Why Are Wireless Bras Getting More Popular? | Market Inventors

Aesthetics are diversifying, comfort is winning, and women's social and economic standing has changed

Women are changing, and so is women's underwear. In the few hundred years since the bra was invented, its main job has been to lift the breasts, make them look firmer, and shape a woman's silhouette. That job is now shrinking, starting with the disappearance of the stiff support under the cup — the underwire (though most bras today use hard plastic rather than metal).

Underwire bras are still the mainstream, but over the past three to five years wireless bras have gradually overtaken push-up bras. The rise of buzzy wireless-bra brands, the growing number of wireless bras in fashion influencers' street-style photos, the steady stream of bad results out of traditional lingerie makers like Victoria's Secret and Wacoal — all of it points to a shift under way.

Relaxation is in the air, and has been for years.

From wide-leg trousers and sneakers to athleisure meant to work in several settings at once — even as people keep complaining about stress and anxiety, they demand less and less of themselves in how they look. You might assume it is women's clothing that has loosened up. In fact men's clothing has grown just as casual, with Silicon Valley's tech companies leading the way. Fewer occasions and fewer professions call for formal dress, while sneakers and casual trousers fit more and more of them: you can wear sneakers to a royal wedding now. It is just that historically, men have always been held to fewer rules about clothes than women have.

So the popularity of the wireless bra is no surprise.

China, the United States and Japan are all seeing the same upward trend.

One piece of direct evidence: Uniqlo is about to pass Wacoal in Japan. Uniqlo's parent company, Fast Retailing, lifted its share of the Japanese women's underwear market from 15% to 20.03% in five years, putting it just behind the No. 1 player, Wacoal, at 20.11%. Uniqlo sells only wireless bras; Wacoal's core products are push-up and shaping bras.

The Chinese market shows signs of it too: on Taobao, wireless bras already outsell underwire ones. According to data Taobao gave QDaily, the sales ratio of wireless to underwire bras in 2017 was already close to seven to three. And CBNData's 2017 Online Underwear Consumption Research Series found that from July 2016 to June 2017, wireless bras outsold underwire bras three to one on Tmall and Taobao.

In 2017 the wireless-bra market on Taobao alone, not counting Tmall, passed 5 billion yuan in transaction volume. But wireless bras cost less per unit, so by total market size they have not yet overtaken underwire bras.

The growth of startup lingerie brands like Neiwai, which sell only wireless bras and sell them on comfort, says something about this market's vitality too.

Founded in 2012, Neiwai reached 150 million yuan in sales within five years. Its online sales grew 500% a year for three years running. In April 2018 it raised another 60 million yuan. It is now opening stores in more cities, and expects to have 30 of them by next year.

A relatively empty market gave brands like Neiwai their opening. Through brand exposure, signing the supermodel Du Juan as its face, and opening physical stores, Neiwai's own growth may in turn have pushed wireless bras further into fashion.

But for online consumption as a whole, Taobao mattered more: it helped merchants catch the wave of another kind of wireless bra, the bralette — a sewn bra with thin padding or none at all.

Gu Yan, the Taobao category manager (colloquially a "taoxiaoer") in charge of underwear, told QDaily that from 2016 they noticed more shoppers searching Taobao directly for words like "French," "lace" and "bralette." So Taobao began recommending this promising category to more merchants.

"Through some of our (Taobao's) recommendation methods, plus campaign operations, we built this category up," she said. At the start of 2016 only a dozen or so Taobao merchants carried the product; now nearly every major underwear merchant sells bralettes.

Chen Yulin, founder of the Taobao-native lingerie brand Haoqi Misi, thinks Chinese shoppers first met this unpadded, sewn lace bra in street-style photos from abroad. Oh, and a bralette can be worn as outerwear.

Bralettes have been popular in the US since 2015; Google Trends shows that as the period of fastest growth. WGSN data puts the number of new bralette styles in 2016 up 157% on the year before.

Fast-fashion brands including Urban Outfitters, Topshop, ASOS, Aerie and Oysho (owned by Zara's parent, Inditex) all launched versions of it. At first they picked the bralette over other kinds of bra simply because it is easier to make: all it takes is sewing. A standard underwire bra needs a stiff plastic or similar support set into it, plus a mold to shape the curved cups.

But the brands soon found its advantages: cheap, wearable under clothes or on its own, comfortable and light. It became one of the weapons fast-fashion labels (and teen clothing labels) used to take market share from Victoria's Secret.

They also realized they could design bralettes for layering, which then sold other clothes. So they brought out tops made to show the bralette underneath: V-neck and off-shoulder T-shirts, backless tops, camisoles cut lower at the armhole. "This is an incremental business," Aerie's parent company, American Eagle Outfitters (AEO), wrote in an earnings report.

Two years after launching bralettes, AEO said in 2016 that they had helped lift same-store sales at Aerie by 4%. Victoria's Secret did not launch its own bralette until 2016, after these clothing brands.

Whether it is the push-up bra of the past or the wireless bra now on the rise, why women wear a bra, which one they pick and which one catches on has always been decided by culture, not medicine: wearing a bra does not prevent sagging, and underwire bras have also been shown to have no direct link to breast cancer.

From the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, the corset kept women tightly bound for a very long time. It pushed the breasts up high; whalebone and other stays at the waist, pulled in by the laces, squeezed the waist and belly; some corsets even carried a frame to hold out the skirt, so a woman's hips looked fuller. Seen from today, all of it served a male taste for a full bust, a narrow waist and wide hips.

People were pointing out the dangers of the corset as early as the 17th century. From the late 1860s to the early 1890s, The Lancet ran more than one article a year on the hazards of tight lacing; even a loosely worn corset impaired overall lung function. None of it cooled upper-class women's enthusiasm. Some chased this curve to the point of madness: the mainstream small-size corset measured 16 to 18 inches (40 to 46 centimeters) at the waist. Look at the surviving corsets in museums and you can see it.

Later the corset grew a little looser and softer. But it was not really killed off until the 1920s. Fashion still moved from the top down: some French film actresses announced they had stopped wearing corsets (even though their figures still looked as sinuous as if they had not). By then the corset was increasingly taken as something only middle-aged women whose figures had gone had any need for. The most fashionable look of the decade was the flapper — a dropped waistline, short hair, red lips and a hemline up at the knee. Beyond a single ornate, genteel ideal, women now had more androgynous options: trousers, straight-cut suits.

Social and economic forces were at work. The First World War sent women in Europe and America into factories, doing jobs that had belonged to men. In 1919 Britain passed the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, which barred certain industries from declaring someone unqualified for a profession on the grounds of sex or marital status, opening jobs to middle-class women. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries American women won the vote state by state.

The United States entered a golden age: from 1922 to 1929 almost every year set a new economic record. American prosperity carried over to Europe: the whole Western world was living through the Roaring Twenties, and more and more women went out to work.

Perhaps you could put it this way: the more women's labor is needed, the less popular uncomfortable underwear becomes. More women work outside the home now. City dwellers mostly leave early and get back late, and a whole day in an underwire bra is uncomfortable. The first thing many of them do on getting home is unhook it.

The American lingerie brand Lively advertises: your day starts at 6 in the morning — as if you had time to spend on uncomfortable underwear. Its founder, Michelle Cordeiro Grant, was once a senior merchandising director at Victoria's Secret. She left to build a brand that put good looks and comfort together, so that women could be "active 14 hours a day."

Allure has argued that some teenagers like bralettes because the bralette expresses something natural and unwilling to submit to convention. Young stars such as Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga have been photographed in them. Showing your underwear, or wearing nothing over it, stopped being taboo long ago; it has become a novel way to dress, a fashion.

"In a soft, wireless cup, everyone's breast shape is different, and that brings a sense of 'imperfection,'" says Araks Yeramyan, who founded her eponymous wireless-bra label in New York. She sees the natural shape a wireless bra allows as a rebuttal to the rigid molded cups of an ordinary bra. "[That kind of bra] makes everyone's breasts look the same."

It calls to mind a declaration that has drifted around for decades like music from a tiny scene: throw away your bra. In 1968, a group of feminist protesters led by the writer Robin Morgan threw bras into a "Freedom Trash Can" outside the Miss America pageant; some of them set the can alight.

"One of feminism's main points of attack was the sexual objectification of women. Most radical activists chose first to attack and reject the traditional feminine look. [They] stopped removing body hair, wearing makeup, setting elaborate curls and wearing shaping garments — and gave up bras and corsets too," Jane Farrell-Beck and Colleen Gau write in Uplift: The Bra in America.

Hippies liked to turn "throw away your bra" into a slogan on a march banner. Companies preferred to call it a matter of taste — they had no wish for shoppers to actually throw their bras away. They murmured instead: love your own body, don't hurry to follow the crowd and please other people. Try these bras with no fixed shape. The trick worked.

It is not only wireless bras. The sports-bra market is growing too, the fastest-growing category in underwear. Worldwide, sports bras are compounding at about 10.8% a year. And not only in sport: more and more models and Western celebrities turn up in street-style photos wearing one — Kendall Jenner and Chiara Ferragni, for instance. Jennifer Lawrence has worn a sports bra on the red carpet. A sports bra is a wireless bra too.

For much the same reasons athleisure caught on, some wireless bras suit many occasions. Hence a multi-purpose bra that sits between the sports bra and the everyday wireless bra. "As our lives get more multidimensional, we need underwear that can adapt to more occasions," says the fashion writer Courtney Brunson.

"A girl may find one, two, three of them a nuisance — she wants one that handles everything. Especially for sport, gym class, or anything where she'll sweat," Wu Pinhui, Uniqlo China's CMO, told QDaily.

There is also the pull of shopping habits. In an age when people want everything "fast" and "convenient," the way band and cup sizes are measured is simply not friendly enough.

A wireless bra usually gets its support from stretch fabric, which forgives more, and often comes in S/M/L. Nikkei reckons this is one reason Uniqlo has closed in on Wacoal in Japan. Young women can't be bothered to measure themselves, or measure themselves wrong. Next to trying on one regular bra after another, buying a wireless one saves trouble.

The research firm NPD sees the same trend in the American market. In 2017, non-sports bras using S/M/L "alpha sizing" grew 3% year on year.

Worth noting: sales at L Brands, the parent of the more traditionally minded Victoria's Secret, and at Wacoal, have been sliding since they peaked in 2015.

From the start of 2016, same-store sales at Victoria's Secret and its younger, cheaper sister line Pink fell in nearly every month. They dropped 1% in 2016 and 8% in 2017.

In fact taste and the shape of the underwear market had already begun to change in 2014, when people started attacking Victoria's Secret's "Perfect Body" ads and accusing the brand of retouching models' waists thinner and their busts higher.

Some small brands took the opening. The most successful may be Aerie, mentioned above. Its slogan is "the real you is sexy." From the beginning of 2014, Aerie said it would no longer retouch any advertising or in-store image.

Not all of Aerie's products are wireless. But the brand stresses natural beauty, with a body-positive campaign against the idea that thin is beautiful.

It shows ordinary, unretouched bodies as they are: tattoos, freckles, braces, even a bit of belly. For its latest season it cast models with albinism and Down syndrome. Millennials have bought the pitch: praise for the campaign runs wide on social media. The numbers show it as well — as of the second quarter of fiscal 2018, Aerie's same-store sales had risen for 12 quarters in a row.

Like Aerie's, marketing that stresses natural beauty or a natural body has had a good few years. Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign won a prize at Cannes Lions, and Unilever kept the theme going for years. SK-II's latest campaign put six actresses on screen without makeup.

Highly controlled, manufactured, over-polished "beauty" no longer rules fashion alone.

Taste really is diversifying. But is the "curvy" ideal of cleavage and a marked waistline finished? Judging by the history of underwear, not necessarily. After androgynous style swept the 1920s, people loved curves again in the 1940s, and the cone bra stayed the dominant shape for more than a decade. The Wonderbra of the 1990s, which helped small-chested women build cleavage, and the shapewear craze of the 2000s were both comebacks for more constricting underwear.

Still, the "comfort upgrade" looks hard to reverse. "For the past fifty years, comfort has always been an important factor in the development of the underwear [industry]," says Marshal Cohen, chief analyst at NPD. What is different now, he argues, is that women ask more of it: "from a little comfort being enough, to wanting total comfort."

Cover image: Aerie, George Gvasalia on Unsplash