The Differences Between Women's Stockings and Tights

The real difference between stockings and tights is the comfort level and the occasion in which you wear them. For example, a lady would never wear tights with a formal gown or to anywhere where she needed to be 'properly' dressed. In this case, properly means appropriately dressed.

A lady needs to be appropriately dressed for whatever the occasion she is attending. If you are attending a cocktail party for a formal business cocktail party, then you would need a cocktail dress and stockings. Stockings are always much more formal than tights. Tights are what a woman would wear when it was inappropriate to wear casual slacks or jeans.

Tights would best be classified as the 'in-between' dress code. That is, not too informal and not remotely formal. They are what you would ear with a skirt and jumper or cardigan. For any non-Aussie reading this, a jumper is what Australians call a pull-over cardigan. It is pure Australian slang, according to my Chilean friends. Their definition coming from our national animal called a Kangaroo who is a well-known jumper. I don't know where the idiom comes from. I just know when it is a good time to put a jumper on. 

Stockings can also be worn with a skirt, blouse and cardigan or coat but they are not as warm as a pair of tights.

Tights are a thicker fabric weave than stockings. They are also made from a coarser fabric and not from silk or nylon. Tights are often made from cotton with an elasticised thread threaded through the weave to make them cling firmly to the contours of a woman's leg.

A stocking is made from silk or Nylon and is designed to follow the shape of a woman's leg, in a very light, finely woven silk or Nylon fabric. The stocking is a see-through weave and sheer; where a pair of tights is a thick, heavy weave and cannot be seen through. 

Tights are good to wear in winter and are rarely, if ever, used during any other season. Tights are designed for winter use in Australia and would be much too hot a garment to be worn during an Australian summer.

Stockings are rarely worn by women these days during the hot summer months unless they go out at night. Not so long ago, no woman worth her salt would have gone to work without a non-laddered pair of stockings on. It simply wasn't acceptable dress for the office. 

Now women can go to work much more comfortably dressed by not having to wear a pair of stockings every day, and this is a great saver on the family budget. It is fine for a woman to wear stockings to work if she wants to, or feels more comfortably dressed by doing so. These days women have much more choice in what they can and do wear to work. Many opt to wear tights in the winter time simply because they are warmer and they are much more comfortable to wear today than what they were twenty years ago.

Stockings and tights have both materially improved with the advance in technology in the past twenty years. The enhancements in the fabrics industry represents more comfort to more women than any time in the past century.