A 5,300-year-old hunter called Ötzi the Iceman wore no-show socks. When his freeze-dried body was discovered 35 years ago in the Austro-Italian Alps, he was so remarkably preserved that scientists could successfully excavate his final meal from his stomach: a menu of ibex, red deer and einkorn wheat. It was also possible to figure out what he had been wearing, including an insulatory mesh of linden bast stuffed with dried grass that he had wrapped snugly around his feet, rising to about ankle height.
Jacob Elordi arriving at the Valentino SS24 fashion show © Jacopo Raule/Getty Images
Chloë Sevigny in New York, June 2026 © Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Dr. Martens
This would, five millennia later, be a catastrophic cock-up. “I’m not one to be an authoritative voice on sock length,” says Gui Rosa, a London-based fashion designer who makes a point of mostly wearing her socks to the knees. “But with low-rise socks I make an exception: they’re a fatal faux-pas.” Gen Z are a militant bunch and there are few issues that stir them more than where a sock’s cuff should land. As fitness influencer Phoebe Parsons virally observed in 2023, Gen Zers wouldn’t be caught dead in a low rise, making sock height key to differentiating age brackets. Getting it wrong, Rosa adds, can be “viscerally disturbing”.
