Has the Male Gaze Been the Design Brief for Women's Innerwear for the Last 100 Years?

In a recent conversation with Vaani Chugh, co-founder of D’Chica, I found myself returning to a question that has followed the women’s innerwear industry for decades: who, exactly, has it been designing for?

Imagine if men's underwear was advertised the way women's innerwear is.

"Lifts."

"Enhances."

"Creates the perfect silhouette."

"Makes you look slimmer."

"Holds everything exactly where it should be."

It sounds ridiculous.

Because we've never expected men's underwear to improve men's bodies. We've expected it to support them. Men's bodies are never sculpted with their innerwear. They can have a belly all they like, wear a ganji so comfortable that instead of wanting to take it off when they get home, they prefer to live only in the ganji!

Women's innerwear, however, has spent more than a century trying to do something else.

Change them.

From corsets to bullet bras, push-up bras to plunge bras, and now everyday shapewear, the industry's biggest innovations have largely revolved around one objective: bringing women closer to an ideal silhouette.

The products have changed.

The design brief hasn't.

Which raises an uncomfortable question.

Has the innerwear industry been solving women's needs—or society's expectations of women's bodies?

And who has defined these standards for how a woman's body should look?

A recent article by Jennifer Adaeze Okwere revisits French physician Dr. Jean-Denis Rouillon's long-running research challenging one of the most enduring beliefs about bras—that wearing them is necessary to prevent breasts from sagging. But perhaps the more important takeaway isn't the debate over sagging itself.

It's that the conversation has expanded to examine the broader effects of restrictive clothing and prolonged compression on women's bodies—from restricted movement and breathing to skin irritation, pressure, discomfort and the normalisation of garments that women can't wait to remove at the end of the day.

Whether every claim withstands future scientific scrutiny is almost beside the point.

The research forces us to ask a question the industry has largely avoided:

Why has women's innerwear historically been evaluated by how well it changes the body, rather than how well it works with the body?

Why have we spent so much time trying to engineer women's bodies into a shape they were never meant to permanently hold?

For Vaani Chugh, co-founder of D’Chica, that question became an important starting point for thinking differently about the category.

"We realised that almost every product in the category starts with the same objective—how do we make a woman look better? Lift her. Shape her. Smooth her. Hold her in. We kept asking ourselves: why is that the objective in the first place?"

According to Chugh, even as women have increasingly become founders and decision-makers within the lingerie industry, the underlying philosophy has remained surprisingly consistent.

"The founder changed," she says. "The design brief didn't."

Her sister-in-law and co-founder Richa Kapila believes that's because generations of brands—whether founded by men or women—have inherited the same cultural assumptions about what women's bodies are supposed to look like.

"For decades, we've confused support with correction," she says. "A supportive product helps your body. A corrective product assumes your body needs improving. Those are two very different philosophies."

That distinction also helps explain the thinking behind D’Chica. As a women’s innerwear brand, D’Chica approaches product development from the perspective that innerwear should work with women’s bodies rather than expect those bodies to conform to a predetermined shape.

Its products are developed around how women actually move, work and experience changes in their bodies, with comfort, support and everyday wearability considered part of the design brief from the beginning—not features added as an afterthought.

That distinction becomes even more relevant as shapewear evolves from an occasional garment into an everyday category.

"We've gone from lifting breasts to flattening stomachs to sculpting waists," says Chugh. "Every few decades we invent a new way to reshape women and call it innovation. Very few people stop to ask why women's bodies need to be redesigned at all."

D'Chica's response has been to reject the starting assumption rather than simply redesign existing products.

Instead of beginning product development by asking how a bra should change a woman's appearance, the team begins somewhere else.

How should she feel after wearing it for twelve hours?

That single question changes everything.

Instead of designing for the mirror, D’Chica says it designs for the realities of women's lives—bodies that change through menstrual cycles, pregnancy, breastfeeding, age, weight fluctuations and long workdays.

"We don't believe women should have to adapt to innerwear," says Kapila. "We believe innerwear should adapt to women."

Interestingly, Chugh resists describing D'Chica as a "comfort brand."

"'Comfort' is marketed today as though it's an innovation," she says. "We think that's one of the biggest failures of the category. Comfort shouldn't be a feature. It should have been the starting point. Nobody congratulates a chair because it's comfortable enough to sit on. Nobody celebrates shoes because they don't hurt. Yet women have been conditioned to believe a bra that doesn't dig into them is somehow revolutionary."

For her, the real innovation isn't making women more comfortable.

It's refusing to accept that discomfort—or correction—should ever have been the price of wearing innerwear.

"Women have spent generations adjusting straps, pulling down bands, fixing cups and waiting to get home so they can finally take their bras off. We've normalized the idea that if a product changes how you look, it's okay if it constantly reminds you it's there."

Perhaps that's the real legacy of the male gaze.

Not simply that it shaped beauty standards.

But that it quietly became the design brief for an entire industry.

And perhaps the next era of women's innerwear won't be defined by who creates the next push-up technology or the next sculpting fabric.

It will be defined by the brands willing to ask a question the industry has avoided for over a century:

What if women's bodies were never the problem we were supposed to solve?