Pantyhose & Tights

Anna Sui has just released an awesome collection at New York’s fashion week with an awesome array of multicolored patterned clothing inspired by 60s fashion matched with gorgeous custom made legwear items. From opaque bright colored tights to multicolored patterned socks there’s a little bit of everything, we also loved the black pantyhose with embroidered golden circular patterns and some lace tights in purple and green tones.

Below is a small selection of some or favourite looks, you can check out the rest of the catwalk photos at Fashionising and see exactly what we’re talking about, really gorgeous combinations all around. Anna Sui’s website is also very playful and full of other suggestions, be sure to take a look at it.

Anna Sui was born in 1955 and named one of the “Top 5 Fashion Icons of the Decade”, her creations never cease to surprise and the use of original playful legwear is a constant on the collections she brings forward. She wanted to be a fashion designer from a very early age and attended Parsons The New School for Design after reading about it in Life Magazine but after graduating she had to struggle for quite some years before establishing herself within the highly competitive American fashion industry.

(Photos by Imaxtree)

She launched her eponymous label in 1981 but didn’t show on the runway until 1991, in a debut that featured Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell; her first retail store followed a year later on Greene Street in New York’s SoHo. The CFDA recognised her early with its Perry Ellis Award for New Fashion Talent in 1993, and came back around in 2009 with its Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award, putting her in the same company as Yves Saint Laurent and Ralph Lauren. The brand has since grown well past ready-to-wear into footwear, fragrance, eyewear and home goods, with collaborations like Target and Coach along the way, and now counts more than 200 boutiques worldwide.

Our take: what stands out most in this collection is how confidently the legwear is treated as a design element rather than an afterthought, the embroidered gold circular pattern especially is the kind of detail that only works because the rest of the outfit stays relatively simple around it. It’s a good reminder that a single statement pair of patterned or embellished tights can do more for a look than adding several smaller accessories, which is exactly the kind of piece worth hunting for secondhand since runway-adjacent patterned hosiery like this rarely stays in production for long.