I always wore skirts much more than my friends growing up, mostly with knee socks in elementary school, then with various shades of pantyhose and tights when I was in high school. Not because of any fetish that I was aware of, I just gravitated that way, partially because my waist is a lot smaller than my hips and it used to be much harder to find pants that fit properly. I did always like finding interesting hose and I owned a lot of it and I did like looking at my legs a lot. I can remember lying on the couch in my rec room with my legs and feet up in the air just looking at them and thinking, "Are they pretty? I think they might be, but can I know?" in a very typical girl-becoming-a woman, kind of way. I have no idea if there was something latent in there. I suspect there must have been because of how crazy the Hosiery Monster went once I let her out of the cage.
I have always thought other female legs were gorgeous. When I was pretty young, I can remember reading an article in People magazine about three different women who each claimed she was the model for the For Your Eyes Only movie poster, and I saved that magazine for years and can remember scrutinizing it fairly often, partially because one of the women said that she had been studying her legs since she was five years old and knew every curve and had no doubt they had used her legs in the final poster (they hadn't).
I do know when the switch flipped in my head though and hosiery and shoes became truly very tingly-charged for me. I was in a Designer Shoe Warehouse, of all places, buying boots and an incredibly good-looking couple was one aisle over from me and the man was kneeling at the woman's feet helping her try on different styles of black knee boots and I could tell he was desperate for her to buy these boots. She was wearing jeans, but the leg was rolled up and she had on a pair of very dark, dense lace black hose (couldn't tell what type) and the poor guy was putting her boots on and very incredibly slowly zipping up the boots while cupping her calf and it was obviously all he could do not to lick his way up her leg. The tension in the air was incredible.
Her calf was very slender and they were trying on boot after boot because they were all too big and he ran around the store, almost in a panic, because he really wanted her to leave with some boots and she was visibly losing patience for the whole endeavor. It was obviously "his thing" and she didn't get it (except I do give her props for wearing hose under her jeans). I just sat on my little shoe-trying-on bench with one foot halfway in the Franco Sarto boot I was going to buy and tried not to stare too hard or climb over the shoes and ask if he'd put boots on me, too.
For some reason, I left there not fixated on boots so much, as really focused on hosiery. Maybe it's because the boots weren't working out for her, but she was already wearing the hosiery, I don't know, but after that I started rabidly collecting photographs of hosiery I found online and buying piles of it in stores, then garter belts, then shopping online because I wasn't satisfied with what I could find in brick-and-mortar stores. It was at the point that I realized I was spending hours every single day looking at photos of hosiery or trying on hosiery or plotting my next hosiery purchase, that I thought it might be a very good idea to start this blog. Especially since I enjoyed the thinking and looking and wearing I was doing so much.
So, that's how I became so obsessed with hosiery. I think hosiery is an endlessly fascinating subject and, recently, my focus has turned towards stockings and thigh highs more than anything else, possibly because they are slightly more novel to me, I'm not certain. They definitely feel sexy, so I don't really need to dissect it too much. I'm just very busy enjoying myself and obviously a good stocking tease is something that really turns my crank. Crank turning is a good thing in my book.
