Sheer Laciness

Emergent India’s market for premium lingerie is buoyant, no doubt, but here is how it could boom

Suman Nathwani has been designing lingerie for 26 years now. She remembers how she got started—her cousin was getting married and they had been scouting for something sexy for her to wear on her first night. “I had something very specific in mind… like a baby doll,” she says. A baby doll, according to Wikipedia, is a short négligée with cup formations—called a bralette—for cleavage, and is trimmed with lace, ruffles, appliques, marabou fur, bows and ribbons. It is made of sheer fabric like chiffon or silk. Nathwani was introduced to baby doll lingerie by the Mills & Boon stories she devoured.

They searched high and low in Kolkata, but could not find one. Finally, at her sister’s insistence, she set about stitching one herself. “I went shopping for lace and material, which was also hard to source. Then I found a tailor and had to explain it all to him. I created some cutwork designs, which later became my specialty,” she says. “I guess it was my destiny to design sexy lingerie. I did a few more for my family members and finally launched my own label.”

In the two-and-a-half decades she has been at it, Nathwani has seen some shifts in India’s market for lingerie. “White was equated with virginity back then. A girl who wore white was nice and sweet, while wearing lace or bright colours was considered loose,” she says, “Red was reserved only for the first night, and black if you wanted to seduce your husband.”

Now when she sits down to design a set, she has to keep a variety of things in mind, starting with which age group she is designing for and what customers want. “So many women in their forties walk up to me and ask for sexy lingerie tips to dress up their figures. They don’t want to be shy anymore. I advise them to wear funky prints but in more supportive fits as they need to take care of their breasts.” She finds that animal prints and neons go well with Indian skintones and are usually in demand. “You can mix and match them. Leopard and zebra prints are also such a draw.”

Advice on sexy innerwear is always at a premium. Ask Deepa Mahadik of Unhooked, a lingerie blog, who answers all sorts of questions every day, ranging from ‘What kind of lingerie should one carry on a honeymoon?’ and ‘What looks sexy on a curvy body?’ to ‘What looks sexy on a thin body?’ and ‘What is conservative yet sexy?’ Those asking these questions span a wide spectrum of ages, from teenagers to women above forty, and are usually middle- and upper middle-class women in conservative joint families who want to enhance their sex appeal behind closed doors. “In Bombay, look at the different types of women who are shopping for lingerie,” says Deepa, “Many actually go to stores with pictures torn out of magazines looking for that exact bra. Everyone needs to feel pretty and sexy.”

The Indian lingerie market is doing very well at the premium end. In 2012, by the time the iconic push-up brand WonderBra was launched in India, all its pre-launch stock on display was sold out. Nearly 100,000 women from across the country had pre-booked their orders online. A year earlier, the consultancy Ernst & Young had estimated the Indian lingerie and nightwear market at about $2 billion and projected expansion of an annual 15 per cent till 2015. Several other brands have made their debut since, and online lingerie stores like Pretty Secrets and Zivame are gaining popularity.

The question, however, is of how well lingerie marketers are adapting themselves to the Indian market. Foreign brands like La Senza have been making efforts for some years now. Neha Kant, CEO and co-founder of Cloe, a new brand that retails online and focuses on 25-30-year-old working women in relationships, says that the company’s pre-launch research offered interesting market insights. For example, Indian women like push-up bras, but they still retain some conservative values. So Cloe offered the option of a light push-up.

The opinions of boyfriends and husbands count, too. A 22-year-old fashion blogger says that she got an important lingerie lesson from her boyfriend in school during a make-out session. He told her wearing white undergarments was a no-no because everyone, from mothers to domestic helps, wore white. He wanted her in black lacy stuff instead. “Till date, I never wear white,” she says, “To me, sexy will always be something black, lacy and see-through.”

According to Kant, ‘sexy’ now means lace, colours and prints. “Basically, innerwear can also be seen as outerwear now—your bra straps show if you wear spaghettis, [and] you flaunt lace bra when you wear sheer tops. It’s not something we hide anymore.”

Rajiv Grover, COO, Genesis Colours Pvt Ltd, which markets the brand Bwitch, says that its primary target audience of 15-25-year-olds is open to new styles. “The younger generation wants to flaunt innerwear,” he observes, “There was a time when bra straps were hidden as much as possible. Now women love to show them off. Lingerie has become a fashion accessory and is not a need-based product anymore.”

A 27-year-old writer says she has just three pairs of ordinary underwear—“granny pants”—for days she only wants to feel comfortable (or is unwell). Otherwise, she wears corsets, thongs and push-ups—even under a regular jeans-and-sweater get-up. She first discovered lingerie on her 18th birthday, when a senior girl in school stuffed a black thong in her pocket and told her to try it on when no one was around. Today, she has multiple grades of lingerie—from sexy to super sexy. Earlier, she would tell relatives staying overseas to bring her bagfuls of lingerie. Now she gets all she wants right here in India. “Obviously, the big brands have it all,” she says, “But even underground markets like Lajpat Nagar have some great stuff.”

Easy availability of lingerie has helped boost demand too. Conservative women who would find it too forbidding to shop for lingerie in the brick-and-mortar world now simply go online and order what they want. Richa Kar, CEO of Zivame.com, a multi-brand curator portal for lingerie, says that offline bra shopping involves such discomfort that it has been reduced to a chore, something to quickly be done with and put out of the way. In contrast, online shopping works well since it lets women understand their needs, browse styles and get sizes right without any embarrassment—in the privacy of their home. The website’s full-figure section, which caters to curvy women, is its bestselling one. “We have products going up to J cup [an extremely large bra size], which is unheard of in the offline world. The push-up bra is the most popular style of bra selling on our website.” Karan Behal, founder and CEO of PrettySecrets.com, corroborates that observation. His website also sells “more push-up bras than minimisers” and “more bikinis than one-piece swimsuits”.

Market watchers believe that the internet has liberated the market and finally allowed latent demand to translate into actual purchases, and so even if the overall sales numbers are low, online trends are valid pointers to the future.

Yet, an old problem still lingers. Most Indian women still don’t know their right bra size or what kind to wear. Deepa often gets questions like ‘How do I measure my cup size?’ and ‘What does 34C mean?’ apart from the occasional ‘Do underwire bras cause cancer?’ She is surprised that women still don’t know all this. “Now, 34 is your band size, which is the underbreast [measure around your torso], and C is your cup size,” she says. According to her, apart from the one about underwire being carcinogenic, there are many other lingerie myths—like the belief that buxom women can’t wear padded bras. “It actually adds to your shape and makes you look nicer, as no sagging or spilling happens.”

A 30-year-old business analyst complains that every brand has different sizes. “I bought a bra from Triumph that was perfect. But I have never been able to find that style again… To find the same level of comfort, I have to switch brands and go through that size-finding routine again.”

It would be well worth the trouble, lingerie marketers would assure her. As swimwear designers Shivan and Narresh say, other than a swimsuit, nothing quite has as much impact on a woman’s perception of her body as innerwear. “What most lingerie brands get wrong is fit and sizing,” they say, explaining the principal challenge, “Indian women have a unique body type that cannot be measured on the basis of standardised UK, US or European sizings.”

That, then, is the secret of success in this market—and it’s not Victorian.

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Aastha Atray Banan