Polly Vernon
LAST WEEK, I got four Whatsapps from four unrelated INDIVIDUALS, ALL
asking if it’s OK to wear tights yet. ‘I’m cold, Polly!’ they whinged. ‘I’ve got a wedding to go to!’ ‘My beat-up bare naked shins aren’t fit for human consumption!’ Et cetera.
‘Hush your texting, women!’ I replied. ‘ You know I am zero-tolerance on tights. Always have been, always will be. The correct moment for you to start wearing tights is NEVER. And I do not care about your physical discomfort! And I do not care about your body issues!’
I’ve never made peace with the hose. Never seen them as anything but an itchy fuss, a perilous ( ladders!) faff, a compromise! A thing you wear not because you really want to, but because it’s too chilly not to. Tights are, at best, a necessary… I suppose ‘evil’ might be overstating things, but ‘ bore’ definitely isn’t. Tights: A Necessary Bore. ‘ You’re only saying that because you never worked out how to wear them,’ Whatsapp’d one of the Whatsappers. ‘HOW DARE YOU?’ I replied, then deleted her contact.
Ah, but her words played on my mind, niggling away like a pregnancy scare when you’re 22 and a week late. What if my antitights stance stems not from pure aesthetic conviction – but from fear, and failure?
So Saturday night. I avail myself of a new pair of Heist’s The Thirty – aka the Hot Black Sheer (according to… I don’t know. People?), and attempt to devise a tight-friendly ensemble that will carry me through a night out with a crowd I know only vaguely (a moderate-to-highrisk social sitch). I climb into the tights, concede they feel not unlike a silky smooth leg-hug, contemplate my wardrobe… Then freeze. I cannot make these look good! But then I’m visited by the voice of Carine Roitfeld, former editor of French Vogue, whom I once interviewed. She comes to me like Yoda to Obi-wan ( if Yoda were French): ‘I don’t mind a white court shoe with a black tight,’ CR muses. ‘I like it when it is “wrong”, but “right”.’
In an inspired flurry, I pull white Russell & Bromley slingbacks from my shoe mountain, chuck on a denim mini, a navy silk shirt, a check blazer… Look in the mirror, and rejoice! I’ve made tights work!
‘I see!’ I monologue to my eminently-satisfactory reflection. ‘It’s all about making the tights the focus of the look, rather than viewing them as an apology for not being bare-legged!’
I make a text note of that wisdom on my iphone. It’ll deffo do for a column one day.