Barbara Paris

Barbara was a French lingerie house founded in Paris in 1926 by Marcel Bena. It started not as a lingerie brand at all but as a maker of elastic fabric, moved into girdles, came late to bras, and sold refined everyday lingerie under the slogan "Barbara, c'est moi!" until its owners announced in 2018 that the name would be retired in 2019. Its story runs through almost the whole French corsetry century, and its ending is typical of how many mid-sized houses of that era closed.

An elastic mill in 1920s Paris

In 1926 the material mattered more than the garment. The corset was in retreat, hemlines were up, and women wanted foundations that moved with the body. Elastic fabric, knitted or woven with rubber threads, was what made that possible, and Bena's company was founded to make it. By 1930 Barbara had turned its own fabric into finished goods, specializing in girdles, the stretch foundations that took over from the boned corset between the wars.

A year later, in 1931, the firm made its first exports to the United States and moved to the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, in the old garment and trimmings quarter of the 10th arrondissement. Selling French girdles to America at the start of the Depression was a bold choice, and it shows how strong the Paris name already was in foundation wear.

Girdles for half a century

For decades Barbara was a girdle house first. The French Wikipedia records that the Béna family took over the company in 1950, and the brand rode the long postwar boom in shaping garments, when a girdle was a daily item for most adult women. Its descendant today is the control brief, lighter and shorter but built on the same idea of firm elastic panels.

The fall of the girdle in the late 1960s, under pressure from tights, miniskirts and a younger generation that refused to be held in, forced every foundation maker to change. Barbara's answer came in 1970, when it began making bras. In 1980 it turned more fully toward women's lingerie: matching bra-and-brief sets, lace and color, the territory where houses such as Simone Perele and Lejaby were also competing for the French department-store customer.

"Barbara, c'est moi!"

Barbara's positioning in its later decades was refined, wearable lingerie made for a range of body shapes, sold through independent lingerie shops rather than through its own chain. The slogan "Barbara, c'est moi!" put the customer, not a model, at the center. The firm added the Ravage brand in 1990 and a swimwear line in 2000, the usual moves for a lingerie house trying to fill the year beyond the bra season.

Receivership and Korean owners

The 2000s were hard for French mid-market lingerie. Production moved east, independent shops closed, and chains took the customer. In 2009 Barbara went through court-supervised restructuring and was taken over by Huit, the Rennes lingerie maker founded in 1968. That rescue did not last; Huit itself was placed in receivership in February 2010 and was later liquidated.

In June 2010 the Korean importer Namyeung Vivien Corporation bought the Barbara brand and relaunched it as Groupe Barbara with capital of 4 million euros, adding subsidiaries in Spain and Italy that September. The company stayed headquartered in Paris. By 2018 it was sold through about 350 retailers.

The end of the name

In October 2018 the director, Olivier de Croizant, announced the closure of the brand's only boutique, in Lyon, a round of layoffs, the end of the Barbara brand in 2019 and the launch of a new brand called Bibiche in its place. After 93 years the name that began on an elastic loom in Paris was retired by its own owners.

The archive holds no Barbara pieces yet. A collector looking for them should start with the girdles of the 1950s and 1960s, when the house was at its most important, and with the lace sets of the 1980s and 1990s that carried its slogan.

Last updated October 7, 2026