs.
1960s – present day: Women can wear trousers or skirts as the occasion demands. Result (usually): nice warm legs.
you know, I grew up in the sixties, everyone wore skirts to school, and most of us wore knee highs til jr high or high school. those fashionistas with parents who were willing to foot the bill wore them sooner and those of us who had to supply our own wore them later of course. I really didn’t think about it except if the wind was blowing. we would have been hurrying to school no matter what I was wearing, so I just hurried.
I did get some chapped legs above the boots, and I can remember when my knees or thighs brushed together I would know the skin was cold cause each leg registered touching something cold. LOL weird isn’t it. but it wasn’t something you really thought about otherwise. what does a kid have to compare it to.
And have you SEEN what they were wearing on children in the fifties? those little outfits were bare to the butt!! anything would have seemed warmer, even stockings!!
AGHHHH! God, women must have been cold pretty much ALL YEAR ROUND! That’s massively stopped me moaning about feeling cold, I’m feeling very grateful now. How crazy are conventions that leave half the population in perpetual discomfort (same old same old, I know). Yeah, I saw a girl with seam-line tattoos on her legs, it looked badly done and not very attractive as she was scraping herself down the high street in flats, but I’d love to see a well-done version styled with heels and a pencil skirt! Thanks for opening this topic, fascinating as always! xxx
Oh, I remember trying that useless friction mitt, too!
I’m also old enough to remember seamed stockings, and although I can see their appeal now, at the time I thought them really ugly, plus it was a constant struggle to keep the seams straight. I was so glad that seamless were available by the time I was old enough to wear them.
As for bare legs in winter, I can see many girls enduring it as long as they could, just as we used to strut around in short skirts with legs as red as lobsters from the cold, refusing to admit any discomfort. During the war, older women probably went with the dowdy but cozy wool or lisle stockings. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them in old newsreels. They were also still in use in my memory, but only by elderly ladies who had given up trying to look stylish.
Now that you mention it, Tabby, I remember my mom wearing seamed stockings. and I remember her straightening her seams. I thought it was weird and I was very glad I didn’t have to worry about them by the time I was wearing stockings. When I began wearing stockings the “runless” stockings had come out and I THINK panty hose were just making their appearance. I bought runless stockings til I graduated high school. I was a frugal girl when I had to pay for stockings from my babysitting money. they don’t even make those things anymore.
For those who are to young to remember they had tiny bumps on them instead of being smooth. I think they were knotted every so often. They didn’t get runs, but they got HOLES if you didn’t paint every snag with Fingernail polish. Every girl had clear polish in her handbag in the sixties.
A brief aside: Olwen mentions fixing runs in stockings with a hair from your own head! You had to be brunette for it to blend in:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/90/a2666090.shtml
Maybe that’s when waxing became popular? My mom grew up during the war with 8 sisters. I don’t think mom ever did shave, but I don’t know. I only have two aunts left, maybe this is a burning question I need to research while they remain. LOL
This is something I’ve often wondered about, I can’t imagine any form of leg browning would look good on hairy legs, so did they have some other way of getting smooth and silky? Also, what did they wear in the winter, I can’t imagine bare legs now and its only March and we have central heating. From what I’ve read they had to be careful with fuel so houses wouldn’t have been as warm as we keep them, would they?
I can imagine the whole thing would be a disaster for me, I’d be bound to get caught in the rain and it would run and as for keeping my ‘seam-line’ smudge free I’m sure that would be impossible!! I have enough trouble keeping eye pencil smudge free on my face!!
Well, I’ve read that women used pumice stones to remove leg hair, but I can’t see how that would work, can you? The woman in The 1940s House tried it, and it just gave her a big raw patch on her shin. There were a lot of tips and tricks to make razors last longer, like rubbing them on a water glass to sharpen them. Other than that… maybe tweezing?
I, too, cannot imagine bare legs in winter, even in “temperate” Britain. From the BBC “People’s War” website:
We cycled everywhere from Milford and I remember one day in the bitterly cold winter of ‘44/45 cycling to the cinema in Godalming. There was no question in those days of wearing trousers, and we had bare legs instead of stockings as it was easier to chip the ice off bare legs!
AAAAAAAGH.
Check here about the “friction” hair removal. I know they used to have commercials for the mitts here in Canada, I tried one when I was a teenager and found it took far too long to be useful, thus stuck to shaving.
An interesting modern take on painted seam lines though are seam line tattoos! I know quote a few girls who have them and I love them as well but also like real seamed stockings, it would be a paint to keep the two lines always matched
Seamline tattoos! I’ve never seen any — possibly because women in Britain now keep their legs covered for most of the year, like sane human beings. That’s quite a commitment!