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1. Last night she was wearing seductive stocking.
2. Last night she was wearing seductive stockings.
Will you tell me which sentence is correct? Of course I mean that she had one pair of stockings. It seems to me that first sentence suggests that her dress was incomplete whereas the second one that she was wearing many items on her feet.
The usage I am familiar with is
- Last night she was wearing seductive stockings.
This is because stockings very often functions the same way as pants, scissors, etc: plural in form, but referring to one object (as in nylon stockings, which gets shortened to nylons), so that we also say a pair of pants, a pair of scissors, a pair of stockings, a pair of nylons.
On the other hand, a pair of stockings do not have to be attached, so you can have two unattached stockings, just like you can have two unattached socks. In this case, I have always taken stocking to be an old-fashioned or perhaps fancier version of a sock.
It is also possible to refer to a single stocking and a single scissor--I am not sure about a single pant (except the kind of pant a dog makes, which is a different word).
As an aside, one can have a head covering called a stocking hat or stocking cap, but today this is not usually made of an actual stocking (although it can be) but fashioned so that it resembles a stocking.
Even if you wanted to use stocking in the singular, you would need to use an indefinite article:
Last night she was wearing a seductive stocking.
or, as in
Last night she was wearing a seductive stocking on her left foot/leg and a goofy stocking on her right foot/leg.
