Tights have been a part of our wardrobe for centuries. They started as a
men’s affair, but became a womenswear staple when hemlines started rising
around the 1920s. Nylon and Lycra, invented by DuPont in the 1940s and
1950s respectively, contributed to make tights even more popular by
conferring strength, elasticity and sheer to the garment. Today, the
average British woman spends some 3,000 pounds (approximately 3,800 US
dollars) on tights and pantyhose in her lifetime, according to an Asda
survey from 2016. In the US, over 400 million pairs of tights and pantyhose
were sold in 2018, according to Statista.
It seems like women have a love affair with their tights, but look
closely and you’ll realize it’s actually a love-hate relationship. Tights
tear easily, they sag, they “catch” on things and get holes at the toe.
“How do you make pantyhose last longer?”, asks a user on Reddit. “They seem
to last only 1 to 2 wears and at 7-ish dollars each, that adds up fast”.
She’s hardly the only one taking to the world’s biggest discussion website
to find the answer to that question. Quora and Yahoo Answers are also
filled with similar inquiries.
Some even argue that tights are fragile on purpose. The 2010 Danish
documentary The Lightbulb Conspiracy, directed by Cosima
Dannoritzer, mentions tights among its examples of planned obsolescence.
The film argues that the first versions of Nylon pentyhose developed by
DuPont were so durable that the company sent its chemists back to the
drawing board to make them weaker — otherwise, they wouldn’t sell enough
pairs. With the rise of fast fashion, tights have gotten even more fragile.
In a 2018 survey of 3,000 French women conducted by NGO Halte à
lÓbsolescence Programmée (“Stop built-in obsolescence”), 72 percent of
respondents said that their tights last an average of six wears before
running or breaking.
Startups look to solve customer complaints about the hosiery market
Wherever there’s an unsatisfied consumer, there’s a business opportunity
waiting to be grabbed. Startups have been popping up in recent years
looking to fix those problems and disrupt the hosiery market, which they
argue hasn’t innovated much in the last few decades. “We’re in 2019 and
people are wearing undergarments from the 60s”, said Fiona Fairhurst, Vice
President of Innovation of Heist Studios, during a phone conversation with
FashionUnited.
Heist Studios is a digitally-native, direct-to-consumer brand founded in
2015 in the UK. Using feedback from a group of 67 women, the company
developed tights that promise to be comfortable and long-lasting: “no
rolling, no twisting, no digging”, says the brand on its website. In fact,
Heist is so confident about the quality of its product that it names it
“the best tights you’ve ever worn”.
Priced at 20-24 pounds (36-42 US dollars), they come in ten shades to
make it easier for customers to find a pair matching their skin color. The
center seam, one of the most frequent complaints, has been removed. “Rather
than knitting, cutting and stitching together two legs with a front and a
back seam, as with conventional tights, we knit ours in a single tube,
removing the gusset. Then, to get rid of those remaining, and truly
annoying, toe seams where the machine starts knitting, we tuck them under
each foot”, explains the brand in a press release.
As for the waistband, it is treated as a separate component to the legs.
It is available in two heights: low, for those who prefer the tights to sit
on the hips, and high, for those that want it to hug the waist. “Our
waistband is a game changer, but it’s not just that. The way we knit, all
the way back to the way the yarn is created, we have a much higher number
of threads… Just touch them and you can instantly feel they’re more
premium”, said Fairhurst.
Heist wraps 5,000 spirals of Nylon around each inch of elastane, which
the company claims is ten times the industry average. “Add to that slowing
down their knitting machine to operate at 400 rotations per minute (the
industry average is 700 to 1,200), to ensure even coverage and fewer missed
stitches”, added the brand in the press release.
With 25 employees and a manufacturing rate of 60,000 units per month,
Heist claims to sell one pair of tights every 15 seconds. Sales have been
growing an average of 20 percent month on month since October 2015. The
company has raised 8.1 million US dollars (6.4 million pounds) to date,
with Net-a-Porter founder Natalie Massenet and Alexa Chung investor
Pembroke VCT among the investors, as well as the founders of the Innocent
Drinks company.
Heist has also made headlines after its tights were worn by the Duchess
of Sussex, Meghan Markle. According to the brand, the palace has confirmed
that a recent order of tights was meant for Meghan and that the Duchess has
been wearing the product in recent appearances.
Across the pond, in Canada, Sheertex, a company founded in 2017, set out
to build an “indestructible” pair of sheer pantyhose after raising 200,000
dollars on Kickstarter. “All of the fibers on the market today are either
strong or sheer, not both”, said the startup in a statement. After a year
of research and development, the company came up with a fiber that was
resistant, flexible and sheer, but too strong for regular machinery. So,
the next step was to develop a manufacturing process which would withstand
the strength of the material without compromising the wearability of the
product. It worked. Now, Sheertex claims its “stronger-than-steel”
pantyhose can last up to 50 wears. They are sold online and priced at 99
Canadian dollars (approximately 73 US dollars or 58 pounds).
Beyond comfort and durability, tights have another problem: they are
not environmentally-friendly. Nylon yarn is petroleum-based. Enter Swedish
Stockings, a brand from Stockholm aiming not only to solve women’s
complaints about tights, but also to address the sustainability issues from
the industry.
The company was founded in 2013 by Linn Frisinger and Nadja Forsberg,
inspired by the documentary The Lightbulb Conspiracy. “They
[tights] went from being a top quality product in the 1950s to the number
one item of clothing that women throw away”, said Frisinger to
FashionUnited over the phone. “The evolution of tights had been standing
still for a while, both in terms of sustainability and also in terms of
quality and design. I felt there was a lot to do, a lot of angles to
attack.”
Frisinger thinks most companies failed to innovate because tights are a
“boring” product. “They’re easy to forget and big players didn’t have a lot
of competitors. I also think that women aren’t really aware of how this
product is made. Most of them don’t know that it’s 100 percent petroleum.
For most customers, finding out about how bad this product is for the
environment is an aha moment.”
All of Swedish Stockings’ products are made from recycled Nylon from
pre-consumer waste. They are produced in Italy, in a factory driven by
solar panels and renewable energy. The tights range in price from 12 to 39
euro (13-43 US dollars or 10-34 pounds), and they’re sold worldwide via the
Swedish Stockings website and a network of over 600 retailers. The US,
Canada and the Netherlands are its strongest markets, but the company has
recently expanded to Japan, where it’s focusing most of its growing
efforts.
The brand has also recently launched a line named Innovations by
Swedish Stockings in which other recycled materials will be employed.
The first release was a pair of tights made of 100 percent recycled
elastane from pre-consumer waste. The next step is to develop tights from
recycled plastic bottles. In two years, the company aims to make fully
biodegradable tights.
In addition, Swedish Stockings has a recycling program in which
customers are invited to send used tights back, regardless of the brand.
“We’re not able to produce new tights from old tights yet. A lot of
customers think our tights are made from old ones, but that’s not the case.
They’re made from the spill-over of nylon production from others, but the
idea is to become fully circular in the future. The recycling program is a
way to show the customers and the industry that we are doing something
about it, we’re collecting the tights so that they don’t end up in
landfill. We’re actually using those used tights as filling material in
glass fiber tanks, which is the best we can do at the moment”, explained
Frisinger.
As the aforementioned brands, Swedish Stockings paid extra attention to
the waistband and toe reinforcement to increase the quality and comfort of
the product. The fabric uses four instead of two layers of thread and most
products are also 3D knitted, which means the hosiery is knitted in a tube
to ensure a good fit. “Making sure products last longer is a very important
part of sustainability. We don’t want to make things just because they’re
sustainable. Our main focus is quality, sustainability is an added value”,
noted Frisinger.
According to her, Swedish Stockings has been growing 100 percent each
year. With 10 full-time employees, the company aims to grow by 200 percent
in 2019. Online sales account for 25-30 percent of its turnover. As for the
future, Swedish Stockings aims to collaborate with other brands (a
collection with Ganni is in the works) and inspire other hosiery brands to
adopt more sustainable practices. “We don’t want to be the only ones for
much longer, we want to be seen as the first”.
Pictures: courtesy of Heist and Swedish Stockings
