Bali

The American bra and underwear brand Bali began life in 1927 as Fay-Miss, a company founded by Sara Stein. It took the name Bali Brassiere Company in 1935, merged into Hanes in 1969, and spent the following decades inside some of the largest apparel groups in the United States. Since December 2025 it has belonged to Gildan, the Canadian basics manufacturer, and it is run from Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Fay-Miss and the move to "Bali"

Very little of Bali's early history survives in public sources, which is common for American foundation-garment firms of the interwar years. What is recorded is the founding name and the founder. Sara Stein started the business as Fay-Miss in 1927, the same decade in which the brassiere was turning from a flat bandeau into a garment with shaped cups and sizes. Eight years later the company renamed itself the Bali Brassiere Company.

The choice of name is worth a pause. In the 1930s Bali was a Western byword for the exotic: the island had become a fashionable destination and a favorite subject for painters and travel writers. Naming a brassiere after it sold a sense of glamour that the product itself, a practical support garment, could not. The name has outlived the fashion that inspired it, and today the plain domain bali.com belongs to an Indonesian travel guide while the brand trades online as Bali Bras.

Under the Hanes roof

In 1969 Bali merged with the Hanes Corporation of Winston-Salem, the hosiery and underwear maker. That deal tied the brand to North Carolina and set its course for the next half-century. Hanes in turn became part of Sara Lee Corporation, the former Consolidated Foods, which took the Sara Lee name in 1985. For two decades Bali bras were therefore owned by a company better known for cheesecake and coffee.

On September 6, 2006, Sara Lee spun off its apparel business as Hanesbrands Inc., based in Winston-Salem. Bali became one of a large stable of intimate apparel names held by the new company alongside Maidenform, Playtex and Wonderbra, as well as Hanes underwear, L'eggs hosiery and, in Australia, Bonds.

Live Beautifully

The best-documented chapter of Bali's marketing is its "Live Beautifully" campaign of 2007, photographed and directed by Peter Lindbergh, the German photographer known for unretouched, black-and-white portraits of women. The agency KraftWorks NYC created the campaign and had handled Bali's advertising since 2005. Bringing in Lindbergh, a fashion photographer with a reputation for treating age and character as assets, fit a brand whose customers were mostly past their twenties.

What Bali makes

The brand's current positioning, set out on Gildan's site, centers on "solution-driven" design: minimizer bras, wireless bras and newer fabrics, with a tagline arguing that the first garment put on in the morning should not be the first one taken off. That is a fair summary of where Bali has always lived. It is an everyday brand, built on support and comfort rather than fashion statements. Its range covers bras, panties, sleepwear and hosiery.

From Hanesbrands to Gildan

Hanesbrands had a difficult 2020s. In 2024 it reported revenue of about 3.51 billion dollars and a net loss, and that year it agreed to sell its Champion sportswear brand to Authentic Brands Group for about 1.2 billion dollars. In August 2025 Gildan Activewear announced a deal to buy Hanesbrands, valued at about 2.2 billion dollars. Shareholders approved it in November 2025, and Gildan completed the acquisition on December 1, 2025.

Gildan, a large vertically integrated maker of T-shirts and basics, now lists Bali among its brands next to Hanes, Maidenform, Playtex, Comfort Colors and American Apparel. The brand Sara Stein started as Fay-Miss is close to its centenary, and it has now changed corporate hands four times without ever changing its name again.

There are no Bali pieces in this archive's product collection yet, which says more about where the archive's collecting started than about the brand's reach in American underwear drawers.

Last updated October 7, 2026