Fitzpleisure
we speak to Sonali, visionary & designer behind handmade, soft n dreamy lingerie label FITZPLEISURE (custom sized for angels worldwide) read below:
Would you mind introducing yourself and your brand – how do you identify? And how would you describe your brand?
I'm Sonali, 21 years old, based in Melbourne, Australia and I started Fitzpleisure at the end of 2018. I identify as she/her.
Since the very beginning I've always thought of and considered my brand as soft and dreamy. I love creating memorable lingerie and view the pieces I make as almost wearable intimate art and my vision of the feminine divine.
An intrinsic element of my brand is also me as an individual creator, my pieces are all very personal to me as I run every single aspect of my business, including making all garments, and I try to capture that sense of personability within my work and Fitzpleisure's virtual presence.
When did you first become interested in lingerie?
I personally became quite interested in lingerie when I started becoming more aware of my own sexuality. I've always been very enthusiastic and passionate about my external presentation and the clothes I wear and how I express myself, and I loved the idea of lingerie which was a way to physically emphasise my love for myself and my body, which was something that I had started feeling during my first relationship.
However, I found it quite difficult to find lingerie which I felt really drawn to as much of mainstream lingerie follows a simple colour palette of primarily black, red and white which I wasn't particularly excited by. A lot of the lingerie I liked was also only found within luxury and boutique labels, which I couldn't afford, or alternatively were from smaller fast-fashion labels that were fairly poor quality, ill-fitting, and-or uncomfortable. I struggled to find pieces that fell somewhere in the middle of it all.
I'd always had an affinity to being more hands on with small scale projects and decided to start trying to make my own pieces and realised pretty quickly that it was something I was quite good at and allowed my creativity to flourish.
Did you ever consider a different path (potentially another creative one)?
It might be surprising to discover but I hadn't ever actually considered myself to be that creative of a person before developing my brand!
I knew I had a strong sense of what I was good at and what I liked but I'd always been more academically driven and felt my strengths were more with critical thinking and arts based academia, especially in the field of sexuality and gender studies.
I found that I often struggled with completing self-guided creative projects and that I hadn't felt inspired to create physical things because I wasn't sure of what I wanted to create. I can't imagine myself pursuing any other creative pathways before Fitzpleisure but now that I've been so immersed in design and my sense of creation I feel like I've found my niche and would love to explore it as much as I can. I also don't see myself branching out to other kinds of clothes at this stage or wanting to veer too far from what I've established.
Where did the name Fitzpleisure come from?
The name Fitzpleisure comes from a few things! I'm inspired by many things but in particular my favourite writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who's writing is very romantic but also critical of modern society and I feel strongly resonates with my worldview, and my favourite band alt-J that have a song named Fitzpleasure. Their music is oftentimes quite experimental and has a powerful and almost otherworldly energy which is what I aspire to evoke with my work. I also love a play on words, hence mixing pleasure and leisure which is also what I want my lingerie to encapsulate! I loved that I could capture so many different and meaningful ideas within the name Fitzpleisure.
In how we think about clothes, I feel as though there’s a general sense of being perceived – will I look good, not to myself but to others? Will I look sexy? And I think that generally this is still the framework the mainstream media encourages to perceive lingerie through, a kind of item of clothing imbued with the male gaze. I can’t think of a scene in a movie where a character wearing lingerie hasn’t been used to grab the attention of another character (or the viewer).
What’s striking about what you said – lingerie as a way to physically emphasise my love for myself and my body – is that it seems to be entirely personal, and positive, a kind of pure self-affirmation. So I have to wonder, did you always feel this way about lingerie?
That's very true! I think that's also why my own pull to lingerie is embedded within my sexuality, as that is how lingerie is most commonly presented. Although I wholeheartedly recognise the attraction to lingerie and how it connects to sexuality and don't wish to eradicate or deny its place within that context, I rather seek to go beyond just that with my representation of lingerie and not have sexuality be the primary association with my brand. I find it harmful the way lingerie is often presented not only as a tool to make women more desirable, appealing and attractive to mainly men, but also a largely unattainable fantasy of a woman overall.
The dominant brands within the lingerie industry often depict predominantly slim models and almost dictate how lingerie should look on a woman as they monopolise the representation of lingerie. This kind of imagery does more harm than good, as it reinforces the male gaze by hyper-sexualising a form of clothing, and also makes women more strikingly aware of their bodies and how they may differ to models'. I remember personally feeling worse about myself in lingerie a few times I'd worn some pieces as I felt like it just emphasised how unlike I was to the models who advertised the same pieces. This later shifted as I learnt to stop comparing myself so harshly to other women.
The more I became interested in lingerie and found pieces that I really liked, I loved seeing myself in them and taking photos. Loving myself was never something that came easily to me and only really happened when I started recognising and internalising the love I was receiving from the people around me, and learning to become more self-aware and self-appreciative. I didn't want to feel shame for something that made me feel good, even if it was something slightly controversial, as lingerie is hyper-sexualised and some people are uncomfortable around public expressions of sexuality. I wanted to normalise my body and although there are times when I use lingerie as a way to make myself appear more desirable or sexual, it's certainly not inherent to lingerie and women's bodies more broadly.
It’s interesting to me that lingerie is, in a sense, being reclaimed or perhaps repurposed. I guess I see a lot of contrast between your brand and something like Victoria’s Secret, which was not only started by a man, but as has come out in the last few years, been run in a toxic patriarchal way which I’m sure has not only affected the staff and models involved with the company, but also the customers.
In a personal sense, your growth and shift in self-perception is important, but how do you encourage people who buy your lingerie to feel the same sense of comfortability and empowerment?
The majority of my lingerie is made to measure and I can cater to the fit requests of my customers, this ensures greater comfort and I receive lots of positive feedback from my customers who feel glad they have pieces which are made just for them, as much of lingerie and women's clothing more broadly is standardised and doesn't work well for all different shapes, sizes and proportions. I try to have diverse representation on my page for my non-customers too, all the people who just see and observe my work, and also regularly receive encouraging feedback from young women who have felt more self-love by seeing different bodies look beautiful in lingerie.
That said, I don't hire models to showcase my pieces, due to my limited budget as a small business, so I often rely on my customers and occasional influencers to feature my work, and this is a limitation on how much diversity I can present on my page.
I believe empowerment comes from within and I can't necessarily influence that too heavily, no matter how much I'd like to. However, I think promoting a strong feminine brand and imagery for girls and women to appreciate all bodies, feel in tune with themselves and nature, and being able to have intimate pieces custom made that represent their style and enhance their personalities is what I strive to offer!
The ability to customise your pieces to the extent that you do, so that you can best meet the wants of your customers, seems particularly important – do you have any plans to outsource at all? Or is Fitzpleisure something that you want to keep entirely yours?
I don't have specific plans or visions yet for how I'd like to see my brand grow, I recently hired a freelance seamstress to help make some pieces so that I can manage my workload and if I were to keep increasing my production capacity it would be in small steps so that I can maintain the variety and customisation my brand currently offers. I would always like to have a strong role in the production of my pieces though and can't see it being outsourced completely.
Would you be able to talk through your creative process? What inspires you to make particular pieces, and what happens differently when you’re coordinating with a customer?
I usually take simple concepts and lingerie silhouettes I really like and build on them in ways which incorporate my own personal touch, usually through adding more intricate detailing or colour. I like playing with different colours, textures and love finding new materials everywhere I go and being inspired by fabrics. I often play around with different ideas and have clear pictures for new designs, and sometimes work with freelance pattern-makers to help make my more complicated ideas a reality. I adore lace-up corset detailing and that's a feature I've incorporated into some of my designs. I don't make structured bras with wires or padding as it would be harder to offer as much size variation as I do and they would be even more time consuming to make, so I mainly stick to soft cup bras.
I can customise colours, fabrics and sizing within most of the existing designs I offer for sale. I usually ask customers if they have a style, print or fabric in mind and work with them from there. It's often quite a back and forth process. I have so many fabrics and don't have a public gallery to view them so I can't show people all my options at once as it requires me physically taking them out of storage and taking photos to send, so I do try to help customers narrow down their selections first. I usually manage custom orders like these through Instagram DMs as it's easier to have more of a conversational approach. However, even through my webstore I don't have any product listed in a specific size (excluding occasional sample pieces) as all pieces are made to order, and therefore customers can select to have a piece made in any size for them in the notes section of the carts.
I like that the process with your clients seems almost collaborative in that sense. What makes made-to-order garments interesting to me, especially your custom lingerie, is that in a way you’re waiting for your clients to seek you out, and give you their specifications and requests and measurements and so-on – typically, the product is there and it’s ready and the customer kind of has to seek it out, hope that it’s what they really want, and in the case of normal lingerie hope that it fits.
That said, your process is obviously more time consuming and expensive relative to what’s available in the fast fashion market, which is something that some people struggle with. Where do you think this struggle comes from? And what do you think needs to happen to help people understand the cost of clothing?
It seems to me there's a huge disconnect in how people view the final products of clothing, with little awareness of how they were produced and how fast fashion operates as a whole. Clothing has been available in such huge quantities and at such low costs sometimes that you can practically find any type of garment for a very low price if you go for it in the simplest form or find it on sale. So I think people's valuation towards clothing is very obscured, especially as most people don't sew, as in most cases it's cheaper to buy something new than try to fix something damaged or make something from scratch.
When explaining how my brand varies to larger brands that have much larger production scales, people don't often realise the differences. Every operation is managed by one person in my case, from sampling designs and trialling new pieces (which require lots of drafting and editing), cutting fabric for each individual piece (the bras I make have up to 14 separate pieces which are all cut by hand), and sewing each piece one at a time, unlike in factories with multiple seamstresses that divide up each part of a piece to produce more things in less time. To give context, I rarely ever make more than 3 pieces in a single day! So my prices reflect the amount of time and care that goes into each piece. I am very much a quality over quantity person, and would rather sell fewer pieces but truly account for the cost that the pieces are worth, rather than try to reduce costs just to produce more.
Not all garments are made in the same way, and the scale of production will largely influence how much can be made in a given timeframe, and pricing of independent designers should not be comparable to that of large brands when the pieces sold are being made in completely different ways. Although noting this, all clothing is still handmade and there are real people putting in time behind every piece of clothing made. Having more transparency would certainly help make people more aware and considerate about what they're purchasing and how it has been produced, as such a large portion of garment makers are underpaid and exploited in developing countries, which is the main reason clothing can be sold for so little.
That idea of a real person or people being behind the creation of each garment is an important one. There’s definitely a lack of focus on what goes on behind the doors in these big international brands, and I think it’s important for consumers to remember that even local brands can (and often do) still produce overseas, which as you’ve mentioned often entails relying on an underpaid and often abused workforce that is predominantly women and people of colour.
That said, Saeed Al-Rubeyi of Story Mfg recently spoke out about how when he initially tried to do production in England he came across factories that were quite openly exploiting underpaid labour, so I’d definitely like to avoid demonising particular countries. Brands should take absolute responsibility for the welfare and treatment of the workers in factories that produce their garments.
Definitely! Many small brands do outsource as well which is another interesting aspect of manufacturing. Ultimately all brands should be considered individually as not all operate in the same way, and again that's where transparency is needed.
So, I suppose in a sense what I see is that by purchasing from you (as a one-woman brand), consumers have somewhat of an assurance that what they’re wearing has been created in a more just environment, which is something that I think deserves a lot of acknowledgement.
To wrap up on that note, we opened with your vision of your brand, so I’d like to end on how you’d like consumers (and maybe even just followers) of your brand to see your garments. How do you want people to feel when they wear your pieces?
Thank you! It's a lot of work running things just on my own, but it's also extremely rewarding. I think it's super important to consider the people behind brands and products and hope that people being aware of me and Fitzpleisure, can also transfer over into how they view other brands and fashion overall. Recognition, support and appreciation are what sustain creative industries after all!
I want my lingerie to make women feel comfortable, beautiful, and inspired! Comfort not just in one's own body, but in one's environment more broadly. I like conceptualising some of my designs as wearable art as they're not always very pragmatic or functional for regular use or being worn under other clothes and serve purely an aesthetic purpose. However, they adorn the body so beautifully and can enhance the beauty of the wearer.
Inspiration to me is even just feeling explorative and playful, being excited by colours and wanting to express yourself in different ways or see yourself in new ways is something that can be so energising and uplifting. I want people to look at my brand and feel inspired to wear something a little more captivating and eclectic, and feel more in tune with themselves to indulge in their sensuality or self-love, and view the natural world as a backdrop to feel free and open in any way they wish.
I probably have quite idealistic visions but I want Fitzpleisure to be akin to the most sweet and vivid of dreams that are ultimately a safe and self-oriented space for women to indulge in their desires!
You can see more about Fitzpleisure here. Words by Henry Johns / Image source
MORE LIKE THIS
