Dimanche Lingerie is a Moscow lingerie company specializing in corsetry: structured bras, bustier sets and shaped briefs. The brand is recorded as founded in 2001, and the company itself says it has been making corset lingerie for more than twenty years. It sells mainly wholesale, to shops across Russia and the CIS, and runs two further lines, Acappella and Domenica Romana.
Sunday, twice
"Dimanche" is French for Sunday. The company's seamless underwear line, Domenica Romana, takes the Italian word for the same day and adds "Roman." The repetition is presumably deliberate: one name in French for the corsetry, one in Italian for the basics, both pointing at the same idea of a day off.
A French name on a Russian brand is a familiar move. It borrows the prestige of Paris lingerie without claiming French manufacture. In Dimanche's case the more relevant foreign link is Italian rather than French, as the company's own account makes clear.
A note for researchers: the domain dimanche.ru belongs to an unrelated leather-goods maker in St. Petersburg, founded in 1998. The lingerie company trades from dimanchelingerie.ru.
Corsetry as the core
The word the company uses for its main product is corset lingerie, and that has been the line from the start. In the Russian trade the term covers more than laced corsets. It means bras with firm structure, often with wires, side boning or multi-part cups, matched with high-waisted or shaping briefs and sometimes a longline or bustier top.
That is technical work. A corset bra or a longline bra has more pattern pieces than a soft cup, more places where tension has to be right, and less forgiveness in sizing. Earlier accounts of the brand said it used Leavers lace from Calais and silk from Italian mills. The company's own pages do not say so, and this entry does not repeat it. What the company does stress is design.
Italian design, Russian marketing
Dimanche describes its method as a combination of Italian design, modern Italian and Southeast Asian production technology, and Russian marketing, adapted to Russian and CIS customers. In plain terms, collections are designed with Italian input, made using a mix of European and Asian manufacturing techniques, and fitted and sold for the home market.
The arrangement puts design credibility and fit to local measurements in one package, which neither a pure importer nor a pure domestic factory could easily offer.
A wholesale house, not a boutique
Earlier descriptions pictured Dimanche as a luxury label with its own boutiques. The company's current business is different. It works B2B, selling to retail partners rather than directly to shoppers, with individual discount schemes for its trade customers. Its address is a Moscow office on Novodmitrovskaya Street, in the north of the city.
For a corsetry brand, wholesale makes sense. Structured lingerie sells best where a fitter can help a customer find the right size, and independent lingerie shops are where that fitting happens. A wholesale house supplies dozens of such shops rather than running a few of its own.
Two sister lines
Over the past decade or so the company has added two lines that move away from corsetry. Acappella is designer casual clothing and knitwear, and the company says it has been producing casual clothing and knitwear for more than ten years. Domenica Romana is seamless underwear, the soft, knitted-in-the-round opposite of a boned corset set. Readers comparing the two approaches can see how construction changes the garment in our underwire vs. wireless bra exhibit.
The three lines together cover the full spread of a lingerie shop's stock: structured sets for the display window, seamless basics for the drawer, and knitwear for everything else. Dimanche, more than twenty years in, is a supplier to the shops rather than a name on the high street.
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