Fashion for feet-late Merconian alarm: white socks

Fashion shock on the boat bathing trip in Berlin. I ask a teenager twin sister couple why they wear white socks? “Because it’s cool,” says one. How please, what? “Because it looks good,” says the other. And then they jump into the water without socks and I look at me at a loss.

Should white socks be cool? And look good? I hear that for the first time in decades! I was banned from the white socks as a biblical bid of the styler and modernists, enacted everyday use in order not to look too stupid. This commandment once came up in the dark western Germany of the middle 80s, as apocalyptically against acidic rain (destroyed the forests) and nuclear missiles (destroying everything else) – and white socks.

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You could remember that well: no white socks and you are okay. It was a double warning: in front of hippies and with poppers alike. Some wore them in sandals (that was considered very bad), the others in college shoes (almost worse). Both were perceived as repulsive: Hippies had stopped at their fashion trips, and Popper were stuck in conservatism.

And then there was Steffi Graf and Boris Becker, the heroes of the new Wir-Sind-Wieder-Wer-Tennis nationalism. This was particularly taboo. Short trousers for men were also banned and for all genders the forehead tapes, such as Björn Borg, John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova, because they looked like it.

Band ligaments for the feet, that was roughly the image of the white socks – a fashionable misunderstanding. Anyone who was still wearing them was comedic, mostly in the nineties as a renithal atze as in the TV series “New Kids” or “Little Britain”, where Stumpf was a trump card.

But uncool becomes the new cool, these are the eternal laws of Yin and Yang in the fashion industry or how it formulated Yves Saint Laurent: “What is elegance other than forgetting what you are wearing?”

I have now read it: Billie Eilish wears white socks. I have now heard myself: In the editorial management of this newspaper, you already know that they are going again – for at least one year, because the family has announced it. I asked the twins on the boat: “And what about black socks?” – “Forget them!” Both said at the same time.