Denier, Explained: How to Choose the Right Tights

Walk into any shop and the tights are labelled with a number. 20. 40. 90. Nobody tells you what it means, so most people guess, buy the wrong thing, and decide they just do not like tights.

Denier is not a difficulty rating and it is not a quality rating. It is a measure of yarn thickness. Technically it is the weight in grams of 9,000 metres of the fibre.

Denier tells you one thing: how sheer or how opaque the tights will be. Low number, you can see through them. High number, you cannot.

That is genuinely all it is. Once you know that, the wall of tights gets a lot easier to read.

The ranges, and what they are actually for

The mistake almost everyone makes

People buy one denier and expect it to do everything.

Denier is seasonal. A 20 denier pair that is perfect in September is a genuinely poor decision in January, and a 90 denier opaque under a summer dress is going to be miserable.

Two or three pairs at different weights will serve you far better than three pairs of the same thing, and they will each last longer because you are not wearing the same pair to death.

Denier is not the whole story

Two pairs at the same denier can feel completely different, and this is where the difference between a good pair and a cheap pair actually lives.

• The knit. Italian hosiery mills have been at this for a very long time, and it shows in how evenly the yarn lays and how the colour reads across a stretched leg. Cheap tights go patchy at the knee and thigh. Good ones do not.
• The recovery. Does the fabric go back to shape, or is it bagging at the knee by lunchtime? This is elastane quality, and it is the single biggest difference between a $12 pair and a $33 pair.
• The finishing. A reinforced panty, a sandal toe, a cotton gusset. These are the things that make tights wearable for a full day rather than tolerable for three hours.

So which number do you want?

If you are buying one pair: 30 denier, black. It is the most useful pair of tights a person can own and it will go with roughly everything you have.

If you are buying two: add a 90 denier opaque. Now you are covered from September to March.

If you are buying three: make the third one interesting. A fishnet, a seamed pair, a glitter. This is the pair you will actually get compliments on.

The pair you buy once

Here is the thing nobody selling you a three-pack wants to say out loud: cheap tights are not cheap. They are expensive, paid in instalments.

You buy them, they ladder in a fortnight, you buy them again. Do that four times and you have spent more than one good pair would have cost, and you have spent the whole time with tights that sagged at the knee and went patchy at the thigh.

A well-made pair at the right denier is a pair you stop thinking about. That is genuinely the whole pitch. It is not glamour, it is just the quiet relief of getting dressed and having your tights not be a problem you have to manage all day.