In a Tight Spot
"So there I was, innocently trying on a pair of trousers -cream linen -when I saw it." Saw what?
"Well, I mean, everything. Ever-ee-thing!" she says, her nostrils flaring with bitter distaste, as if she has just seen a worm being cut in half. "I turn around and there in the mirror I see...dimples. Cellulite. Saddle bags. Everything!"
The nose wrinkles as the voice descends into a conspiratorial croak. "And this, I can see all of this, through the trousers."
Sarah Blakely -a blonde, perky American of the relentlessly optimistic variety - is telling me, very earnestly, about her Eureka moment. It happened just over three years ago when Blakely was entrenched in the grim business of selling fax and photocopy machines door-to-door, not quite the career path she had had in mind when she went to study communications in her native Florida. Knocking on doors was a bleak and humbling experience, at which Blakely nevertheless excelled: she climbed the ladder, but her life rolled out in front of her as predictably as ever. Faxes had been her life for seven years. Where would it all lead? Shredders?
And to cap it all, Blakely had cellulite: nasty stubborn stuff, she claims. Immune to Stairmasters or loofahs, the cellulite would just sit there around her saddle bags (another one of her "troublespots") puckering the skin of her previously smooth thighs. All very well and good under a sackcloth where no one could see, but on this occasion -an important business dinner -she intended to wear pale linen trousers and, as Blakely discovered in her changing-room epiphany, underneath the trousers, the swell of an undisciplined rump was horribly visible.
Her thighs needed restraining, her bottom, bolstering -just the job for a pair of control tights, she thought. But, hang on, the feet needed baring (strappy sandals, you see). That's when Blakely took out a pair of scissors and gave her tights a good snip, just below the ankles. And lo, the "footless concept" was born.
Three years later, Blakely is sitting opposite me in the Harvey Nichols restaurant sipping fizzy water with lime. Since her revelation in the changing room, Blakely has become an entrepreneurial pin-up in America, having "single-handedly taken on the male-dominated hosiery industry" and launched Spanx, a range of footless tights designed to hold you in under whatever it is you happen to be wearing. In the first year the company sold $8 million (Pounds 5.1 million) worth of tights.
Oprah Winfrey decreed Spanx one of her favourite products, and all sorts of famous people secretly wear them under their designer frocks.
It's worth pointing out that, contrary to expectations, Blakely is not a whale of a woman with porridge thighs and a bottom the size of a barn. She is slim, tall, with a tiny bottom-I look closely for evidence of sagging but find none. Aha! But I've been tricked; that's the Spanx effect she tells me, proudly lifting a trouser leg to reveal a flesh-toned sliver of nylon.
"Cellulite doesn't discriminate," Blakely says with gravitas, as if we have accidentally stumbled into a conversation about the Sars virus. "You can be thin or not so thin, and unless you go to the gym for an hour a day, you jiggle."
A few days before this interview I was sent a pair of Spanx to try for myself. I found them rather scary to look at -shrivelled little things once they were out of the glamorous packaging. The boys in the office were similarly nonplussed.
"It's a con," they crowed. "Men have only just learnt to handle the Wonderbra," explained one. "At least that looks feminine, but if I saw that contraption on the floor after a passionate night ..."
But here's Blakely telling me that footless tights are sexy. A confident woman is a sexy woman, is her mantra. The biggest confidence booster of them all? That's right, a "tight butt".
"Women who've tried my product tell me I look better, my clothes fit me better, I jiggle less. Friends tell me that I've lost weight."
She's not wrong -when I tugged a pair on myself (it's not possible merely to slip on a pair of Spanx), I found much of the above to be true. I was as taut as if I had been vacuum-packed by Sainsbury's. But I was still wearing a flesh-toned pair of cycling shorts underneath my clothes -not something I would usually choose to wear when on the prowl. Blakely is having none of this, "Well hey, you can always lure the guy by having them on and then you can turn off the lights and take them off. Close the deal first, right?"
Blakely holds particular contempt for the G-string -the proliferation of which she says tackles the VPL issue by letting everything "just hang out." She predicts unprecedented amounts of "butt jiggle" on the high street this summer: this season's sorbet colours and the ubiquitous satin combat trousers are particularly unflattering on the unrestrained bottom.
Isn't it natural for a woman to jiggle a little bit? Many women don't enjoy jiggling, says Blakely. "I truly believe that women are trained not to buy certain clothes to avoid that wobbling effect. I used to walk right by white, pale blues, baby blues, yellow. I just didn't go there. Even if I see one cellulite dimple it freaks me out."
Is there such a thing as a phobia of cellulite? Am I face to face with a classic case? But, too late, we're on to her new range: fishnets with a control top.
Blakely has conquered sag-butt, and jiggle-butt. Next on her hit list? Grid butt.
"Well, I mean, everything. Ever-ee-thing!" she says, her nostrils flaring with bitter distaste, as if she has just seen a worm being cut in half. "I turn around and there in the mirror I see...dimples. Cellulite. Saddle bags. Everything!"
The nose wrinkles as the voice descends into a conspiratorial croak. "And this, I can see all of this, through the trousers."
Sarah Blakely -a blonde, perky American of the relentlessly optimistic variety - is telling me, very earnestly, about her Eureka moment. It happened just over three years ago when Blakely was entrenched in the grim business of selling fax and photocopy machines door-to-door, not quite the career path she had had in mind when she went to study communications in her native Florida. Knocking on doors was a bleak and humbling experience, at which Blakely nevertheless excelled: she climbed the ladder, but her life rolled out in front of her as predictably as ever. Faxes had been her life for seven years. Where would it all lead? Shredders?
And to cap it all, Blakely had cellulite: nasty stubborn stuff, she claims. Immune to Stairmasters or loofahs, the cellulite would just sit there around her saddle bags (another one of her "troublespots") puckering the skin of her previously smooth thighs. All very well and good under a sackcloth where no one could see, but on this occasion -an important business dinner -she intended to wear pale linen trousers and, as Blakely discovered in her changing-room epiphany, underneath the trousers, the swell of an undisciplined rump was horribly visible.
Her thighs needed restraining, her bottom, bolstering -just the job for a pair of control tights, she thought. But, hang on, the feet needed baring (strappy sandals, you see). That's when Blakely took out a pair of scissors and gave her tights a good snip, just below the ankles. And lo, the "footless concept" was born.
Three years later, Blakely is sitting opposite me in the Harvey Nichols restaurant sipping fizzy water with lime. Since her revelation in the changing room, Blakely has become an entrepreneurial pin-up in America, having "single-handedly taken on the male-dominated hosiery industry" and launched Spanx, a range of footless tights designed to hold you in under whatever it is you happen to be wearing. In the first year the company sold $8 million (Pounds 5.1 million) worth of tights.
Oprah Winfrey decreed Spanx one of her favourite products, and all sorts of famous people secretly wear them under their designer frocks.
It's worth pointing out that, contrary to expectations, Blakely is not a whale of a woman with porridge thighs and a bottom the size of a barn. She is slim, tall, with a tiny bottom-I look closely for evidence of sagging but find none. Aha! But I've been tricked; that's the Spanx effect she tells me, proudly lifting a trouser leg to reveal a flesh-toned sliver of nylon.
"Cellulite doesn't discriminate," Blakely says with gravitas, as if we have accidentally stumbled into a conversation about the Sars virus. "You can be thin or not so thin, and unless you go to the gym for an hour a day, you jiggle."
A few days before this interview I was sent a pair of Spanx to try for myself. I found them rather scary to look at -shrivelled little things once they were out of the glamorous packaging. The boys in the office were similarly nonplussed.
"It's a con," they crowed. "Men have only just learnt to handle the Wonderbra," explained one. "At least that looks feminine, but if I saw that contraption on the floor after a passionate night ..."
But here's Blakely telling me that footless tights are sexy. A confident woman is a sexy woman, is her mantra. The biggest confidence booster of them all? That's right, a "tight butt".
"Women who've tried my product tell me I look better, my clothes fit me better, I jiggle less. Friends tell me that I've lost weight."
She's not wrong -when I tugged a pair on myself (it's not possible merely to slip on a pair of Spanx), I found much of the above to be true. I was as taut as if I had been vacuum-packed by Sainsbury's. But I was still wearing a flesh-toned pair of cycling shorts underneath my clothes -not something I would usually choose to wear when on the prowl. Blakely is having none of this, "Well hey, you can always lure the guy by having them on and then you can turn off the lights and take them off. Close the deal first, right?"
Blakely holds particular contempt for the G-string -the proliferation of which she says tackles the VPL issue by letting everything "just hang out." She predicts unprecedented amounts of "butt jiggle" on the high street this summer: this season's sorbet colours and the ubiquitous satin combat trousers are particularly unflattering on the unrestrained bottom.
Isn't it natural for a woman to jiggle a little bit? Many women don't enjoy jiggling, says Blakely. "I truly believe that women are trained not to buy certain clothes to avoid that wobbling effect. I used to walk right by white, pale blues, baby blues, yellow. I just didn't go there. Even if I see one cellulite dimple it freaks me out."
Is there such a thing as a phobia of cellulite? Am I face to face with a classic case? But, too late, we're on to her new range: fishnets with a control top.
Blakely has conquered sag-butt, and jiggle-butt. Next on her hit list? Grid butt.
Dark ages in the docks
Pressure if growing among Government backbenchers for an end to that antique absurdity, the National Dock Labour Scheme. Alerted by the recent Felixstowe Bill facilitating expansion of one of Britain's fastest-growing ports outside the scheme, nearly
200 MPs have signed a House of Commons earlyday motion calling for its repeal.
The Government should listen to its backbenchers. The scheme is a contradiction of everything for which the Government stands. Started in 1947, it effectively freezes working practices and manning at their wartime levels. Changes can only be made if the local and national dock labour boards on which the unions have 50 per cent representation agree. Effectively this gives dockers in these areas a job for life unless the union agree to allow them to be paid to give it up. You may read more informational articles when you click on http://beginhealthnow.com/wart-removal/is-wartrol-as-good-as-they-say/.
Many dockworkers' jobs have been thus purchased over the years, at considerable cost to the employers and the taxpayer. The number of registered dockers has shrunk over the past 40 years from 73,000 to just under 10,000, but that still leaves an estimated 700 surplus workers for whom the maximum severance payment is currently Pounds 25,000 a head.
Even more important is the 'hidden' surplus of workers which restrictive practices have created. Some flavour of the rulebook under which registered dockers work is provided by the injunction that dockwork shall exclude 'the loading carts of horse drivers in the ports of Penzance, Hayle, Portreath, Porthleven and Newlyn' and references to work connected with 'sailing barges and other self-propelled vessels' in the port of Medway.
The Government, like others before it, has made the disreputable calculation that the cost of a national dock strike would be considerably greater than the cost of continuing to pay this Danegeld. In fact, the cost of the scheme is considerably greater than the bare figures would suggest. This week's Public
Expenditure White Paper provides only Pounds 1 million in the coming year, but the reality is that when the current provisions for taxpayer assistance to the
port employers run out in March they will have to be extended. Any other solution would bankrupt the employers and close the docks. In addition the Government is proposing to write off a further Pounds 44.5 million of loans to employers in prior years - the latest in a long line of such write-offs.
Because of the existence of this wart on the face of the labour market, potential new employers are deterred from entering dock areas which are often the very inner city areas needing new investment most. The scheme is also a standing source of grievance to other workers who see the dockets refusing to adapt to the demands of a changing market and being subsidized in their intransigence by statute.
How serious industrial action would be if the dockers' bluff were called is impossible to predict. But jsut as a third of the miners were prepared to go on working during the miners' strike so ports outside the scheme now account for nearly a third of sea traffic by volume and more than half by value. Oil is not handled in the affected ports, and air freight accounts for a growing proportion of the more valuable cargoes.
Abolishing the scheme would not transform the docks overnight. But it would end the insidious belief among dockers that they are employed not by the
ports but by the boards, and would allow the employers to begin serious negotiations for changes in working practices. A Government which believes that
adaptability and hard work are the best guarantee of prosperity and employment should have the courage to allow working practices in the docks to be brought.
You can also visit us at beginhealthnow.com for more information on how to effectively remove wart.
200 MPs have signed a House of Commons earlyday motion calling for its repeal.
The Government should listen to its backbenchers. The scheme is a contradiction of everything for which the Government stands. Started in 1947, it effectively freezes working practices and manning at their wartime levels. Changes can only be made if the local and national dock labour boards on which the unions have 50 per cent representation agree. Effectively this gives dockers in these areas a job for life unless the union agree to allow them to be paid to give it up. You may read more informational articles when you click on http://beginhealthnow.com/wart-removal/is-wartrol-as-good-as-they-say/.
Many dockworkers' jobs have been thus purchased over the years, at considerable cost to the employers and the taxpayer. The number of registered dockers has shrunk over the past 40 years from 73,000 to just under 10,000, but that still leaves an estimated 700 surplus workers for whom the maximum severance payment is currently Pounds 25,000 a head.
Even more important is the 'hidden' surplus of workers which restrictive practices have created. Some flavour of the rulebook under which registered dockers work is provided by the injunction that dockwork shall exclude 'the loading carts of horse drivers in the ports of Penzance, Hayle, Portreath, Porthleven and Newlyn' and references to work connected with 'sailing barges and other self-propelled vessels' in the port of Medway.
The Government, like others before it, has made the disreputable calculation that the cost of a national dock strike would be considerably greater than the cost of continuing to pay this Danegeld. In fact, the cost of the scheme is considerably greater than the bare figures would suggest. This week's Public
Expenditure White Paper provides only Pounds 1 million in the coming year, but the reality is that when the current provisions for taxpayer assistance to the
port employers run out in March they will have to be extended. Any other solution would bankrupt the employers and close the docks. In addition the Government is proposing to write off a further Pounds 44.5 million of loans to employers in prior years - the latest in a long line of such write-offs.
Because of the existence of this wart on the face of the labour market, potential new employers are deterred from entering dock areas which are often the very inner city areas needing new investment most. The scheme is also a standing source of grievance to other workers who see the dockets refusing to adapt to the demands of a changing market and being subsidized in their intransigence by statute.
How serious industrial action would be if the dockers' bluff were called is impossible to predict. But jsut as a third of the miners were prepared to go on working during the miners' strike so ports outside the scheme now account for nearly a third of sea traffic by volume and more than half by value. Oil is not handled in the affected ports, and air freight accounts for a growing proportion of the more valuable cargoes.
Abolishing the scheme would not transform the docks overnight. But it would end the insidious belief among dockers that they are employed not by the
ports but by the boards, and would allow the employers to begin serious negotiations for changes in working practices. A Government which believes that
adaptability and hard work are the best guarantee of prosperity and employment should have the courage to allow working practices in the docks to be brought.
You can also visit us at beginhealthnow.com for more information on how to effectively remove wart.