I’ve been designing tights since 2013, and over the years I’ve created somewhere between 400 and 500 different designs. Many of them are still available as made to order pieces through the Virivee tights webshop or in my Etsy shop.
My tights are handmade using a variety of techniques, including hand dyeing, screen printing and sublimation printing, foil printing, and adding rhinestones. Most designs are produced as made to order pieces, while others are created as custom tights for a particular person or project as a custom commission. Many of these commissions are for bridal tights for weddings, and costumes, these especially for Halloween or cosplay.
Looking back, it’s hard to imagine that tights would become part of my design work.
Before tights
Originally I’m a graphic designer, but I started working as a freelance web designer during the early years of the internet (2001), and spent about ten years designing websites. I also created flyers, catalogues, logos and all kinds of other graphic materials. Most of those projects are long gone and can’t really be seen anymore, but there are a few that are still around, and I’m still proud of them.
One of them is a logo I designed in 2006 for the Taita Foundation, which supports an orphanage in Kenya. The rest of the branding I originally created has since changed, but they kept the logo and are still using it today. It’s quite nice to see something I designed twenty years ago still being used.
At one point, I decided to leave design for a while to make another dream of mine come true, and I opened a chocolaterie. I was a huge chocolate lover and I had always loved the idea of creating a place centred around chocolate, especially hot chocolate made from real chocolate. I had also studied interior design in my mid-twenties, so this gave me the chance to use that knowledge too. I designed the interior, the branding and even the drink recipes myself. I wanted the place to have the feeling of a traditional Central European café, and luckily, the customers loved it. I ran it together with my friend and a team of employees. Unfortunately, after three years, the financial crisis of the late 2000s hit and we had to sell the business, and I went back to design.
I could have seen this as a big failure, but looking back, I learned a lot from those three years. I learned about running a business, working with customers, managing people and dealing with all the things that come with having your own business. All of these have helped me a lot in my later projects.
First tights
Around this time, I also started experimenting with all kinds of crafts in my free time. One of those experiments involved textile dyes. In 2013 I made my first dyed tights. I had no idea then that this would eventually become the beginning of Virivee Tights.
At that time, Virivee was just one of my many side projects. I was also designing urban bicycle accessories with my friends under the name Paperspokes. We took our products to design markets around Europe and to several bicycle fairs. Of course, I designed all the branding and marketing materials for this project too. We even tried crowdfunding to launch the products. The campaign wasn’t successful, but we managed to launch the products anyway, and later we even had a few resellers.
What I loved most about these projects was the freedom. Designing for your own projects is very different from designing for someone else. You can try things just because you like them and nobody is telling you what to do or not accepting your explanation of why “that idea” will not work. I think that freedom has always been an important part of how I work.
I never planned to work with tights. I was already experimenting with textile dyes when I came across an ombré pair of tights that fascinated me. I wanted to figure out how they were dyed, so I tried to make my own, and that was the start.
Learning to design tights
After a few months of dyeing tights, I wanted to try printing on them too. I wanted to create tights with designs that didn’t really exist at that time. There were mostly big tights companies, and I found their patterns quite boring. I thought there must be more interesting things you could do with tights, especially if you tried to design something as a graphic designer.
So I started experimenting with screen printing. And because I was a graphic designer and not a textile designer, this whole field was completely new to me. I had to learn how to print on textiles, how the different inks work, and especially how to print on elastic polyamide, which was not common to print on.
By that point, I had qualifications in graphic design, interior design, and café management, and now I was learning textile design as well. 🙈 Life was not boring.
My first printed designs were VERY basic. When I look at them now, I honestly don’t understand how I could design something that simple as a graphic designer. But I think I was so busy trying to understand the printing technique that I didn’t have much time to think about the designs themselves.
Here are some of my first printed tights from 2014:
Slowly I got better at it, and created much better and complex designs within a few months, and the second collection a year later in 2015 was very good and I’m still selling many of the designs.
The same year I started experimenting with gold and silver foils and more elegant patterns. By then I was getting a better idea of what makes a design interesting and how a pattern actually works on a leg, so I designed a beautiful black and gold tights collection, which I still really love and still sell in the Virivee webshop.
Virivee grows
Things also started to become more serious with Virivee. I hired my first employee, who helped me make the tights and fulfill the orders. I was still working on Paperspokes with my friends, but I stopped doing freelance design work and started focusing more on tights. But when people asked about my occupation I still told them that I was a graphic designer.
In 2016 came the mermaid tights. I created my first mermaid tights at a time when everything mermaid suddenly became very popular. They became an instant hit, and made Virivee known worldwide. Of course, the copies soon appeared too. Within a few months, similar versions were being made by Chinese manufacturers, some even using my own product photos. It was frustrating but I learned that this is unfortunately part of being a designer, because when a product becomes successful, someone will probably copy it, so you just have to keep going and come up with the next idea.
How things changed
Over the last 13 years, there have been bigger milestones and smaller steps in Virivee’s life. The products changed and developed continuously as I learnt more and more about working with textiles and as I could buy better machines and equipment.
The packaging changed a lot in the first 5 years, starting with a very basic “handmade” style packaging, then moving to a more professional-looking but not really good (but expensive) design, and from there to the actual one.
Virivee had an amazing, small physical store in the center of Budapest for 4 years, which also shaped the products through lots of customer feedback, as well as the materials I used and still use.
One of the interesting evolution of the designs is the Meadow Tights, which started as a simple screen print. I designed it in 2015, and originally it was a black print on ivory tights. People liked the design but didn’t want to wear ivory tights, so at design markets (where I also sold the products) they kept asking me to create a black version. (Great place for product feedback, btw.)
So I created an inverse print a year later, and it became a bestseller and stayed one for many years. I think the asymmetry was the key to its success. People liked the idea that it was not a perfect design. Which made it a perfect design 😀.
When I started using sublimation printing in 2022, it was one of the first tights I redesigned using an original botanical illustration from 1799. I already knew it was going to be a hit again, so I created a series of them in different colours. And I was right, customers loved them, so in the last few years I have continuously added (and I’m still adding) new designs to the Meadow Tights collection. Surprisingly, this time it was no problem that the tights were ivory.
Evolution of the meadow tights (2015, 2016, the last two image: 2022, where I didn’t keep the original dandelion motif):
Over the years some styles have become characteristic of the brand, like the asymmetric designs, where the legs have different designs or are not symmetrical. These have been part of Virivee since the first printed collection in 2014, and there have been many tights like these in every collection since.
There are other designs I created that I would also say are typical of the brand, but because more small tights designers have appeared and some have started making similar designs, I can’t say that these designs are unique to Virivee anymore. But I’m very proud that I probably inspired many of these new tights designers.
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