They fall down. They pill. They become weirdly baggy round the knees and remain unyielding everywhere else. But an end to tights discomfort might finally be in sight

It is about this point in winter that you really begin to tire of wearing tights.

Yes, they are a practical necessity – but they dig in. They fall down. They pill. They tear on first wear. They develop holes at the toes. They become weirdly baggy round the knees – billowy, even – while remaining scratchy and unyielding everywhere else. They assume that height and weight observe a strictly linear relationship. They extend either laughably high or uncomfortably not high enough, and, pre-purchase, it is impossible to tell which. And don’t get me started on the gusset.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Running into trouble with tights. Photograph: OlafSpeier/Getty Images/iStockphoto

My aversion to tights sees me going without well into November, just to put off the associated rigmarole as long as possible. “Aren’t you cold?” people ask me. 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.

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. Tights are not comfortable to wear. 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.

A UK woman spends on average £3,000 on tights in her lifetime, according to an Asda 2016 survey. No one is suggesting that this is the No 1 issue facing women today. But it can be a daily discomfort that men don’t have to put up with, and one that women suffer mostly in silence. And not privileged women, either.

Bare 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 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”. 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 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 [several endless-tears emoji] help”.

A 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.”

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. This winter, I asked: what if there was another way?

My Instagram feed had been insistent there might be for months. For more than a year I had been targeted with ads for a brand called Heist Studios, saying: “Goodbye, digging, sagging, seams and gusset. Hello, the best tights you’ve ever worn.” But on learning they were more than £20 a pair, I had scrolled past.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest M&S’s Body Sensor bestsellers. Photograph: Marks & Spencer

Marks & Spencer’s bestseller, Body Sensor in 60 denier, is £6 a pair, or three for £8. 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. At £22, I would only feel worse when they inevitably got a run in them.

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. 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. “You’re battling against years of people not giving any thought to how uncomfortable they are. How many times have you seen someone on the tube trying to hoik their tights up? That’s not because the garment works. And it’s not a problem suffered by men.”

As 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.

Darbyshire, 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”. The women’s underwear market, he felt, was “fundamentally broken” – geared more towards fashion than function, and lagging behind in design innovation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Heist tights: a seamless ‘toe-to-toe tube’ removes the uncomfortable centre seam. Photograph: Mafalda Silva

Ask 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. 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.”

The 120-year-old German hosiery specialists Falke – where prices range from £11 for its extremely sheer, 12-denier bestseller Shelina, up to £55 – is also at pains to stress what is obvious in other areas of fashion: you get what you pay for. It is possible to tell the difference in quality by feel alone, says Marie-Christine Essmeier, the brand’s senior product manager for women and children. “With an excellent yarn quality, a tight is more comfortable, easier to wear and to care for.” She says first-time Falke customers often find “there is no need any more to go for a cheap multipack, because you just feel it on your skin”.

Darbyshire says, of Heist, that the difference is like that between “cashmere and carpet”, the yarn reaching 5,000 spirals an inch (a comparable measure to thread count in sheets) versus the bog-standard 300 or 400. The tights come in four styles (nude and 30, 50 and 80 denier) and two waistband heights (low and high). The seamless “toe-to-toe tube” removes the uncomfortable centre seam; Heist is also continually refining its “leg apertures” to better accommodate different shapes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Holey unacceptable! Photograph: Viktoriya Kuzmenkova/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Many of these innovations had been there to be applied to tights for years, says Darbyshire, but “the rest of the industry hadn’t been bothered to try”.

I would have been more inclined to chalk this up to standard startup big talk if I hadn’t put on my first pair of Heist tights that morning. As I had gone about my day, I had had the nagging sense that something had changed. I eventually realised that I had learned to sit and stand and move about the office in a way that would minimise the discomfort caused by my tights. This tiny friction had been removed, and I quietly marvelled at the difference it made.

For those for whom £22 for tights will always be beyond the pale, no matter how technologically advanced, the rest of the industry is catching up. Nicola Hart, M&S’s buyer for hosiery and socks, says the brand has seen a shift in sales from tights to socks, which she attributes to the trend for casual dressing, but adds that “as technology improves, tights have definitely become more comfortable to wear”. Seamless tights, Hart says, are a “game-changer”; M&S’s own line, with a deep smoothing waistband and without a central body seam, are “the most comfortable tight we have ever made”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jourdan Dunn wears Calzedonia tights from its Made in Italy range. Photograph: Calzedonia

On the high street, Calzedonia sells tights from £5 to £33, with its Made in Italy range the most popular for its multitude of options: “Any customer who is willing to pay more than £10 for a pair of tights knows exactly what they expect from them,” says a spokesman. (He also makes the fair point that, design aside, tights “will always be a delicate accessory” and the correct care is key to their lifespan.)

Darbyshire is under no illusion that Heist will ever capture 100% of the market – but in two and a half years, it has sold 350,000 pairs, and it raised $4.4m (£3.4m) in its second funding round in June 2018. He refers me to the comments made on the brand’s Instagram as real proof of its success. “People are responding in kind of the same way you did: ‘I hadn’t realised just how crap this was.’” Heist has just applied the same philosophy to shapewear designed to take “up to 5cm” off your waist; bras are next.

“In the scale of human tragedy,” says Darbyshire, “the restriction of freedom of a pair of tights is definitely not at the top of the scale. It may not even be near the middle.” But it is one of “these tiny frictions that are making life significantly less comfortable for women”, he says; the aim is to challenge their perception that they have to put up with them.

• This article was amended on 17 January 2019 to remove an unverified statistic. It originally said that 3.5 billion women were reported to wear tights.

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