The Story of Tightsfashion - I

by CJ

CJ and I first met in a certain hosiery chat room (where in fact were were both at one time moderators, but that is another story!) I have known about his Tights Fashion website for well over three years, and have watched it develop and go from strength to strength. It is without doubt the best tights review site on the net. More recently it has taken on commercial links with suppliers.

Today we welcome CJ to this site, as he gives us the first part of a two-part article.

I was delighted when Geraden invited me to contribute an article to his Blog, particularly so since he suggested a piece on the history of my web site www.tightsfashion.co.uk.

As with so many hosiery fans the origins of my like of hosiery is buried in the depths of history. I do know that from as far back in my childhood as I can remember I always preferred the look and feel of a leg in tights or stockings to a bare leg. We are talking many years pre-puberty here, and this means that the interest and enjoyment predates the sexual awareness of early teens. To this day I would say that my interest in hosiery is not a sexual or fetish one.

A common thread in the stories of many male hosiery wearers is trying a pair for the first time in their early teens. I was no different, after my first close up encounters with girls wearing sheer tights I just had to try some to see what they felt like from the other side. Paths tend to diverge from this point, some boys start to wear more and extend their wardrobe to include skirts and other items of female attire, others continue to wear tights purely for the pleasure of that one item, other, like me move onto to other things.

Fast forward 30 years and I am a newly married man. On reflection all my girlfriends up to this point, and of course my new wife, had been daily wearers of hosiery. I was not conscious of this at the time but now it is obvious, even though in the 1970’s and 1980’s hosiery was the norm rather than the exception for most young women. Not so long after my marriage I noticed two things. Firstly the tights my wife was wearing daily for work were nothing like the ones she had worn of an evening while we were dating. Secondly hardly a day passed without yet another pair of dead tights appearing in the bin in the bedroom.

My Yorkshire upbringing means I hate wasting money and throwing things away. My Engineering training tells me that there is a limit to how much you can cut the budget for making something without the quality slipping to the point where overall expense increases rather than decreases. It was quite clear that my wife was spending a lot of money on tights that neither looked that great, nor lasted very well.

The origins of TightsFashion are in the conversation I had with my wife when I asked her why she threw out so many pairs of tights. Aside from the usual excuses that she could not wear good tights to work as they got laddered she said she was too busy to go to the specialist stores to buy better ones. The last was sent with a hint of a challenge in her tone and I rose to that challenge and resolved to buy some better tights for her.

Problem! What I knew about tights was that some looked nicer than others did and that women wore them. How was I to learn more?

To be continued …