Leg Avenue

Leg Avenue is an American hosiery, lingerie and costume brand based in City of Industry, in the Los Angeles area. Its own history begins in 1984, when a family that had arrived from Taipei started selling customized stockings at swap meets and kiosks in downtown Los Angeles. The business was incorporated as Leg Avenue, Inc. in 1999, and today it sells hundreds of hosiery and costume styles worldwide under the line "Born in LA. Worn everywhere."

Very little has been published about Leg Avenue outside its own pages, so this account relies mostly on what the company says about itself, set against what is known about the trade it works in.

Stockings with zippers, 1984

The founders started small. According to the company, they bought imported stockings and changed them, adding zippers, lace and other unexpected details, then sold the results from swap meet stalls and kiosks downtown. That is a modest origin, but a revealing one. From the start the business was about novelty and decoration on top of a cheap, mass-made base product.

Downtown Los Angeles was a natural place for it. The city's garment and fashion district, the largest in the United States, is full of wholesalers, trim suppliers and small workshops, and its swap meets offered a cheap way to sell before renting a shop or a warehouse.

From stalls to a company

Fifteen years passed between the first stockings and the incorporation of Leg Avenue, Inc. in 1999. The company now operates from City of Industry, an industrial city east of downtown Los Angeles that is home to many distribution warehouses.

The cat ears that opened a category

The company dates its move into costumes to 2000. Customer feedback, it says, led it to put together a Halloween look built on black lingerie and a pair of cat ears. It sold, and it opened a whole new line of business.

That move makes sense once the overlap is clear. Adult Halloween costumes in the United States lean heavily on lingerie pieces: corsets, bodysuits, fishnets, garter belts and thigh-highs. A company that already made those could add hats, ears, aprons and printed bodices and sell costumes at a fraction of the cost of a full outfit. Today the brand lists more than 650 costume styles, from fairytale characters and pop-culture themes to uniforms.

Bodystockings and fishnets

Hosiery remains the core of the catalog, with more than 300 styles. The line runs from sheer tights and thigh-highs to fishnets and decorated novelty styles, the direct descendants of those first zippered stockings. The bodystocking, a one-piece garment in mesh, fishnet or lace that covers the body from shoulders to feet, became one of the brand's signature products and fills a large part of its lingerie range.

Around the hosiery the company sells chemises, babydolls, teddies, garter belts, g-strings and accessories, priced for impulse buying rather than for a fitting room.

Where it sits in American lingerie

Leg Avenue belongs to the fantasy and costume end of the American lingerie trade, an end with deep roots in Los Angeles. Frederick's of Hollywood built a mail-order business there from the 1940s on similar theatrical pieces, and brands such as Dreamgirl compete with Leg Avenue in costume and novelty lingerie today. These companies sell through adult boutiques, costume stores, online marketplaces and seasonal Halloween shops more than through department stores.

What the numbers suggest

The brand does not publish sales or employee figures. Its scale shows instead in the catalog: hundreds of hosiery styles, more than 650 costumes and a line of lingerie and accessories sold under one name around the world. That is a long way from a swap meet table of stockings with zippers sewn into them, and it is still recognizably the same idea.