Tights in art: why nylons are fetish and fantasy gold

An art exhibition about tights? In Margate? It sounds very end-of-the-pier, all saucy postcards and mother-in-law jokes. There is something a bit icky about hosiery in the day-to-day. Tights are underwear, sure, but they’re more business end than babe-wear: functional, grubby, prone to tugs and bald patches. There are few words uglier in the English language than “gusset”.

“Tights sit in the innermost, intimate regions of the female form,” says Zoe Bedeaux, curator of Gossamer, at Margate’s Carl Freedman Gallery. “So when one thinks about their function and then imagines them in the context of art, I guess they can conjure an element of humour.”

While Gossamer is a witty, knowing exhibition, it approaches hosiery with barely a smirk, for tights and stockings have actually been used by an astonishing range of artists, from Man Ray and Louise Bourgeois to Sarah Lucas and Senga Nengudi. Nylons do, after all, work brilliantly in sculpture – stretching, masking, distending and accommodating almost anything stuffed into them.

The idea for Gossamer was sparked by a chair made by superstar Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama that appeared to be made of stuffed stockings. Bedeaux found herself conducting a roll-call of artworks she had encountered using tights and stockings: it went on and on. Carrying associations with femininity, fetishism, domesticity, dominance, smut, suburbia, sexual freedom, “standard” skin colours and body types, hosiery offers a rich seam for exploration.

Before his 12-year partnership with Marina Abramović, performance artist Ulay produced a series of works exploring gender, among them S/He and Death of a Transvestite, which show him in glamorous makeup, dressed in nightclub and bridal costume and stockings.

Ulay was less interested in the erotic, sexual connotations of feminine dress than in a personal exploration of gender. “I had an incredibly beautiful – actually female-beautiful – body.

“All the stockings, everything, suited me,” says the artist who was keen to see how the feminine aspect of himself coexisted with the masculine. “I wanted to explore the in-between. I wanted to make clear that my queerness is not an inborn thing: it’s not a social, not an economical, not a cultural thing. It’s just a sympathy for the other – and of course I always wanted to be part of the other.”

Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, meanwhile, approaches tights as a voyeur. His images of stark fishnet patterning taut across pale flesh are so up-close that the curving contours of the human body feel architectural in scale. Moriyama is a photographer of the street rather than the studio, his beat being Tokyo’s underbelly. His artfully arranged landscapes of the human body encased in mesh seem to blend the abstract patterns of the built environment with the erotics of Moriyama’s predatory gaze.

Polly Borland’s photo series Bunny is simultaneously sexy and strange. Borland started working on Bunny in 2002 with a then unknown young actress called Gwendoline Christie. Excited by Christie’s striking looks, Borland first planned to shoot her as a kind of Bunny Girl pinup, but thanks to the uncanny, mutating effects of stretchy hosiery, the project got odder and more animalistic. Christie became beast-like, her body by turns male, female and monster. Borland has continued to experiment with hosiery, covering and moulding the body in her more sculptural series Smudge and Morph.

“With Bunny and then Smudge, the idea was to use stockings to conceal the human face and make dolls out of people,” says Borland. “My favourite books as a child were the Lonely Doll series. Edith the doll character had a felt face with painted eyes. I also had a doll with a painted stocking face. With the Bunny series, the work partially became about the different identities or cliches that are used to describe or in some cases define women.” The combination of naked flesh and the clingy veil of gossamer hosiery brings an unnerving sensuality to Borland’s work. “Fetish doesn’t interest me,” she says however.

Leigh Bowery, by contrast, constructed fantastical costumes that manipulated his body to disturbing, erotic effect. Photographer Fergus Greer, who made detailed portraits of the performance artist’s highly textured looks, says: “Leigh’s use of hosiery, whether fetishistically or just to delineate form, gave a sexual, metaphoric language to his work.” Hosiery gave him “an open landscape of creative space for erotic fantasies to play in”.

The overlap between the sculptural potential of hosiery and its sexual associations is further explored in works by Louise Bourgeois and Sarah Lucas. Bourgeois used tights to form mutant bodies: stuffed as sausage-like limbs, stretched over metal frameworks to resemble female torsos, or strange, expressive, semi-human creatures.

In her ongoing Bunny series, Lucas built on Bourgeois’s mutant female stocking sculptures, using three pairs of stuffed tights stretched over a chair to suggest the body of a drunk (literally legless) woman whose supposedly sexy attire – stockings and bunny ears – look tawdry in the morning-after light of a gallery. Lucas’s Bunnys are female bodies reduced to a few sexual signifiers: all stockings and stilettos. In her NUDS sculptures, stuffed tights stand in for human limbs of unspecified gender, twisting like fleshy serpents in a strangling, sensual embrace.

As the title NUDS suggests, much of the sculptural impact of tights comes from their resemblance to human skin, and the body-like forms they offer. That of course depends on whose skin and whose body: until shockingly recently, the term “nude” in fashion indicated only a beige-pink colour.

As brands making nude tights for women of colour (Sheer Chemistry, Bianca Miller, Nubian Skin) appeared on the British market, Enam Gbewonyo started “to chart the history of hosiery and its relationship with black women. I thought about how this item of clothing had till then marginalised black women and how we are often made to feel invisible in the fashion and beauty markets.”

Her exploration led back to the days of slavery and empire, to the tights worn by black nurses on the NHS, and the pink tights and shoes that black dancers were forced to wear as a ballet “norm”. Throughout the history of hosiery advertising, she sees the “eroticisation of white women and subjugation of black women”.

Gbewonyo has been working with hosiery since 2016. “I was both interested in it as a material in its malleability and how I could manipulate it in so many interesting ways,” she says. “I cut tights up, stitch them into yarn and create hand-knitted and woven works. I also stitch the legs together to make ruffled fabric that is stretched over canvas. I burn into them, embroider by hand on them and trap them in tissue paper. There’s practically no limit to how they can be used.”

In Gossamer, Gbewonyo will show alongside Senga Nengudi, her hero. Nengudi started making sculpture with nylon tights in the mid-1970s, works she referred to as “abstracted reflections of used bodies”.

Gbewonyo says: “What I love most about Nengudi’s work is how she upsets the boundaries of traditional museum culture by inviting the public to cross those barriers, to touch and feel and truly connect with her work. For me, her work is about celebrating the female form. Hosiery […] changes shape just as the female form changes shape through different seasons of our life.”

Bedeaux agrees: “Tights are highly transformative, loaded with all sorts of socio-political connotations. The show is complex, it’s not a show about tights per se: it’s about the possibilities that can come from using a particular object outside of its utilitarian function. This show explores the alchemy of hosiery.”