Most writing about hosiery is shopping copy with a byline attached. It exists to move product, which is why it all sounds the same and why none of it will tell you that a waistband is badly made.
This site tries to be the other thing.
Amore 3000 has been online since 2009. It went quiet for a few years and came back with a narrower focus and a slower schedule. What we cover has not changed much: hosiery, lingerie, costumes, shoes, accessories, toys, and the practical side of sex. What changed is the assumption underneath it, which is that a pair of tights deserves the same kind of attention a coat or a bag gets. Fiber, knit, construction, price, who makes it and where.
Who writes the hosiery column
I do. My name is Iris Mallory and I live in Oakland City, on the southwest side of Atlanta.
I spent more than ten years in retail, most of them on the hosiery floor of a department store that got absorbed by a national chain and then closed for good. That is where I learned what denier means in the hand rather than on the label, mostly by handling forty pairs a day and by listening to women come back and tell me exactly what had gone wrong with the last ones. Nobody gave me a certificate for it.
I keep a small collection of vintage stockings, thrift store finds from around the South. Some are still in the box, unopened since the sixties. They are more useful than they sound. When a company announces that its new knit is a breakthrough, I have something in a drawer to hold it against.
How the brand pieces get made
Once a month I take a single brand and try to answer a short list of questions about it. Where the company is, who started it, what it actually manufactures and what it only puts its name on, what it charges, and whether anything about the way it makes hosiery is worth a reader’s attention.
The material comes from company sources, trade press, and the public record when a brand is old enough to have one. I read what buyers say. I do not claim to have worn every pair on the market, and where I have not, the piece says so instead of pretending.
When something is not worth its price, that goes in too. It is the part most hosiery writing leaves out, and leaving it out is why so little of that writing is worth reading.
A few things you will not find here
Vocabulary built to sell insecurity. “Control top,” “smoothing,” “shaping.” A pair of tights holds and recovers or it does not, and a label that talks about your body instead of its own construction is telling on itself.
Invented color names. There is a real difference between a black that stays black under a noon window and one that goes gray at the knee. There is no difference at all between six shades of taupe with separate names on them. Only one of those is worth paying for.
Nude as if it were a single color. That one is just old.
Getting in touch
Corrections are welcome and they get made. If a date is wrong, a factory closed, or a brand changed hands and a piece here still says otherwise, write in through the contact page.