Are Your Socks Showing Your Age?

For Millennials brought up on 'secret socks', the current trend for show-off versions is a stress dream

- Hattie Crisell

MY TRAUMA around socks haunts me every morning. In the late ’90s, one of the rules of teenage life was that it was absolutely unacceptable – laughable – to visibly wear socks. You had to roll them down under the arch of your foot. You’d rather get a blister that went to the bone than let friends see that you wore socks.

Why? Why anything? Fashion is a fickle and irrational mistress – especially when you’re 15 – and, sometimes, something just starts to look very right or very wrong. In fear of getting picked on, I stuck with small socks permanently, graduating from hiding them inside my shoes to buying trainer socks (aka secret socks), which leave the ankle bare. Now I’m 41. If the weather is very cold, I might wear a longer sock to bridge the gap from shoe to trouser, but always in unobtrusive black or grey.