Rihanna's Leggings

In Victorian England some ultra-respectable families even covered up the legs of the piano....

You mean "the limbs", not legs. Calling them legs would be vulgar.

That is the era that introduced the terms "white meat" and "dark meat" for chicken. You just couldn't ask someone if they preferred breast or thigh.

Reminds me of the classic moment between Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in Hitchcock's 'To Catch a Thief'....

When I was in school there was a strict dress code. Boys couldn't have facial hair or hair touching their collars. Shirts had to have at least 2 button if pullovers. If pants had belt loops you had to wear a belt. No tennis shoes in class. Girls had to wear skirts or dresses. They had to be knee length and if thought to be too short were sent to the office and the check was to kneel and they had to touch the floor. Certainly no cleavage could show. The girls were almost always the violators. They pushed the limits. When I taught briefly in a Catholic school the girls had those pleated tartan plaid or plain blue skirts. They would roll them at the waist to shorten them. If a nun walked by they simply tugged them back down. There was a large glass wall at the back of my room and lookers on the other side. Once while the class was writing I looked up and noticed one of the girls turned around and on the other side of the glass a girl was raising her skirt and flashing her panties and giggling. When I was teaching private lessons one of the mothers told me she and her friend were flashing drivers in front of the all girls school before the first bell. What they didn't know was the Mother Superior was watching them from her office window. They were called over the PA system just after the last bell and sitting in homeroom. In her office the nun had them bend over her desk for a paddling. She made a real production out of it, smoothing their skirts down before the paddling started. In the telling, she kept laughing and detailing the story.

Some observations:

In the 1970s my father was the vice-principal of a Technical College (technical and other education for over 16s who didn't fit with school and older ones who didn't want to go to university). It had a "no visible belly buttons" rule, which derived entirely from his personal dislike of belly buttons!

On an English beach, in the summer, I concluded that current women's swimwear fashion was to give the impression of nudity and that the effect was much improved by said women's apparent desire to spend as much time "bottom up" (sometimes very up) as possible. I approve of this trend.

When I was at school in the 60s, a local girls' school had a rule, "no skirts more than six inches above the knee". Girls whose skirts might break that rule were required to kneel on their desks so that the gap, skirt to desk, could be measured. They avoided being caught out by rolling their skirts around the waistband, thus shortening them, but allowing the girls to quickly roll them down and lengthen them if an inspection was imminent.

For us boys the issue was hair length and style. I asked my father how it was that a school could forbid both long hair and very short hair. It seemed illogical. He explained that there were no absolutes and schools merely banned anything that was, in the moment, seen as extreme and thus a demonstration of rebellion.

Geoffrey Stirling