Gloves and mittens, then silk, then a name.

Vanity Fair Lingerie is the lingerie name of a company that started out making something else. VF Corporation’s company history says the business was established in Pennsylvania in 1899 as the Reading Glove and Mitten Manufacturing Company by John Barbey and a group of investors. An independent account agrees on the place and the year: Paula McLendon’s 1984 article in the journal Southern Changes says Vanity Fair Mills originated in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1899 as Reading Glove and Mitten Manufacturing Company, before “several changes of names and production lines”. English Wikipedia dates the founding to October 1899.

English Wikipedia says the company expanded into silk lingerie in 1913, was renamed Schuylkill Silk Manufacturing and branded its lingerie line Vanity Fair, and that the company soon after took the name Vanity Fair Mills. VF’s own timeline says the company was renamed Vanity Fair Silk Mills, Inc. in 1920, when it expanded into silk lingerie. The brand’s website, in a version archived in January 2025, says Vanity Fair has been making lingerie since 1919, and its history page marks 2019 as the brand’s 100-year anniversary. The same website credits founder John Barbey with the idea that lingerie should be both fashionable and functional.

The war left its mark on the company name. VF says the word “silk” was dropped from the name in the 1940s because of an embargo on the material during the Second World War, leaving Vanity Fair Mills, and that Vanity Fair Mills began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 1951.

The lingerie name then became the name of the whole group. In 1969, VF says, the company acquired the H.D. Lee Company — the jeans maker behind Lee — and renamed itself VF Corporation. VF’s own timeline describes Vanity Fair as its “namesake brand”. For the next four decades the lingerie sat inside a company that grew around jeans, workwear and outdoor goods: Women’s Wear Daily listed Wrangler, Lee, The North Face, Nautica, Vans and JanSport as VF’s primary apparel brands in 2007.

Reading to south Alabama, and VF to Fruit of the Loom.

From the late 1930s production moved south. McLendon’s 1984 Southern Changes article says Vanity Fair began shifting its manufacturing south in 1937 by opening a plant in Monroeville, Alabama, and that by the late 1950s the company had ceased all of its Pennsylvania production. The Encyclopedia of Alabama also records that Vanity Fair opened a sewing plant in Monroeville in 1937.

The article traces a wider network in the region. A textile plant opened in 1939 in Jackson, Alabama, where the company’s Clarke Mills began by making silk stockings and soon converted to rayon and nylon lingerie. Vanity Fair later built factories in the south Alabama towns of Atmore, Bayou La Batre, Butler, Demopolis, Luverne and Robertsdale, and by 1984 it ran two out-of-state plants, both in the Florida panhandle. A cutting plant opened in Monroeville in 1973, so fabric made in Jackson could be dyed, finished and cut nearby before going to the sewing plants. In 1976 workers at Clarke Mills in Jackson voted to form Local 118 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the article records.

The lingerie business left VF in 2007. On 23 January 2007 VF announced that it would sell its global intimate apparel business to Fruit of the Loom, Women’s Wear Daily reported. The business included the American brands Vanity Fair, Lily of France, Vassarette and Bestform, along with European names, and Fruit of the Loom planned to run them as Vanity Fair Brands under Curt Holtz, then president of VF’s intimates business. VF’s chairman and chief executive, Mackey McDonald, said in the release that the company was rebalancing its portfolio towards jeanswear, outdoor, imagewear and sportswear.

Fruit of the Loom has itself been a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway since 2002, English Wikipedia says, citing Berkshire’s announcement that the purchase closed on 29 April that year, and the same article lists Vanity Fair among its subsidiaries. The brand’s website carried a 2025 copyright line in the name of Vanity Fair Brands LP.

Design and documentation.

Underwear and basics brands in general live on a small set of surfaces. Before a garment is worn, its brand is carried by a box, a sleeve, a multipack bag or a card header on a peg; once it is unwrapped, the name moves to a woven waistband, a printed neck label or a small sewn-in tag; and in a store, a hang-tag or a fixture sign does the work that a shop assistant once did behind the counter.

Each of those surfaces has its own constraints. A waistband has to read in a narrow horizontal band, often repeated around the body, so a name set there tends to be short, wide and simple. A pack has to hold a name, a size and a style at arm’s length on a crowded shelf. A hang-tag sits close to the eye and can carry more words, a fuller logo and a line of copy.

The guides in this group look at those surfaces brand by brand: who started each name, who owns it now, how its labels, packs and advertising have changed, and where independent records and the company’s own account each stand.

A fashion name, a photographer’s brand and a set of collection names.

The brand’s own history page puts photography at the centre of its story. Its timeline, in a version archived in January 2025, says the fashion photographers Richard Avedon, Mark Shaw and Melvin Sokolsky shot pictures for its national advertising campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s, and the page credited its header photograph to Sokolsky. The same timeline lists, in the company’s words, a fabric called Silkenese in the 1920s, live showroom models in 1942, crystal pleating in the 1950s, leopard print in 1953 and bold patterns and colours in the 1960s.

In more recent decades the company lists a V-Back bra in the 1980s, the Illumination collection in 2000, Beauty Back in 2010 and Beyond Comfort in 2019, the year of its centenary; the archived site marked Illumination, Beauty Back and Beyond Comfort with the registered-trademark sign and used them as collection headings in its menus. Its About page carried two versions of the same paragraph, one headed Vanity Fair Lingerie and one headed Vanity Fair, so both forms of the name appeared side by side.

The name also lives on in two company names. VF Corporation kept its initials after selling the lingerie business in 2007, and Fruit of the Loom runs the brand through Vanity Fair Brands, the business name Women’s Wear Daily reported at the time of the sale and the name on the brand website’s 2025 copyright line.

For a design guide, Vanity Fair Lingerie shows how a brand name can outgrow its product and become the name of a group, then return to being simply a lingerie label when the group moves on — while the brand itself keeps telling its story through fashion photography and collection names. Compare it with Fruit of the Loom, its owner since 2007, and The North Face, a brand of VF Corporation, the company that grew out of the lingerie business. For this guide we use midnight navy, champagne and silk with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Vanity Fair Lingerie’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.