Pantyhose & Tights

(The original video for this one has since been taken down from YouTube — keeping the write-up for the record.)

Our fantastic journey through the pantyhose music video universe has brought us to this fantastic piece of film directed by Phil Harder for one of our favorite bands, the vibrant electroclash indie rock synthpop powered beauties that form the Brazilian band CSS aka Cansei de Ser Sexy. The song is called “City Grrrl” and it’s featured on their album “La Liberación”, which is full of rocking tracks that you should definitely check out.

Throughout the music video we can see the lead singer Luísa Hanae Matsushita aka Lovefoxxx, an absolutely gorgeous girl of German, Portuguese and Japanese descent who abandoned her activity as illustrator and fashion designer to dedicate herself entirely to the band.

On the first scene of the video she’s walking out of a suburban bus onto New York city and heading straight for an underground bathroom where her casual laid back look is about to undergo a deep transformation. She opens up her bag, starts putting on a whole array of accessories and grabs a pair of scissors which she uses to cut her jeans into ripped denim shorts. Beneath them she’s already wearing a pair of black lace pantyhose with spider web patterns which completely match the electro punkish look she’s going for.

The next few shots are of Lovefoxxx dancing in front of a graffiti wall of fame with a big baggy yellow sweater, brown boots and the aforementioned tights but later on we can see a scene with a really cool look where she’s wearing fishnet pantyhose and, in a rapid sequence of edited shots, combining them with several different outfits in front of a turntable.

All in all an awesomely energetic pantyhose music video with really cool editing for an awesome track to add to the other excellent ones CSS has produced in the past.

The black lace spider-web pantyhose Lovefoxxx changes into partway through the video is a good example of how patterned tights can carry an entire look’s edge on their own. Paired with something as plain as a baggy sweater or a simple denim short, a bold lace or fishnet pattern on the legs does most of the work that a more elaborate top or accessories would otherwise have to do, which is part of why fishnet and lace-pattern pantyhose have stayed a reliable shortcut for an electro-punk or edgier look well beyond this video’s 2007 release.

The ripped-denim-shorts-over-patterned-tights combination she wears is also worth calling out on its own: cutting or distressing denim over a base layer of patterned tights, rather than bare legs, gives the shorts something to sit against visually and tends to read as more considered than the same shorts worn alone.

It’s also worth comparing the two “taken down” videos featured together on this site, this one and the Editors video above: both rely on the same underlying idea that a strong, simple legwear choice, whether a lace spider-web pattern or fully visible opaque colour, can carry the entire visual identity of a video even once the original footage itself is no longer easy to find online, which says a lot about how memorable the right pair of tights in the right context can actually be.

Lovefoxxx changing outfits mid-video around a single consistent base layer of patterned tights, rather than a completely new look each time, is also a neat trick worth stealing: swap the top layer, keep one strong pair of tights as the anchor, and the whole sequence of looks still reads as connected.