Lingerie designers Elise Olson and River Takada-Capel at Olson’s studio in the River Arts District. photo by Rebecca D'Angeloby Phaedra A. Call

It’s no wonder designers who make lingerie by hand are hard to find. After all, why go through the hassle and potential embarrassment of a personal fitting with a designer when you can just swing by Victoria’s Secret? (Or choose the low-budget, no-frills option, a six-pack of Hanes at Target?) For many women, convenience is key. But for plenty of others, the mass-produced, machine-cut female undergarment simply doesn’t fit. Call it an unexpected footnote to the women’s lib movement, but now, at least a few Asheville-area designers have broken the traditional clothing-design mold and have started designing and sewing lingerie by hand, sparking a trend that is both inspired by women and, so far, made by women. The result? Lingerie as it was meant to be: it’s fun, it’s sexy and it fits.

At 34, Elise Olson is too young to have lived through the ‘60s-era women’s lib movement. Maybe that’s a good thing for a woman who would rather design better bras than burn bad ones. Olson advocates women’s empowerment through lingerie, rebuking the ad campaigns of certain mainstream lingerie brands as unrealistic and discouraging for real women. She is passionate about the need for women to feel confident in their skivvies. “I get a lot of women contacting me who can’t find lingerie to suit or fit them. I like the aspect of working with women individually to give them something that they’ll feel both comfortable and sexy in,” she says. She takes a firm stance against lingerie that does too much “enhancing”—adding an underwire here and too much padding there, creating illusions about a woman’s body at the expense of comfort and function.
Olson’s designs aren’t about making eye candy of oneself. They aren’t meant to be worn only to be ripped off again. If there was ever an armchair undergarment philosopher, it’s Olson. She notes that “lingerie is a way of feeling, not just a way of looking.” Whether she’s fashioning voluptuous red-and-black garters and panties or dainty yellow-and-white bras or sensuous, crushed-velvet purple camisoles, her focus is on the woman. As her brand name, On the Inside, implies, she knows that it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

photo by Rebecca D'AngeloAs a businesswoman, she’s found success surprisingly quickly. After taking up full-time lingerie design for only a year, she’s found customers in Asheville, around the country and in Paris and Hong Kong. With her studio in Asheville’s River Arts District, she feels a strong sense of community among designers here. While some of her patronage comes from boutiques like Custom in West Asheville, the big engine behind her sales growth is the website Etsy.com, an online marketplace for handmade items. In her Etsy shop, bras and camisoles tend to run in the $30 range and panties cost around $20, though a custom-made set can run as high as $62.

Like Olson, River Takada-Capel, a 21-year-old born in Tokyo but raised in the Chapel Hill area, doesn’t conceal, lift, wire or pad a woman’s body with her designs. “Lingerie is about celebrating our bodies and our love for our bodies. Why drape [them] in something that doesn’t celebrate that?” she says. Now a Haywood Community College student, Takada-Capel is ultra-hip, shouldering her college textbooks in a tote she fashioned from plastic grocery bags. Her swirls of dark hair frame her ebullient expressions, and she has a hint of vintage—or maybe just playful dysfunction—as suggested by the rectangle of scotch tape that holds her glasses frame together. Her designs are made from retro slips that she collects, boils, dyes and reconstructs into lacy slip-skirts and camisoles. She’s essentially a one-woman assembly line.

Takada-Capel, who sells her products in boutiques around the state—like Roulette Vintage in Carrboro, N.C., and Rags Reborn in Asheville—started out sewing doll clothes when she was five. Then, in third grade, she started constructing her own clothes and later put them on other people. She is the model for what she calls the do-it-yourself generation. “We are getting back to the ways of our grandmothers by sewing our own underwear,” she says. (This is not to say, however, that her designs come anywhere near “granny panties.”) Her hand-dyed bra, which sells for a reasonable $28, is a fresh and flirty reconstruction of found silk slips, which may have in fact been worn by someone’s granny. “Lingerie is private and fun,” she says. “It’s not just for women in couples. Women can wear lingerie and feel sexy on their own.”

photo by Rebecca D'AngeloIt seems simple, but that idea actually runs counter to so many million-dollar ad campaigns, and as a result, runs counter to the ideas about lingerie that so discourage women. Handmade local lingerie may seem like a far-out departure from Victoria’s Secret, but it’s actually a bit of a revival movement that seeks to empower women to feel strong, sexy and comfortable. Designers like Elise Olson and River Takada-Capel are hoping more people will try it on for size. 

To see more of Elise Olson’s lingerie, go to www.OnTheInside.etsy.com. For more on River Takada-Capel’s designs, go to www.riverbasinoutfitters.com.