This can open up the conversation in a low-pressure environment.
Hosiery, stockings, or socks may also be appealing to people with a sexual attraction to feet or footwear.
That is, some people think of feet as a lowly body part.
In the case of some phantom foot patients, Ramachandran found that the amputees' brains didn't just fail to erase the missing foot from their body image map, they accidentally rewired the map in a way that caused the person's phantom foot to become sexy.
Shoe and sock fetishes are closely related to foot fetishes.
For example, not everyone wants a foot job.