There have been some pretty exciting goings on within the lingerie industry as well as here in Derriere de Soie. Some of these are the Lonely Girls Project by Lonely Lingerie, Curvy Kate’s Star in a Bra Contest and Panache’s Modelled by Role Models, along with our own modeling campaign. This is all a part of a much greater movement to empower women and help them to have confidence in themselves.
The Lonely Girls project, coming out of New Zealand has stated one of their goals as being to “[remove] lingerie from the male gaze,” which we are obviously huge supporters of. As a boutique that caters primarily to women, we’ve personally witnessed how well-fitting and beautiful bras can benefit women in remarkable ways. Lingerie can not only make women look great physically, it can also provide surprising inner confidence. The Lonely Girls Project highlights not only women of all ages and body types, but also women who have no experience with modelling. One participant in this is Girls’ star Lena Dunham, who shared a photo of herself in the Bonnie set by Lonely Lingerie in Pistachio, (which is also a favorite of our’s in the store) along with the caption “love my @lonelylingerie and I think I will wear it to dinner with some boots and a smile because we are all lucky to be free.” A message we can definitely get behind.
Another one of our favorite brands is UK brand Curvy Kate, which has held an annual modelling search with their only requirements being legal age, being able to wear their products, and until 
this year, living in the United Kingdom. This year, however, the campaign was made open to women from all different parts of the world. Curvy Kate places a strong emphasis on women feeling confident in their bodies and embracing their curves. As a D cup and up brand, they often encourage women to embrace their curves, without playing into the “real women have curves” mantra that has been incredibly offensive towards women who are more slender. Another great idea that we also try our best to adopt ourselves.
Panache also launched a campaign called Modelled by Role Models. This highlights different women whose accomplishments range from being an incredible marathon runner to one woman who is deeply involved in the fight against Ebola. This stemmed from the brand surveying women, most of whom said that they did not have any definite role models. They have stated that they want to shift the focus from only women’s “physical attributes” towards acknowledging their impressive “contributions to society and personal achievements.” This only adds to the messages of some of our other designers that lingerie can have an immensely larger impact on a person than merely outward features. This project truly gives women the opportunity to showcase their inner in addition to their outer beauty.
These campaigns helped to inspire us to launch our own modelling campaign. We recently revealed our own photos from this search to overwhelmingly positive reviews. One of the most important parts of this for us was that all of our customers be able to relate to the photos. After the release many customers approached us saying that they had wanted to enter but felt like they were too big, old, etc… But as we will be making this model search annual we would like to make clear that nobody is too anything to be one of our models. We hope to be as representative as possible of the real women who come in and shop with us. It was an
incredible experience seeing these women, many of whom we had known previously as customers, have a great time at the photoshoot. We also loved hearing about what each and every one of the women felt about beauty and beauty standards in society.
We try to embrace all of these ideals as well as we can to make shopping with us as positive of an experience as possible.
