The hose-pushing hosts were a hit and the site even won the first Clio Gold award for cyber-advertising. "With much of the Internet targeted towards men," read the press release, "the Leggs site is a haven for female internauts."

     Or so they thought. But as anyone who frequented the L'Eggs bulletin boards knows, today's most loyal hosiery consumers are men.

     That's what a reporter from Women's Wear Daily discovered. Intrigued by a blurb in the Wall St. Journal, she started to explore the L'Eggs message boards expecting to find fans chatting about sizes and colors and sheerness and all things pantyhose, which indeed she did. What she also found was that the forum participants were mostly men. Men who enjoyed wearing women's pantyhose -- L'Eggs pantyhose to be exact. Two days later the message boards were pulled off-line.

     Now to be fair, some guys -- hunters and runners and highway workers who spend all day out in the cold -- have found that pantyhose make for good cheap insulation on cold days. In fact, when Red Herring wrote about the site for a piece about corporate identities online, L'Eggs was said to be considering a men's line of pantyhose as a result of discovering this new niche.

     Former members of the L'Eggs messageboard community say that the company even conducted a phone survey among 15 to 20 of its regular male visitors to determine whether a line of men's pantyhose would be worthwhile.

    "This backfired," said Dave, moderator of HUML (the Hosiery and Undergarment Mailing List) site. "As it started a mad rush of responses [on the bulletin boards] dealing with hosiery fetishes and cross dressing."

     Ultimately, it was the survey that likely broke the proverbial plastic egg. Until then, the forum regulars were good old-fashioned pantyhose lovers talking about a range of subjects from "What happened to Hanes Smooth Illusions in Sheer to Waist style?" to "I wear pantyhose and my girlfriend doesn't know, how do I break it to her?"

    "It was a good mutual-counseling forum" said Robert, a survey participant and L'eggs forum regular. "There were discussions of people working together to further the acceptance of pantyhose for men. Overall, a virtual organization formed in this forum where people talked with each other to try to get something to happen."

     Yet in the last months of the forum, a run appeared in the bulletin board's stocking. Regulars tried to keep the meaningful discussions going, but flamers disrupted the conversations. "It really got carried away and became quite disgusting to many people. A lot of people got upset, and many were surprised that L'Eggs didn't come in to regulate the discussion," Robert said. Perhaps that's why no one was surprised when the forum disappeared.

     But the real reasons for the shut down may be more sinister: It's the Frankenstein-like story of a marketer who looked to the web to create the perfect image, but had to instead destroy the monster that it spawned. One spokeswoman for L'Eggs confirmed for The Netly News the existence of a male-market research plan, even though one of the company's marketing executives denied it. More denials came from Lila Mersman, director of public relations for Sara Lee Hosiery (the company that owns L'Eggs). "Men are not our target. Women are our target," she said.

     Such prudery. If L'Eggs wants to remain silky and energized in the '90s, it will have to realize that a customer is a customer, no matter how hairy the legs. "These people are customers and deserve the same respect as anyone who buys our products," said Steven Halbreich, a former L'Eggs marketing executive turned forum moderator, to Women's Wear Daily. "For a long time, these guys have had no outlet. Now they have found other guys who wear pantyhose."

     And that's no nonsense.

-- With reporting by Elizabeth Frantz