The
fashionable fifties, in my opinion a low point in couture for little girls who
had minimal control over their own wardrobes, left an indelible mark on countless
kiddies. We were subjected to such travesties as fried hair, scratchy net “petticoats”
which caused our skirts to spread over into the next county, or embedded themselves
painfully into the backs of our legs after sitting in school desks in hot weather,
and, possibly the worst blight, poodle socks. Some truly evil soul with a commercial
knitting factory who had a short circuited brainstorm perpetrated these abominations
on girl children, particularly those with short, “sturdy” legs, and was singlehandedly
responsible for creating the earliest known cases of cankles in a most undeserving
population.
The poodle socks to which I refer were the thick cotton ones
with even thicker bumpy tops arranged in rows and columns in neat military precision,
presumably meant to look like a tightly curled poodle dog's coat. They weren't
appliqued with cute little doggie motifs, not that this would have necessarily
rescued them from fashion hell. They were just long tubes of binding cotton knit
threads that fit as snug as a rubberized long leg girdle, leaving ones' knees
gasping for air by the end of the day.
Mine were nearly always white,
except for once when my mother bought me a pair in deep, ugly candy pink. I don't
think these ever matched anything I wore, not to school, anyway. Those dresses
were usually of dark colors, russets, browns, tans, grays, greens, dark blues
and deep maroons. Couple these Last-o-Leggings with saddle oxfords, in either
brown and white or black and white, and it was a major fash-clash. It didn't help
one bit that I was more than a little short of leg so that, unless I folded the
sock tops down, they seemed to disappear under my skirts to the region just beneath
my chin. Folded down, though, they gave the appearance of a couple of redwood
tree trunks overhung with a peaked roof.
I'm not sorry a bit to say I
loathed them. For one thing, they were murder to put on. They stretched only to
a point, and if I didn't manage to line up that thick white ridge running across
the toes, then it was a fight to the death to even manage to cover my feet. After
that came the struggle to pull them up, get those accursed bumps lined up in rows
instead of barber pole spirals, and finally, drenched in sweat, recently brushed
hair flopping in my eyes and glasses fogged up, I'd manage to shove my lower paws
into those near indestructible saddle shoes and stagger out to the car for the
ride to school. If you were to ask me now if I think poodle socks should be resurrected,
I'd say you were barking mad.
© Frances
Giles
"True Confessions and Mild Obsessions"
April 15, 2014 Column
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