Cotton On

Cotton On is an Australian fashion retailer founded by Nigel Austin, who opened the first store in Geelong, Victoria, in 1991. The privately owned group is still headquartered in Geelong and runs eight brands, with 1,298 stores in 19 countries as of January 2025. Its intimates business is Cotton On Body, launched in 2007 to sell underwear and sleepwear and later expanded into swimwear and activewear.

From a denim jacket in 1988 to a Geelong store in 1991

The group dates its origins to Austin's first sale of a denim jacket in 1988, three years before the first shop. That store opened in Geelong, a port city on Corio Bay, southwest of Melbourne. Geelong has stayed the company's base ever since. The group's own site describes its global support center as "born on Wadawurrung Country," a reference to the Aboriginal people of the Geelong region.

The business grew as an Australian mall chain selling cheap, casual basics to young customers. It took fifteen years before Cotton On crossed its first border: the first New Zealand store opened in 2006 at the Queensgate shopping center in Lower Hutt, near Wellington.

2007: Cotton On Body, Typo and Factorie

The year after that first overseas store, the company launched three new brands at once. Cotton On Body was one of them, alongside the youth fashion label Factorie and the stationery and gifts chain Typo. Cotton On Kids had already arrived in 2004. Rubi, for shoes and accessories, followed in 2008, and in 2013 the group bought the Australian youth fashion chain Supré. The most recent name in the lineup is Ceres Life.

Cotton On Body started with underwear and sleepwear. That was a natural extension for a chain built on cotton jersey T-shirts, since briefs, crop tops, sleep shorts and pajama sets use the same knit fabrics and the same supply base. Over time the line added swimwear and activewear, which put it up against specialist swim labels as well as other chains.

What Cotton On Body sells

Wikipedia describes the line's starting point simply as "underwear and sleepwear," and the museum could not read the Body category pages directly, so this entry does not list individual product lines. The shape of the business is still clear from the group around it. Cotton On sells affordable everyday basics with a casual, youthful look, and its intimates follow the same logic: soft, knit-based pieces such as briefs, the bralette and sleep sets, priced for frequent buying rather than for investment. It is the opposite end of the market from the corsetry houses in this encyclopedia, and closer to a T-shirt drawer than to a fitting room.

The nearest equivalents elsewhere are the intimates sub-brands of other youth retailers, such as Aerie in the United States, and in Cotton On's home region the New Zealand chain Glassons, which sells basics and loungewear to a similar customer.

Fines, Xinjiang and a change of supplier

Fast growth brought scrutiny. In December 2012 the company was fined A$1 million for selling children's sleepwear that was flammable while labeled "low fire danger," a case that cut close to the sleepwear category Cotton On Body would later expand.

In July 2019 the ABC's Four Corners program reported that Cotton On sourced cotton from Xinjiang, linking its supply chain to forced labor in the region. In October 2019 the company announced that it had stopped buying cotton from Xinjiang over concerns about human rights abuses. For a retailer whose name begins with the fiber, the episode was a particularly awkward one.

Earlier that year, in February 2019, Cotton On had also begun selling adult wellness products on its websites, a quiet sign of how far the Body line had moved from the basic underwear it began with.

The Cotton On Foundation

The group runs a charitable arm, the Cotton On Foundation. Its site says the foundation has supported youth mental health since 2022 and has committed more than A$20 million to that cause.

Cotton On Body today

By early 2025 the group employed about 22,000 people across its eight brands. Cotton On Body remains one of those eight, selling underwear, sleepwear, swimwear and activewear from a company that still answers to its founder's hometown, Geelong, while trading in 18 other countries.

Last updated October 7, 2026