Ballet, opera, posture. Three things we keep hearing nobody cares about anymore.
Someone famous said this year that ballet and opera are only kept alive out of duty. Every opera house in Europe invited him in by the end of the week. Slow things always look dead to people in a hurry.
Posture belongs on that list.
I started ballet at three and I was a shy child, which is a strange combination. Twenty years of being told exactly where my shoulders belonged, and twenty years of folding forward anyway, at the exact place ballet was trying to open. Then three girls, two of them at once, and sitting at a computer through all of it.
I have known the instruction since before I could read. I still forget it four hundred times a day.
My mother had it too. I remember her at the age I am now with her neck and back taped in a big X, and I asked her about it, the way you do when you are young enough to just ask. She said it was the only thing that reminded her to stand up. It worked because it was talking to her all day. It also told everyone in the room she was dealing with something.
That question stayed with me for twenty years. How do you get the reminder without the treatment?
Meanwhile the answer on offer is to buy the result. Women are spending up to five thousand dollars on the line across the front of the neck. Creams, lasers, red light. They are calling it neck-maxxing. None of it says anything to you at four o'clock when you are slumped over a laptop.
So we built Align.
Graduated compression engineered along the Lymphatic and Circulatory System, so the garment is working the whole time you have it on. Then the back. Months of prototypes and study went into the placement of the custom silicone grip straps, because a few centimetres either way changes everything. They had to sit where your body would actually register them, hour after hour, without you thinking about it. That is the feedback. You feel the second you drop. You come back up. It happens a couple of hundred times a day, and after a few weeks your body stops needing the reminder.
I have worn mine every day for months. To the desk, to school pickup, on flights, out to dinner. I feel stronger and taller than I have in years, and I take up the amount of room I am supposed to take up, which I did not do for most of my life.
And it is so cute. That is not a small part of it. A garment you love is a garment you wear, and a garment you wear is the only one that changes anything.
Ballet gave me the instruction. My mum asked the question. We spent a year answering it.
Shoulders back. Breath in.
With love, Lauren