Calzedonia's leggy New York taxi: hosiery marketing goes street-level

A yellow cab pulls up at the corner of Lafayette Street, in SoHo. Nothing unusual so far: New York has more than thirteen thousand of them. Except that two pairs of legs are sticking out of this one's roof, in tights and heeled shoes, pointed at the sky. It is fashion week, September 2026, and the taxi belongs to Calzedonia.

You don't need to read the name on the roof light to know what it sells: the legs say it. That is the point of the whole operation, and also the reason we are writing about it. Tights are the hardest garment to show. They have no shape, no front and no back; they only exist when a leg fills them. A hosiery brand that wants to be noticed in a city has to put legs on the street. Calzedonia put four of them on the roof of a cab.

What was there: the taxi, the billboard, the pop-up

The operation, reported by Famous Campaigns on 11 September and picked by Event Marketer among the best moments of the week, had three parts. The first is the taxi: a branded cab with two pairs of three-dimensional legs emerging from its roof, driving around Manhattan on show days. The second is a large-format billboard in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bought through the Blindspot advertising platform. The third is the pop-up.

It was called The Stoop by Calzedonia, and the name is already half the idea: the stoop is the front steps of a New York townhouse, the place where you sit and watch the street. The pop-up's façade at 188 Lafayette Street reproduced one, and the address was meant as somewhere to stop between shows.

According to V Magazine, the pop-up opened to the public on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September from noon to 5 p.m., after a private preview for press and guests. Inside there was a vending machine dispensing 20 denier knee-highs in seven colours, from white to black by way of blue; New York embroiderer Danica Pantic hand-stitching initials and small motifs onto socks, free of charge; a hair station with stylist Anh Co Tran; make-up touch-ups by Beauty of Joseon; coffee by The Elk; a photo booth with a “magic mirror”; stickers and goodie bags. Event Marketer adds matcha. On display, the Invisible Make-Up Effect 15 denier sheers in six skin shades, from Silk to Mocha. Among the guests, sisters Jordyn and Jodie Woods and a long list of creators.

“Socks and the city”

On 14 September the brand closed the week with a recap post, and the caption deserves quoting: “Socks and the city”, with a taxi where the obligatory emoji goes. We appreciate the play on Sex and the City for obvious reasons, but it also says something precise: New York is the only city where a pair of tights has a television series behind it, and Calzedonia knows it.

Why it works

The first reason we have already given: the product is the leg. A bag can be photographed on a table, a coat on a hanger; tights cannot. Almost every hosiery advert shows legs, and the problem is that legs in a photograph all look alike. A pair of legs sticking out of a taxi roof gets a second look.

The second is the shop window. The yellow cab is the most photographed object in New York, and this is not the first time a brand has used it: Famous Campaigns recalls Tiffany & Co.'s blue taxi and Coat's street stunt during a previous fashion week. Calzedonia added the sculpture, and with the sculpture the photo people take by themselves.

The third is the layering. The street, with the cab driving around; the neighbourhood, with the billboard in Williamsburg, where many of the people who make content live; the room, with the pop-up where that content gets made, between the magic mirror and the fake stoop. At every level the subject is the same: a leg.

The fourth is the calendar. Mid-September is the start of tights season in the northern hemisphere, and fashion week puts in one place the people who decide what will be seen over the next few months.

The yellow cab, New York's most photographed object. Photo: Marc Lautenbacher, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Who is behind it

Calzedonia was founded in 1986 in Vallese di Oppeano, near Verona, by Sandro Veronesi. The group that owns it, together with Intimissimi, Tezenis, Falconeri and other brands, has been called Oniverse since 4 December 2023, and according to Wikipedia it counts 5,732 stores in 55 countries in 2025, with revenue of €3.527 billion in 2024.

In the United States Calzedonia has a boutique at 97 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and the American business is run by Marcello Veronesi, the founder's son. Back in November 2020 Glossy counted 49 stores in the country and described a growth plan in California, with e-commerce up to 41% of US revenue; the country manager at the time, Antonio Simonato, explained that “the U.S. is a huge country, and Florida is very different from New York”.

The medium is new, the month is not. Calzedonia has been launching tights in October for years: in 2020 the “Feel Good” commercial with the Totally Invisible sheers in 20, 30 and 50 denier, in 2021 the “talking tights” with printed slogans, on television from 17 October. In New York it only moved a few weeks earlier and changed language: no commercial, a sculpture.

The sign reads “Italian Legwear”: that is how Calzedonia presents itself outside Italy. Photo: KensmRPM 22300, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What it says about the season

The taxi is the first act of an autumn in which Calzedonia is spending heavily on tights. On 3 October it tagged Celine Dion in Paris with three words, “The moment. The tights.”; on 2 October it introduced Lily Allen as the British face of the Autumn/Winter 2026 collection; in between it posted Mika Abdalla in its tights. Three weeks, three celebrities, one product.

And it is not alone. On 6 October Glossy reported that Swedish Stockings, the Swedish recycled-hosiery brand, is opening its first American pop-up on Elizabeth Street, a few blocks from Lafayette, from 7 to 18 October, and that in the first nine months of 2026 its direct-to-consumer sales in the United States grew by 37%, against 30% globally. Two European hosiery brands renting an address in downtown Manhattan in the same autumn is no coincidence: it is the sign of a growing market, and of a season in which tights have become a topic again.

A taxi doesn't sell tights. But it makes people look up from their phones, and in a city where everyone walks while looking at one, that is already a lot. The legs do the rest.