Formfit Rogers

Formfit Rogers was an American foundation-garment and lingerie company formed in the early 1960s when the Formfit Company of Chicago, founded in 1917, merged with Rogers lingerie. Formfit made corsets and girdles first, then bras and briefs, and for a few years around 1960 its lingerie was designed by the Italian couturier Emilio Pucci. The business faded in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the name now belongs to a Colombian apparel company.

Corsets and girdles in Chicago, 1917

The Formfit Company was founded in Chicago in 1917, at the tail end of the corset era. Its headquarters held manufacturing, shipping and sales under one roof, with further facilities in Aurora, Illinois, west of the city. The early product was what the trade called foundation garments: mainly corsets and girdles, the boned and elasticated shapers that defined a woman's silhouette before the bra took over.

Over the following decades Formfit followed the market away from rigid corsetry. By mid-century the company was known for other types of lingerie, particularly bras and briefs, more than for the corsets it had started with. The founders' names are not recorded in the sources available for this entry.

Emilio Pucci's Chicago lingerie

The most interesting chapter came at the end of the 1950s. In 1959 Emilio Pucci, by then famous for his printed silk sportswear, decided to launch a lingerie line. According to his biography, his atelier in Rome advised him to produce it abroad, because a decade earlier he had struggled to match available fabrics to his prints for a first swimwear line. Pucci went to Chicago and gave the lingerie contract to the Formfit-Rogers mills.

The arrangement worked. A year later Pucci was made vice president in charge of design and merchandising for the company, an unusual title for a Florentine marquis at a Midwestern foundation maker. In this period the label produced intimate garments and gowns to his designs, and Formfit-Rogers enjoyed what its encyclopedia entry calls a renaissance of sorts. For a Chicago foundation house, putting a couturier known for printed silk in charge of design was a sharp change of course.

The Rogers merger

The formal merger with Rogers lingerie, which gave the company its double name, came in the early 1960s. Little is recorded in accessible sources about Rogers itself before the merger, beyond the fact that it was a lingerie company. The combination gave Formfit, a foundations specialist, a stronger line of slips, gowns and soft lingerie, which is exactly the area where Pucci's prints belonged.

Decline under new owners

In the 1970s Formfit-Rogers was bought by I. Appel Corp., a New York apparel holding company run by Norman Katz. The brand kept trading for another two decades, but the late 1980s were hard on it. Manufacturing moved to Mexico, quality control slipped, and department stores dropped the line. At the same time Victoria's Secret was turning lingerie into a mall-store fashion purchase, and an old foundation brand sold through department-store counters had little answer to it.

The remains were sold in pieces. In 1997 Jockey International acquired Formfit's seamless panties line, which it sold under a "Form-Fit" label, a sign that the seamless brief was the part of the business still worth buying. The rights to the Formfit-Rogers name itself are now held by Ingresar Apparel Company of Colombia.

Timeline

Year	Event
1917	Formfit Company founded in Chicago
1959	Emilio Pucci gives his lingerie contract to Formfit-Rogers
1960	Pucci named vice president for design and merchandising
Early 1960s	Merger with Rogers lingerie creates Formfit-Rogers
1970s	Acquired by I. Appel Corp. of New York
Late 1980s	Production moves to Mexico; department stores drop the line
1997	Jockey buys the seamless panties line

The dates do not sit neatly: Pucci's biography uses the Formfit-Rogers name for 1959, while the company history places the merger in the early 1960s. Either the merger came earlier than usually stated, or the biography uses the later name for convenience. For a museum the more useful fact is the one that survives in the clothes, the corsets and girdles of the early decades, and the Pucci-designed lingerie that showed what a Chicago foundation maker could do when it hired a couturier.

Last updated October 7, 2026