A tube sock is a sock with something missing. No heel, no shaped toe, just a straight knitted cylinder with a cuff at one end. It sounds like a shortcut, and in 1967 it was one. What nobody at the mill in Rockford, Illinois expected was that the shortcut would end up on the legs of Super Bowl teams, Wimbledon champions, skateboarders and roller-disco regulars, and that sixty years later it would still be the sock people reach for when they want colour on the leg.

This is how it happened, and why we still knit ours without a heel.

Rockford, Illinois, 1967

The tube sock was born at the Nelson Knitting Company, a hosiery mill founded in 1880 by John Nelson, who had built a machine for knitting socks without a seam. Nelson Knitting already had one claim to fame: in 1932 it added a red heel to its plain work socks, and American families spent the Depression turning worn-out pairs into sock monkeys. The company would spend decades defending that idea.

The heel-free sock came along in 1967, made possible by a new generation of stretch yarns that could hold a straight tube snug against a foot. Leaving out the heel pocket and the shaped toe cut knitting time by roughly a third and made the sock far easier to produce on simple machines. The first pairs were plain white and sold by the dozen. Within two years Nelson was shipping around 125,000 of them.

There is a footnote that explains the rest of the story. Nelson Knitting never patented the design. Any mill in the country could knit a tube sock, and within a few seasons most of them did.

Why take the heel off a sock

A shaped sock fits one foot well and every other foot slightly less well. A tube fits all of them about the same. One size covers a wide range, left and right are interchangeable, and with no heel pocket there is no fixed point for the fabric to wear through first. A 1976 piece in Good Housekeeping made the point parents cared about most: a small child could pull one on without hunting for the heel.

That practicality is what carried the tube sock out of the factory and into a decade that happened to be very interested in sport.

The 1970s: stripes, stadiums and the knee

Organised youth sport grew quickly in the United States through the late 1960s and 1970s. Basketball, football, track, roller skating: more children, more teams, more pairs of socks worn out in a season. A sock that fitted a growing foot for two years instead of one, at a lower price, sold itself. Girls were joining teams in numbers for the first time, and a sock with no gender and no size suited them just as well.

Then the stripes arrived. Nelson Knitting began supplying professional teams with knee-high tubes banded in club colours, and both sides of the 1973 Super Bowl, the Miami Dolphins and Washington, took the field in them. On television the bands read from the cheap seats. Basketball did the rest: a knee-high striped sock on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Julius Erving, worn with the short shorts of the era, was the most visible garment on the court.

Tennis adopted the look with a lighter hand. On a white court, a white sock with two thin stripes at the cuff was as much colour as the dress code allowed, and the players of the late 1970s, Björn Borg among them, made the stripe-at-the-calf a signature. That is the version of the tube sock we keep coming back to: not the full knee-high, but a pulled-up crew with the stripes doing the talking.

From the court to the sidewalk

The tube sock's second life had nothing to do with sport. In Southern California, skateboarders took the striped athletic sock and wore it with cut-off shorts and canvas shoes, pulled high, and a generation of photographs fixed that look in place. Roller rinks did the same in the evenings. The sock was cheap, it came in every colour, and it looked the same on a girl as on a boy. By the end of the decade it was simply what young people wore on their legs.

The quiet years

In the 1980s the athletic sock grew a heel again. Mills learned to knit shaped socks almost as fast as tubes, cushioning and arch bands became selling points, and the plain white tube was pushed to the back of the drawer, where it stayed for twenty years as a gym sock. The name outlived the shape: "tube sock" became the generic term for any white sports sock, heel or not.

What came back in the 2020s was not the gym sock. It was the 1970s silhouette: the sock worn visibly, pulled up, with a stripe at the cuff and a shoe simple enough to let it show. Loafers, white trainers, a rolled trouser. Once socks were allowed to be seen again, the tube sock had the best argument for being looked at.

How we make ours

Our tube socks keep the one idea that made the original work: no heel. A straight tube that fits every foot shape, left or right, in one size that runs from EU 36 to 45. Everything else we changed. The body is knitted from a soft 80% cotton blend, with polyamide and elastane so the tube holds its shape on the calf instead of sliding. Under the foot there is a terry cloth sole for cushioning and to absorb moisture through the day. The stripes come straight from the 1970s tennis court, in more than twenty colourways.

They are designed in Brussels and knitted at a family-owned factory in Portugal, which is a long way from Rockford, Illinois, and about sixty years on. €22 a pair, unisex by design.

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Questions we are asked

Who invented tube socks?
The Nelson Knitting Company of Rockford, Illinois, in 1967. The same mill had introduced the red-heel work sock in 1932. It never patented the tube, which is why mills across America were knitting their own by the early 1970s.

Why do tube socks have no heel?
Leaving out the heel pocket made the sock faster and cheaper to knit, and gave it a fit that works across many foot sizes and on either foot. With no heel there is also no fixed point for the fabric to wear through first.

Why are tube socks striped?
The stripes started as team colours on socks supplied to American sports teams in the early 1970s, so they could be read from the stands and on television. Basketball, tennis and then street style picked them up, and the thin bands at the cuff are the tennis version.

Are Escuyer tube socks unisex?
Yes. Tube socks always were: with no heel and a single stretch size, the same pair fits a woman and a man. Escuyer tube socks come in one size, EU 36 to 45, and are designed as unisex from the start.

Do tube socks slide down?
A cheap all-cotton tube will, because cotton relaxes as it is worn. A tube knitted with polyamide and elastane through the leg grips the calf instead. Escuyer tube socks are 80% cotton with polyamide and elastane, and a cuff that holds without pinching.

Escuyer. Considered design, made to last.