Picture the scene: you’re running late for work (or a party), rushing around your bedroom, frantically pulling on a pair of black tights. Your nail snags on the fabric and a ladder unfolds up the leg. Frustrated, you run back to your wardrobe and rustle around for another pair, except this one has a hole in the toe, and the next pair is torn at the gusset.
Despite their ubiquity, tights are often an afterthought — for the people designing them as much as the consumers churning through them. They are also largely made out of synthetics, and it is widely estimated that roughly eight billion pairs are thrown away each year.
This is why Linn Frisinger founded Swedish Stockings in 2013. After watching The Light Bulb Conspiracy, a documentary charting the beginnings of planned obsolescence of products to encourage repeat purchasing, she realised that tights were not being designed to last — and that it was damaging the planet, as well as people’s purse strings. “Tights are the plastic straws of the fashion industry,” says Frisinger. “At the time, there was no competition in this market. No one else was asking how we could produce tights better, whether we could use recycled materials and make them last longer.”
Swedish Stockings are produced, knitted, folded and dyed in northern Italy, relatively close to its warehouse in Sweden. They are primarily made from recycled nylon, leveraging the waste generated in spinning factories, as well as repurposed fishnets. Around 20 per cent are composed of a mix of recycled and virgin natural materials like wool and cashmere.
In 2024, Swedish Stockings hit €4 million in revenue and expanded into white-label production. Now, it’s unveiling its first megawatt influencer collaboration with Camille Charrière. Launching tomorrow, it marks the first time the brand has partnered with a high-profile individual, and Frisinger is hoping it helps to reposition the brand as fashion first, function always.
“Customers don’t buy products because they are sustainable. They buy products — fashion items, at least — because they want to look good and feel good,” Frisinger says. “We really want Swedish Stockings to be seen as a fashion brand more than a lingerie brand or a sustainable brand, and Camille [who has 1.4 million followers on Instagram and over four million likes on TikTok] has the reach to help us do that.”
The collection is a subtly festive nod to Charrière’s signature ’90s-inspired aesthetic. There is a classic pair of black tights (with a higher waistband that can be pulled up and made visible over skirts), as well as a shimmering silver pair (“for parties”), a burgundy pair (or “malbec”, which she describes as a more sophisticated take on TikTok’s “pop of red” trend), and a sepia-toned zebra stripe (an homage to American actress and It-girl Chloë Sevigny). They are made from 86 per cent recycled materials. “With products that are more eco-friendly, there’s a tendency to try and make a statement, but what we actually desperately need is better basics,” says Charrière.
When she asked around about Swedish Stockings prior to signing the partnership, the influencer says she realised they were an “industry secret” among stylists, but her non-fashion friends had never heard of them, despite the “number one question” in her direct messages on Instagram being “where do you get your tights?”. “So it was really important to me to make the perfect pair of black tights and really get the brand in front of people’s eyes,” she says.
Collaborations: Balancing scale with sustainability
A month or so before the Swedish Stockings collaboration came out, Charrière was promoting another design collaboration, with Swedish fast fashion brand Na-kd. It wasn’t ideal timing for Swedish Stockings, who chose to partner with Charrière partly because of her efforts to educate her followers about sustainability, promoting vintage and secondhand, and speaking out against the industry’s unsustainable practices.
Charrière says she approaches collaborations how an actor might balance blockbusters with independent films — every opportunity offers some benefit, but it’s rare to get every benefit in one. “Na-kd was my first chance to design for a more inclusive size range, which previous partnerships have promised me and not delivered,” she says. The partnerships with Swedish Stockings — and before it, intimates brand Stripe Stare — “are not money projects”, she adds, “but they show a better way of doing things.”
On reflection, Frisinger says she has a similar mindset. “A partnership like [Na-kd] is very commercial, and will only give Camille more reach, which I guess is better for us too. There are different reasons you collaborate with different people and what’s important for us with this project is showing our tights as a great fashion accessory, which we have still achieved,” says Frisinger.
Collaboration and partnership are becoming increasingly important for Swedish Stockings as it seeks to maximise its impact. Today, 50 per cent of the tights it produces are sold direct-to-consumer, and the other 50 per cent via wholesale or partnerships. The company has been collaborating with other brands for several years, including Ganni, Reformation, Rodebjer and By Malene Birger. In January, it will formally announce its white-label company Treadfine, producing recycled tights for other brands across the price spectrum.
Branded tie-ups allow Swedish Stockings to reach new customers and collaborate with other companies and influencers that talk about sustainability. The white-label service opens it up to mass-market partnerships and allows it to disrupt the main flow of non-recycled tights, at scale. The reality is that “if we want to change the industry, we have to increase the volume”, says Frisinger.
This includes working with direct competitors, like rival brand Sheertex. “They [Sheertex] are known for making ‘unbreakable’ tights. When I spotted them ordering 200 pairs of our tights on our website, I reached out and asked them to collaborate. So we worked together to try and make a pair of tights that wouldn’t break from recycled materials, which we did. You have to be brave and curious,” she says.
Fashion first, function always
The partnership with Charrière is designed to appeal to the fashion-forward crowd, but Frisinger stresses that the brand is still focused on its core value of producing tights that are more durable to reduce waste. The large majority (80 per cent) of what it sells are classic black tights.
Swedish Stockings are more expensive than the average offering: one pair of tights will set you back between £25 (for standard 30 denier navy tights) and £75 (for the “impossibly strong” and “rip-resistant” option). But they are cheaper than other fashion accessories, says Frisinger, which is how she prefers to position them. “You can do so much with a pair of tights. They can really change an outfit.”
When it comes to durability, Swedish Stockings has a few tricks up its sleeve. Firstly, the yarn is left to rest for longer after dyeing, which Frisinger says improves colour fastness and durability. Then, they are 3D knitted, which offers a tighter weave, densely packing the thread and stopping ladders. An ongoing challenge is getting consumers to care for their tights properly. “We try to educate the consumer on how to care for them in a better way,” says Frisinger. “We share tips on everything from washing to nails.”
Recycled materials are a good start, but the brand is still chasing true sustainability, she says. It has explored making tights from bio-based oils and even carpets (these didn’t work out). And when customers requested a take-back programme, it listened, although it still doesn’t have a scalable recycling supply chain in place. The current best-case scenario is that returned tights get turned into tables designed by Stockholm-based studio Gustaf Westman, whose candy-coloured ceramics are favoured by Djerf Avenue founder Matilda Djerf.
The ideal case would be turning old tights into new tights, but the technology isn’t there yet. “That isn’t possible right now, because we can’t separate elastane from polyamide when we are melting them down. But even if we could, recycling them into new tights wouldn’t be worth the money or the energy, because the quality would be worse. If we recycle something, the second life should be longer than the first life — that’s not the case with tights-to-tights recycling,” explains Frisinger. “What we’re doing right now might not be perfect, but it’s better to do something than get brain freeze and do nothing!”
Correction: The collection with Camille Charrière launches on 5th December (04/12/2024).
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