Pantyhose & Tights

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On our quest to find the best pantyhose music videos out on the web we’ve stumbled upon this really fun colourful masterpiece directed by Kim Gehrig for Calvin Harris‘ catchy electro-house tune “The Girls”. The video starts with Calvin looking cool and hip in his 5 days old stubble while telling the viewers that he likes girls of all races, types and sizes. Still all the girls featured in the video are skinny Caucasian girls with more or less the same kind of features (which we take to be kind of an ironic approach by the director to the contents of the lyrics).

The dancers begin their choreography in tight white shorts and tops, white opaque pantyhose and white wigs. Nevertheless throughout the music video the colors of their outfits and pantyhose change to different bright colours. The most interesting scenes are when the dancers outfits form a kind of colour gradient from yellow to red or to different shades of pinks (and in the final shot ranging the whole visible spectrum of colors) that combined with the sequential dance moves achieves a really interesting visual effect.

Overall this is quite a fun music video to watch featuring our favourite undergarment and it has a cool minimal feel, the choreography has some interesting moves and is enough to keep you interested throughout the video.

We’ve searched Kim Gehrig’s portfolio which is available at Somesuch & Co expecting to find other works featuring pantyhose or other types of legwear but it seems this was a one time theme for her.

The gradient effect the choreography builds toward, dancers shifting from yellow through to red and pink as a group, is a good reminder of how much colour placement matters with opaque tights specifically. Because opaque pantyhose reads as a single flat block of colour on the leg, unlike patterned or sheer styles which break the colour up, it’s one of the few garments where a genuinely saturated, bold colour doesn’t overwhelm an outfit the way a bold top or dress in the same shade might. That’s part of why colourful opaque tights have stayed a small but consistent trend since this video came out: they’re an easy way to add a strong colour statement to an otherwise neutral outfit without it taking over.

If you’re building a look around a single bold colour of tights like this, keeping shoes and top in white, black or grey, the way the dancers’ shorts and wigs do here, is the simplest way to let the colour read clearly instead of competing with everything else you’re wearing.

It’s worth comparing this video’s approach to colour directly against the Jupiter “Saké” video also featured on this site: both use fully saturated, single-colour opaque tights as the core visual device, but where Jupiter splits its dancers into two rival colour teams, Calvin Harris’s video instead moves a single colour palette through a continuous gradient across the whole group. Both are genuinely effective, just built on slightly different colour logic, one uses colour to divide a group into two readable sides, the other uses it to unify a whole group into one continuously shifting visual.

Either approach is a reasonable template to borrow from if you’re planning a themed shoot or event around coloured tights: pick a hard colour split for a “two sides” effect, or a single graduated palette if you want everyone to read as part of one cohesive look instead.