A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

Quietly powering the best in luxury.

LEARN MORE

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

Turning influence into ROI.

LEARN MORE

And now, the main event…

A stylist recently told me about a desperate trip to Nordstrom at the Americana, in Glendale, where she went in search of a beautiful bra. She knew exactly what she wanted: good lace, elegant finishing, a silhouette that felt expensive—and she needed it faster than it would take for Net-a-Porter to deliver something from Eres, the gold standard in the space. What she found at the mall was Simone Pérèle, a brand many American retailers position as the “fancy” option. The lace wasn’t quite right, she said, and the whole thing felt vaguely like compromise. “I’m too old to wear cheap underwear,” she told me.

Eres, which Chanel acquired in 1997, has long been the default answer for women looking to fill a top drawer with beautiful basics. The construction is impeccable, the materials serious, and, as one intimate-apparel boutique owner told me this week, “you can feel the Chanel expertise in every dart and seam.” The problem is that Eres had enjoyed remarkably little competition. Its aesthetic point of view is narrow, it stops at a D cup, and in America the average woman reportedly wears a 34DD.

Some brands have tiptoed into the space. Yasmine Eslami, where bras retail between $120 and $200, has emerged as one alternative, albeit at a lower price point and without the same engineering quality. The boutique owner told me she did carry Simone Pérèle but considered it an entry-level department store brand in Europe—and she offered that assessment less as snark than as a warning.

This is the real void at the top of the market. Women who spend $8,000 on a handbag, more than $1,000 on shoes, and meticulously edit their skincare routines still have surprisingly few lingerie options. In America, the market tends to split into two categories—mass basics on one end, and male fantasy on the other. There’s Victoria’s Secret and the brands chasing its legacy, and the va-va-voom world of Agent Provocateur. Very little exists in between for the woman who wants something beautiful, wearable, and exquisitely made for everyday life. Add to this the fact that most women do not even replace their bras as often as they should; their favorite may well be decades old.

Into that breach has leapt a newer generation of brands with a different idea of what premium lingerie should feel like. Cou Cou Intimates founder Rose Colcord started the company during her final semester in college after her knucklehead boyfriend remarked that her everyday underwear consisted of, in her words, “granny panties,” while another drawer overflowed with La Perla and Agent Provocateur pieces she almost never wore. Her thesis was simple—comfort and beauty are not mutually exclusive. Backed by a small group of investors, including model Natalia Vodianova, the brand is now doing eight figures in revenue, with 85 percent of sales coming through direct channels, according to an inside source. This summer, Cou Cou will test physical retail with a Nolita pop-up running from May 29 through June 20. Nearly every founder and retailer I spoke with mentioned that trunk shows and other intimate, in-person events have become unexpectedly valuable, both for revenue and for customer insight.

In some ways, lingerie has never recovered from Victoria’s Secret. In Selling Sexy, Lauren and her co-author, Chantal Fernandez, recount how Les Wexner first stumbled into the original Victoria’s Secret boutique in San Francisco and saw an upscale lingerie store selling silk and lace at aspirational prices, more akin to Barneys than the suburban mall chain it later became. Wexner recognized the opportunity and scaled it aggressively, but in the process he pushed the entire concept downstream. Meanwhile, the top of the market has remained strangely uncontested ever since.

Meanwhile, La Perla, the luxury lingerie house established in Bologna in 1954, has spent recent years largely absent from the market after ownership upheaval and an overbuilt retail footprint pushed the company into insolvency. Last June, former Expedia C.E.O. Peter Kern and his wife, Kirsten, acquired the brand for €25 million and rehired many previous employees. Retailers told me this week they are eager for the brand’s return.

At the same time, women’s understanding of “sexy” has shifted toward something more personal. Kiki de Montparnasse built its identity around an overtly erotic, fetish-adjacent aesthetic, yet the brand is now trying to position itself less around provocation and more around how lingerie makes women feel. These days, comfort comes first. Dora Larsen, the 10-year-old London-based label now sold to Gen Zers in limited assortments through Free People, occupies a similar space—feminine, playful, and designed for the female gaze.

None of this is entirely new. When Nicole Kidman wore a simple Hanro cotton tank in Eyes Wide Shut, a generation of women suddenly understood that effortless and sheer could be its own kind of sex appeal. No underwire. No elaborate lace. No aggressively engineered cleavage. Hanro remains excellent for elevated cotton basics—slips and tanks that feel deliberate rather than accidental. But basics alone are not enough. For the full wardrobe of lingerie—a genuinely beautiful bra, a matching set, a slip, and all the small accouterments of getting dressed—the shelves are still surprisingly bare. Luxury options remain limited, sizing remains inconsistent, and the inventory investment required to build a true luxury lingerie business is substantial.

The customer willing to spend serious money on lingerie already exists. She has been buying Eres whenever she can find it, though the brand’s distribution remains selective. But department stores increasingly seem stocked for teenagers buying their first bras, not adult women with developed taste. The brands that solve this problem stand to benefit from a very addressable market. The surprising thing isn’t that women want the new-old version of sexy. It’s that so few brands have recognized the opportunity.

On Alex Wang’s energy drink launch at the Met Gala (yep, that happened): “Ironic that, when he got canceled, one of the accusations was that he spiked people’s drinks.” —A stylist (Wang called those allegations “baseless and grotesquely false.”)

On Hailey Bieber’s dual Alaïa/Saint Laurent campaigns: “I wonder if YSL simply neglected to list Alaïa in their competitor brand list. I would not be remotely surprised if they just cut/paste those brands year after year and no one remembered to add Alaïa when they revved up their campaigns.” —A person who does these contracts sometimes

On the growth in Miami’s retail scene: “My prediction is that’ll overtake Los Angeles as the number two luxury market in the U.S. Not because L.A. is losing people, but because New York is—the New York region will always be the biggest, but it’s going to shrink. Rich foreign students aren’t coming to shop in SoHo as much. And I’m hearing the tourist flow is very bad from many brands.” —A market source

Until Monday,
Lauren

P.S.: We use affiliate links because we are a business. We may make a couple bucks off them.

Need help? Review our FAQ page or contact us for assistance. For brand partnerships, email ads@puck.news.

You received this email because you signed up to receive emails from Puck, or as part of your Puck account associated with {{customer.email}}. To stop receiving this newsletter and/or manage all your email preferences, click here.

Puck is published by Heat Media LLC. 107 Greenwich St., New York, NY 10006