When small shipments finally reached stores between late 1945 and early 1946, the sales became scenes of mass desperation rather than orderly retail events. In Pittsburgh, approximately 40,000 women reportedly queued for only 13,000 pairs, and fights broke out as shoppers realized that most of them would leave empty-handed. Around 30,000 women lined up in New York in November, while in San Francisco roughly 10,000 shoppers waiting for a sale caused a store window to break; several women fainted amid the crush. The shortage created a lucrative black market, with pairs selling for as much as $20—roughly $438 in contemporary purchasing power. Women improvised with makeup, lotions, creams, painted seam lines, and spray-on “liquid hosiery” to simulate the appearance of stockings. The craze even produced thefts: one Louisiana household lost 18 pairs, while Chicago investigators ruled out nylon robbery as a murder motive because the victim’s stockings had been left untouched. DuPont’s insistence that its factories were operating at full capacity did little to calm suspicion that the company was deliberately creating artificial scarcity by retaining exclusive control over nylon production. Its public campaign blaming “selfish housewives” for hoarding stock intensified the backlash. By March 1946, production had risen to about 30 million pairs per month and the riots subsided, but the episode left DuPont facing sustained criticism over monopoly power. In 1951, threatened with an antitrust action, the company agreed to license nylon production to Chemstrand Corporation and later to additional manufacturers, helping end its exclusive grip on the fiber.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1940s
Forty Thousand Shoppers, Thirteen Thousand Pairs: The 1945–46 Nylon Riots
DuPont and American department stores / 1940s
When small shipments finally reached stores between late 1945 and early 1946, the sales became scenes of mass desperation rather than orderly retail events. In Pittsburgh, approximately 40,000 women reportedly queued for only 13,000 pairs, and fights broke out as shoppers realized that most of them would leave empty-handed. Around 30,000 women lined up in New York in November, while in San Francisco roughly 10,000 shoppers waiting for a sale caused a store window to break; several women fainted amid the crush. The shortage created a lucrative black market, with pairs selling for as much as $20—roughly $438 in contemporary purchasing power. Women improvised with makeup, lotions, creams, painted seam lines, and spray-on “liquid hosiery” to simulate the appearance of stockings. The craze even produced thefts: one Louisiana household lost 18 pairs, while Chicago investigators ruled out nylon robbery as a murder motive because the victim’s stockings had been left untouched. DuPont’s insistence that its factories were operating at full capacity did little to calm suspicion that the company was deliberately creating artificial scarcity by retaining exclusive control over nylon production. Its public campaign blaming “selfish housewives” for hoarding stock intensified the backlash. By March 1946, production had risen to about 30 million pairs per month and the riots subsided, but the episode left DuPont facing sustained criticism over monopoly power. In 1951, threatened with an antitrust action, the company agreed to license nylon production to Chemstrand Corporation and later to additional manufacturers, helping end its exclusive grip on the fiber.
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