According to a report released by Zion Market Research Group, by the end of 2024, the steady growth of the global underwear market is estimated to reach $59.15 billion. But even with the increasing popularity of underwear, some women, transgender and non-duality people will feel afraid of passing the industry’s products. Finding space in a hyper-sex market can be complicated. Even for those who are not identified as trans or non-dual, trying to find stuffy underwear can be a daunting and insane task.
Cora Harrington, the founder and editor of the blog, The Lingerie Addict, found himself in a similar bondage. Harrington is still not satisfied after searching endlessly online and discovering that he has read product guides, comments and scrolling underwear photos. She recalls that many of the sites she met talked about underwear as a way to make herself look slimmer, which disappointed Harrington.
Although the Internet is full of fashion reviews from bloggers and journalists around the world, Harrington found that he unexpectedly missed a voice in a positive underwear discussion. The underwear addict was originally a place to encourage others to wear – and experimented with underwear to turn it into something other than “utility scaffolding.”
In the first year of the release, The Lingerie Addict found the audience. Harrington’s honest and thoughtful comments range from the relationship between underwear and identity, to the gender politics of underwear, to the proper size and self-awareness. She gave the reader a purpose and reason for caring about underwear.
“We don’t have a real underwear culture in the United States,” Harrington told us, noting that the market’s focus on young slimming models has led to the idea that underwear is not for everyone. Harrington tells us that she wants “people know that you don’t have to look at it in some way, become a certain age, reach a certain size, or be sexually interested in an underwear.”
In her latest book, Intimate Details: How to Choose, Wear and Love Lingerie, she breaks all aspects of underwear in a stylish and elegant way, helping people of all ages, sizes and genders to explore wearing and Test your own underwear.
One of the immediate highlights when looking through the pages of this book is that all the institutions shown are not gendered and always use gender-neutral language. Harrington explained that in addition to her publisher at Ten Speed Press, she made an administrative decision to keep her content as gender neutral and inclusive as possible.
“Underwear needs to be more inclusive and more acceptable; part of it is to make it inclusive and acceptable on the gender axis,” Harrington said. She tells us that the underwear market in North America often produces cis-heterosexual or exclusivity for those who disagree with this situation, adding that underwear contains “a very conservative industry and is slow to develop”.
Harrington said that another problem is that many consumers think that underwear is a boring indulgence. In an article in her blog, she pointed out that American customers are notorious for buying most pure beige T-shirt bras.
But with the release of her book, Harrington hopes to break the barriers created by the North American lingerie market. The book is divided into different sections covering underwear categories such as bras, underpants, special occasions, corsets, socks and corsets.
Harrington wants In Intimate Detail: How to choose, wear and love lingerie becomes a guide, readers can return again and again at different stages of their lives.
“I just hope that at the end of the book, people think underwear is easier to get close to them,” she said. “Because from my point of view, I only want more people to be excited and interested in underwear. I think this is a victory for everyone.”