Araks

Araks is a New York lingerie and swimwear label founded in 2000 by the Parsons-trained designer Araks Yeramyan. It is known for soft, lightly constructed bras and briefs in unusual colors, for making its whole collection in New York, and since 2020 for an organic cotton line. Swimwear followed in 2013, and the brand now also makes sleepwear and resort clothes.

Three colored pencils

Yeramyan tells her own origin story in color. Her earliest memory of drawing is of three pencils her father gave her, red, yellow and blue, and she says every picture she made was limited to that palette until she was about ten. She went on to Parsons School of Design in New York, studying design, painting, photography and silk-screening, and graduated in fashion design. After some years working in the industry, she launched her own lingerie collection in 2000.

That was an odd moment to start a small underwear label in Manhattan. The American market was split between department-store foundations and the mall, and Victoria's Secret owned the idea of what lingerie looked like. Araks went the other way, toward quiet shapes, light fabrics and very little padding.

A bra built like a sketch

The house style is spare. The core of the range is soft-cup and wire-free: triangle bras, bralettes, simple underwire styles with little padding, and briefs cut cleanly with fine trims. Vogue once named an Araks bra the best soft-cup bra, and The New York Times's T Magazine described the label as "modest underpinnings rendered in exquisite colors". Both lines get at the same point. The garments are plain; the colors are what make them hers.

Color as the signature

Yeramyan admits she drives her fabric dyers "crazy" chasing a shade, and she cites unlikely sources for her palettes, from an off-season waterpark to a children's sensory playground. The studio keeps every color swatch it has ever made, stored by the hundreds in binders and jars. That library saves sampling new dyes from suppliers each season, and it also amounts to the brand's archive. In a category still dominated by black, white and nude, Araks is one of the few labels that a buyer can recognize by color across a showroom.

Made in New York, by women-owned workshops

Production is the least glamorous part of the story and the most unusual. The brand says 100 percent of its collection is cut and sewn in New York. When Araks began, the city had few factories that specialized in lingerie, so Yeramyan worked with individual seamstresses she met along the way. Over the years she committed production to them, invested in equipment and helped them run their businesses, and the company says it has supported the start of three women-owned production facilities in New York. Its patternmaker, Wanda, is an intimate apparel designer in her own right.

That claim corrects an older account that had some of the range made in Peru. On the brand's own record, the cutting tables are all in New York.

The fabrics and where they come from

Materials are listed mill by mill on the company's site. The core lingerie line, launched in February 2020, uses a GOTS-certified organic cotton rib milled in Spain. A lower-impact group mixes 70 percent organic cotton with 30 percent REFIBRA, an upcycled cotton-and-wood-pulp fiber, also knitted in Spain. Cotton crepe is woven and dyed in Italy from Egyptian cotton, and the boxer shorts are cut from Turkish organic cotton woven in Japan. Many of the swimsuits use ECONYL, regenerated nylon made partly from old fishing nets. The company went through a third-party sustainability assessment with Bluesign and designs around "evergreen" core fabrics so that leftover yardage goes into later seasons rather than landfill.

Swimwear, sleep and the Salon

Swimwear arrived in 2013 and became a second pillar. Vogue wrote that Araks had "mastered the art of swimwear", with simple shapes in the same color language as the lingerie. Sleepwear and resort pieces followed, designed to be worn with past and future collections rather than replace them.

The brand sells mainly online and through stockists. In New York it runs the Araks Salon, a by-appointment showroom at 401 Broadway in lower Manhattan, and offers virtual fittings for customers elsewhere. Twenty-six years in, Araks is still owned and designed by the woman whose first name is on the label, and it still makes everything within a subway ride of her studio.

Last updated October 1, 2026