Figure 1.--Long stockings in the 1950s became increasingly worn by younger boys and more reserved for winter wear. Here we see four German boys in 1952. The older boys (youngr teenagers) wear long trousers and probably abkel socks (although there is no way to be sure). Their younger friend wears short pants with black long stockings and round garters rather than the more usual Leibchen with supporters.

We still commonly see boys wearing long stockings, especially in the early 1950s. We see two notable trends in the the 1950s. First, while long stokings were still common, they were increasingly be worn by mostly younger boys. We see large numbers of younger boys wearing long stockings in the school portraits. Here we are less sure about girls. Second, long stockings were increasigly being worn seasonaly in cold weather. We see quite a number of yongr boys wearing long stockings in the earky 50s. A ggod example here is a mother and her three sons wearing long stockings in 1952. Another example is an unidentified German boy in 1954. By the mid-1950s they were becoming much less common. King srockings, however, were not unknown even in the late 1950s. An examole is an inidentified German boy in 1957. Here we are talking about boys wearing long stockings with short pants. We suspect that during the Winter that many boys wore long stockings with long pants making it impossible to assess the situation with any accuracy. For the most part, HBC believes that boys in West Germany stopped wearing long sockings in the late 1950s. Not all readers agree. One reader writes, "I travelled in Germany quite a bit throughout the 1950s. I remember that one did see boys wearing long stockings even in the late 1950s--but, of course, not a majority." A reader writes, "The German Hosiery Museum indicated that long stockings were still very common for German boys in the 1950s." HBC general assessment is that many younger German boys were still wearing long stockings when the weather turned cold durng the early 1950s. By the end of the decade we find that this was much less common. Our assessment is based on our admitedly limited archive of German images. We note various suspension devices in the 1950s. An example is an unidentified German boy in 1953. Long stockings sharply declined in popularity in the late-1950s, at least in West Germany, as children's tights appeared on the market.