Progress in Practice: the Inclusive Underwear Brands Changing the Status Quo
- Anthony Najm
- Jun 10
- 4 min read
For most of the last few decades, intimates advertising had a clear and consistent message: if you don't look like this, lingerie is not for you. The target market was a specific woman: tall, thin, and seductive in a very particular way. Everything else was a begrudged size extension— until a handful of brands decided that lingerie is for every body and inclusivity in fashion should be the norm.
The Old Standard vs The New
For decades this framing was so consistent it stopped looking like a choice. Words like "control," "slim," and "angel" weren't describing products; they were describing who was allowed in the dressing room. A "slim collection" is not a product category— it's a judgment call. "Control lingerie" does not describe fabric — it describes what kind of body needs managing. "Angel" — and here Victoria's Secret deserves special credit for committing to the bit — suggested that the apex of feminine desirability was a very thin, sculpted woman with visible ribs and 0% body fat.
This cliché standard and definition of feminine appeal produced too many copycats to count. Take Agent Provocateur— the British brand took the aesthetic in a slightly different direction but the logic was identical. The brand made beautiful, expensive, elaborately constructed lingerie for a version of a woman that fit in a very particular mould. The campaign imagery was consistent, and the woman wearing the product was effectively the product. Lingerie was sold as something that unlocked that identity, provided the body was already the right kind.
When intimacy and confidence are attached to one specific body type, they become things to earn rather than things to feel, and the lingerie category has been doing this for a very long time— until a handful of brands were built on the opposite premise.
When Lingerie Stopped Having a Dress Code
Thistle and Spire, a Brooklyn-based brand founded in 2015, makes the kind of pieces Agent Provocateur makes — bold, intricately constructed, genuinely beautiful — but for the full range of bodies. Sizes run from XS to 3X, and the important detail is how that sizing works: adjustability is built into every design from the original sketch, not bolted on at the end. The full embroidery, the full lace work, the full creative vision runs across the entire size range. No stripped-back plus-size version with half the detail and twice the compromise.
The tagline — "every piece is designed to love you back" — is quietly doing something the old lingerie model never did. It frames the garment around the person wearing it rather than around an aspiration the person is supposed to reach. Thistle and Spire also makes gender-inclusive pieces, with their "Panties for Packages" collection offering cuts designed with trans and non-binary bodies in mind. The brand describes itself as "built for bodies, not binaries," which is either a very good tagline or a fairly damning summary of what most of the industry has been doing, depending on how you look at it.
Underneat, an Indian intimates and shapewear brand co-founded by content creator Kusha Kapila and launched in 2025, comes at the whole thing from a completely different angle. The brand was built around a practical frustration: existing shapewear and intimatewear were not designed for the realities of Indian clothing, specifically the fits, the layering, and what actually works under a sari or a kurta. No aspirational image involved, just a set of real wardrobe problems that existing products were not solving.
The language Underneat uses around bodies names things plainly: tummies, bulges, support, without the softening language that usually cushions intimates marketing, and without any suggestion that these things are problems requiring an apology. The brand's tone is refreshingly open. Shapewear is sold as something that works with the body rather than something that fixes it, which is worth noting in a category that has historically been sold almost entirely through shame.
Nala, the Australian underwear brand covered in depth on this blog, belongs in the new-age brands category for the same reasons: real bodies as the default across all imagery, genuine sizing, and a shopping experience that treats the customer's body as a focal point rather than something to work around.
What Inclusive Lingerie Brands Get Right
What these brands share is not just an extended size range or a campaign with more diverse casting. The difference is structural. The old model attached value to a garment by attaching it to one type of body— the lingerie was aspirational, aspiration came with a template, and the template excluded most people. These inclusive underwear brands start from a different question: what does this body actually need, and how does this piece work with it? That question starts at the design stage, which is the only place it can start if the answer is going to be genuine.
Changing rooms, mirrors, the private moment of getting dressed — the old standard managed to make all of that feel like an assessment. The brands doing it differently are not reinventing lingerie. They are removing a condition that should never have been attached to it.
Index:MH sets measurable standards for how the beauty and fashion industry affects consumer mental health. To find out more or to nominate a brand that's getting it right, visit indexmh.org.
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