Is Lingerie Becoming the Most Progressive Side of the Fashion Industry?

November 14, 2015 by admin
Filed under Latest Lingerie News

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The lingerie market has, simply put, exploded. The Business of Fashion reports the global underwear industry was worth over $110 billion in 2014, and according to Euromonitor, “women’s underwear was the largest category in womenswear in 2013.” But in the United States, it’s controlled by a few big players, including Triumph and Hanes, which owns Maidenform, Wonderbra and Playtex. Oh, and Victoria’s Secret.

“It’s a $14 billion industry, and Victoria’s Secret owns 44%,” Catalina Girald, co-founder of lingerie brand Naja, to told Pando. “There’s not a lot out there in the mass market brand.”

Which is why independent retailers are quietly taking on the industry by doing something revolutionary: listening. They’ve been hearing our moans over the lack of large sizes and groans about the impracticality of the styles that typically get attention, and they’re using that to disrupt a lumbering, slow-moving industry and address these real needs.

That process has pretty much flipped the industry on its head. Usually, companies or designers have to charm the trade magazines and industry power players to establish themselves first; after that come the savvy marketing techniques, and the Internet will follow. But these companies are doing the opposite, relying on the magical, mystical Internet to connect with real people’s needs first.

“The way retail channels work now is that brands are able to get directly in connection with their consumer base,” Cora Harrington, the founder of the blog The Lingerie Addict, told Mic. “You have discussions happening, and then you have the ability to get these products to consumers. Before blogs were really a thing, the only way to share what you were doing was trade journals or through a boutique.”

With the Internet on their side, indie lingerie retailers are looking toward the future and acting on it — and in doing so, making lingerie one of the most progressive, inclusive, exciting spaces in fashion. Here’s what they’re doing.

Recognizing that not all shoppers have the same skin color

Source: Instagram

Take the brand Nubian Skin, for example. Launched last year by Ade Hassan, it blew open the conversation about why “nude” apparel almost always means “white” or “light beige.” After years and years of never being able to find her own shade of “nude,” Hassan decided to launch an intimates company that would cater to women whose skin color isn’t a pinky-white.

“Lingerie is something that’s incredibly personal, and the people who are generally running these large companies are older white men, and so the last thing on their mind would be, ‘What am I going to wear under my top to make sure that it’s not possible to see through it?’” Hassan told Mic last year.

Before the media got wind of Nubian Skin — or any major lingerie industry players cared to tackle the “nude” problem, for that matter — the Internet took notice.

“The conversations started on Twitter first,” Harrington said. “And all of a sudden Black Twitter was all over it. Then Mashable picked them up and then the industry.”

From that finally came the mainstream: Nordstrom picked up the line this summer.