But just because it is an everyday, ‘basic’ product, doesn’t mean it has to be designed in any less thoughtful a way than your leggings from Lululemon.” Photograph: Mafalda SilvaĪsk women what’s wrong with tights, Darbyshire says, and they often say: “Not much.” “Then you say, ‘OK, do they actually work?’ – and they’ll say, ‘No, they dig into my stomach, they sag, they roll’ … I mean, are your T-shirts uncomfortable? With tights, you go from the Helmut Newton line in the Wolford shop, which is very much selling glamour, to by the till in Boots and M&S. Heist tights: a seamless ‘toe-to-toe tube’ removes the uncomfortable centre seam. The women’s underwear market, he felt, was “fundamentally broken” – geared more towards fashion than function, and lagging behind in design innovation. And it’s not a problem suffered by men.”Īs a man, Darbyshire is quick to clarify, he doesn’t have “any product experience on a personal level” – but that outsider perspective, he says, has been helpful in highlighting just how much discomfort women had become immune to, under the impression there was no alternative.ĭarbyshire, a former management consultant who previously co-founded then sold a residential solar panel company, started Heist in 2015 after looking for “consumer sectors in need of disruption”. How many times have you seen someone on the tube trying to hoik their tights up? That’s not because the garment works. “You’re battling against years of people not giving any thought to how uncomfortable they are. Women’s low expectations of how good a pair of tights could possibly be has been one of the hurdles the company has had to overcome. There is “definitely a mentality shift involved”, says Toby Darbyshire, Heist’s founder and CEO, in going from getting change from a tenner for a three-pack to handing over £22 for just one pair. At £22, I would only feel worse when they inevitably got a run in them. I had paid more for tights (from many brands), I had paid less – and I had always seemed to receive the same, vaguely dissatisfying product. Marks & Spencer’s bestseller, Body Sensor in 60 denier, is £6 a pair, or three for £8. Hello, the best tights you’ve ever worn.” But on learning they were more than £20 a pair, I had scrolled past. For more than a year I had been targeted with ads for a brand called Heist Studios, saying: “Goodbye, digging, sagging, seams and gusset. My Instagram feed had been insistent there might be for months. This winter, I asked: what if there was another way? It speaks to women being forced regularly into garments that make them feel too tall, too short, too big, too small, too active, too clumsy or careless. But searching Twitter, the public void into which women scream, reveals it to be a recurring struggle: “I have those really annoying tights on that keep falling down help”.Ī woman who identifies pulling up tights as “the most annoying thing about being tall” is corrected by a follower: “I gotta do that and I’m crazy short!” Another turns it into an insult: “You’re as annoying as when you get a hole in your tights and have to pull and scrunch the tip up and shove it in between your big & 2nd toe.” One more chides her boyfriend for calling tights tangled by the wash “the most annoying thing”: “AT LEAST YOU DON’T HAVE TO WEAR THEM PAL.” As with the pocketless women’s clothes, the trouble with tights is not a western-world problem, it’s a working- or middle-class one – and because it is obviously, objectively low-ranking by any metric of importance, it doesn’t get talked about. But this means it is not wealthy one-percenters left trying to subtly hoik their tights up, or donning with dread that uncomfortable pair they perversely keep “as a spare”. And not privileged women, either.īare legs year-round have already been established – first, by the US Vogue editor Anna Wintour, in about 2000 – as signifying a level of wealth that permits you to dress without mind for such mortal concerns as weather. But it can be a daily discomfort that men don’t have to put up with, and one that women suffer mostly in silence. No one is suggesting that this is the No 1 issue facing women today. Yet I have been laboriously encasing my legs in poly-blends for as long as I can remember – easily 20 years, dating back to my winter uniform in primary school.Ī UK woman spends on average £3,000 on tights in her lifetime, according to an Asda 2016 survey. I may experience these frustrations more than most women, given that I exclusively wear skirts and dresses (a habit formed at school that these days passes for personal style) – but I refuse to believe I am alone in them. Yes, of course – but anything to delay the rat-king of tangled tights that emerges from my washing machine every week to be wrestled into submission. My aversion to tights sees me going without well into November, just to put off the associated rigmarole as long as possible. Photograph: OlafSpeier/Getty Images/iStockphoto
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