Attività

The knitting machine's arrival on the scene in 1589 was a game-changer since six pairs of football function socks could be made in the time it took to create one previously, but socks were still hand-knit alongside the machines for another couple hundred years. A tiny percentage are still made that way today. Socks were historically held up with ribbons or ties or by garters since elastic wasn't a thing yet. Until Jedediah Strut's Derby Rib machine in 1758, that is, but it was so expensive that it took almost two more centuries before more socks were held up by elastic than garters. To put it in perspective, in 1899 England, a pair of socks sold for the equivalent of $15 today…a LOT back then.

The next biggest thing to happen to socks was—drumroll please—the 1938 introduction of…nylon. The blended fabric was born, and synthetics changed the sock world, along with the rest of it. With socks now being made from recycled plastics, their evolution has come full circle in the last 80 years. The most common blends today include cotton, wool, and polyester or nylon, but socks are also made with silk, spandex, bamboo, and other fabrics.

Another big moment in the evolution of socks was globalizing production. In 2011, the Datang district of Zhuji in the Zhejiang Province of China was known as "Sock City." Why? Because it was producing 8 billion pairs of socks each year, which was a third of the world's annual total. Finding accurate sales numbers is challenging but suffice to say that BILLIONS of pairs of socks are sold each year for even more billions of dollars, the competition is fierce, and socks are almost as high-tech as electronics in some facets of their engineering.