Bonds

Bonds is an Australian underwear and basics brand founded in Sydney in 1915 by George Allan Bond, an American who set up George A. Bond & Co. Limited to import women's hosiery and gloves. Within three years the company was knitting its own stockings and making underwear, and the name has since become the default word for a cotton singlet in Australia. Today Bonds sells underwear, bras, socks and sleepwear for men, women and children, and since December 2025 it has sat inside the Canadian apparel group Gildan.

From imported gloves to a Sydney cotton mill

Bond started as a trader rather than a manufacturer. The first stock was imported hosiery and gloves for women, sold into a market that still bought most of its fine knitwear from Britain and the United States. In 1917 he began making hosiery himself in Redfern, the inner-Sydney suburb that was then full of small workshops. By 1918 the business had added underwear, produced in Camperdown.

The big step came in 1923, when the company opened a cotton-spinning mill at Wentworthville, west of Sydney. The machinery was imported and cost about 150,000 pounds, a large sum for an Australian clothing firm of the period. Spinning its own yarn gave Bonds control over the cotton that went into its knit underwear, and the area around the mill was later renamed Pendle Hill.

Expansion had a price. In 1927 George A. Bond & Co. went into liquidation, and a new public company, Bonds Industries Limited, took over the business. The founder's name stayed on the label, which is why Australians still say "Bonds" rather than any corporate title.

Chesty Bond and the athletic singlet

The brand's most famous piece of marketing was a cartoon. In 1940 advertising manager Ted Moloney and artist Syd Miller created Chesty Bond, a square-jawed, good-natured hero who gained his strength whenever he wore a Bonds Athletic singlet. Miller is said to have based the jutting chin on the New South Wales politician Jack Lang.

The strip first ran in Sydney's The Sun newspaper on March 19, 1940, three times a week. By September 1942 it was appearing daily, which may make it the first daily advertising comic strip anywhere. Its wartime storylines were openly patriotic, and several artists drew it after Miller, including Will Mahony, Virgil Reilly, Cec Linaker and John Santry. The strip ended in 1963 after 23 years of continuous publication.

For a lingerie collection the singlet story matters because it set the template for everything Bonds later made for women: plain cotton and cotton-blend knits, sold as comfortable everyday wear rather than as fashion. The women's range of briefs, crop tops and soft wire-free bras grew out of that knitting heritage, closer to a wireless bra than to the molded, structured pieces of the big foundation houses.

Owners: Coats Paton, Pacific Dunlop and Pacific Brands

Bonds changed hands several times in the second half of the 20th century:

Year	Event
1970	Merged with Coats Paton Pty Ltd
1987	Acquired by Pacific Dunlop
2001	Moved into the newly formed Pacific Brands Holdings
2016	Acquired by Hanesbrands on July 15
2025	Hanesbrands acquired by Gildan on December 1

Under Pacific Brands, Bonds sat beside other Australian clothing names in a portfolio built from Pacific Dunlop's consumer businesses. The Hanesbrands takeover in 2016 put Bonds in the same group as Maidenform, Bali, Playtex, Berlei and Wonderbra. When Gildan completed its takeover of Hanesbrands in a deal valued at about US$2.2 billion, Bonds came along as part of the package.

The end of Australian manufacturing

Bonds was for decades one of the larger textile employers in New South Wales. As late as 2006 the brand still made about 40 percent of its goods in Australia. Four years later that figure was zero: by September 2010 Pacific Brands had stopped manufacturing in Australia, with about 1,850 jobs lost across its operations. For a label sold for so long as a piece of Australian identity, the closures were hard to square with the advertising.

Since then Bonds has worked as an importer and brand owner. It designs in Australia and sources finished garments from overseas factories, the same model used by most mass-market underwear labels.

Bonds today

The current range covers men's, women's and children's underwear, socks and sleepwear, with women's briefs and soft bras as a core part of the business. Pricing remains at the budget end of the market, and the brand sells through its own stores and website as well as through other retailers. The lingerie museum holds no Bonds products in its archive at present, which says more about where the archive's sources lean, toward fashion lingerie, than about the brand's reach. In Australian drawers Bonds is probably the most common label there is, and the company that started out reselling gloves in 1915 now belongs to a Canadian group best known for blank T-shirts.

Last updated October 7, 2026