Fantasie

Fantasie is a British lingerie and swimwear brand for fuller busts, dating from 1951 and today designed and produced by Wacoal Europe, the European arm of the Japanese group Wacoal. Its bras run from B to N cup on backs from 30 to 44 in US sizing, which the brand translates as up to a JJ cup in British terms. It sits in the same stable as Freya and Elomi, and of the three it is the one aimed at the woman who wants a well-engineered bra that looks like lingerie rather than a sports kit or a fashion statement.

A 1951 label in a Northamptonshire corsetry business

Fantasie's own site gives 1951 as its starting date and marked "70 Years of Fantasie" in its recent marketing. Beyond that year, the brand says very little in public about its first decades. We could not find a named founder or a founding town in any source we could check, and this entry does not guess at one.

What the public record does show is where the brand lives now. Wacoal Europe Ltd and its sister companies are registered at The Corsetry Factory, Rothwell Road, Desborough, Northamptonshire. One of those companies, now called Wacoal EMEA Ltd, was incorporated on 1 November 1920, and Wikipedia's account of Wacoal describes the British business it bought, the Eveden Group, as a lingerie manufacturer founded in 1920. Northamptonshire was a corsetry county long before it was a bra county, and the factory name on the register is an honest description of the trade the business came from.

Eveden, Freya and the fuller-bust specialists

For most of its modern life Fantasie belonged to Eveden, a British company that built a portfolio of fuller-figure labels rather than chasing the general bra market. According to the Wacoal article on Wikipedia, Eveden launched Freya in 1998 as a younger, more fashion-led label for larger busts, bought the American full-figure brand Goddess in 2002, and launched Elomi in 2008 for women with fuller figures as well as fuller busts, from a 34 back and D to K cups.

That division of labor is the key to understanding Fantasie. Freya gets the prints and the bright swim. Elomi gets the wider backs and the bigger bodies. Fantasie keeps the middle ground: classic shapes, lace and embroidery, careful grading across a long size run, and colors that change with the season but rarely shout. In a market where D-plus cups were long treated as a medical category, a house that split fuller-bust customers into three distinct temperaments was doing something unusual.

Wacoal's purchase in 2012

In 2012 Wacoal, founded by Koichi Tsukamoto in Kyoto in 1949, acquired the Eveden Group. The deal gave the Japanese company, already a giant at home, a ready-made position in European and American department stores in exactly the size bracket it was weakest in. Eveden's brands were folded into what is now Wacoal Europe, which today lists five labels: Wacoal, Fantasie, Freya, Elomi and Goddess.

The Fantasie website is now run in the United States by a company called Eveden Online LLC, a small leftover of the old name. The Desborough address remains the registered home of the European business.

The current Fantasie range

The brand sells three things: bras, matching briefs and nightwear, and what it calls bra-sized swimwear. That last category matters. A bikini top sold by cup and back size, with an underwire and a proper band, is a different garment from a small, medium or large triangle top, and Fantasie was one of the labels that made the bra-sized swimsuit a normal thing to find in a department store.

Within lingerie, the range covers most of the standard silhouettes: full cup styles, balcony and plunge bras, side-support bras, wireless styles and sports bras. The named collections on the current site give a sense of the house's priorities:

• Fusion, which the brand markets as tried, tested and trusted, built around side support and a smooth molded cup.
• Rebecca Essentials, a spacer-foam molded bra, the kind of T-shirt bra that holds its shape without the bulk of thick padding.
• Smoothease, another molded line.
• Illusion and Reflect, side-support styles, the second sold in several colorways.
• Envisage, a bralette range, a concession to the wire-free trend that most fuller-bust brands resisted for years.

Side support is the recurring idea. For larger cups, the problem is often less about lift than about tissue spreading toward the arm, and a sewn-in side panel is the fix that Fantasie returns to across several collections. It is unglamorous engineering, and the brand's reputation rests on it.

Where Fantasie stands

Fantasie does not sell on novelty. Its strength is a deep size run, a fit that stays consistent from one season to the next, and swimwear that is cut like a bra. The brand's weaknesses are the same as its strengths seen from the other side: the designs are conservative, and shoppers who want trend pieces in a G cup are more likely to be sent to Freya.

What has changed most since 1951 is the size chart. A label that began in the era of the long-line girdle now publishes bras up to an N cup in the American system, made by a British business owned from Kyoto, and still registered at a building called The Corsetry Factory.

Last updated October 7, 2026