House of CB

House of CB is a London womenswear label founded in 2010 by Conna Walker, who started it at 17 by reselling ready-made dresses on eBay. It is best known for body-hugging party dresses cut to suggest an hourglass figure, and its range has at various points taken in lingerie, swimwear, shoes, accessories and, since 2020, bridal. For a lingerie encyclopedia the interest is less in its bras and briefs than in the way it borrowed the language of corsetry, boning, satin panels and laced backs, and put it on the outside of a going-out dress.

An eBay shop called Celeb Boutique

The business began small and secondhand in spirit, if not in stock. Walker borrowed £3,880 from her father and began buying finished garments to resell online under the name Celeb Boutique. The name told customers exactly what they were getting: dresses that looked like something a celebrity had worn in a paparazzi photo, at a fraction of the price.

The next steps were the usual ones for a seller who outgrows a marketplace. Walker built her own website, moved from reselling to designing, and renamed the company House of CB, keeping the initials of the old trading name. A sister label, Mistress Rocks, followed in 2016. In 2019 Walker was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list, a common marker for direct-to-consumer founders of that decade.

Corsetry worn as a dress

The House of CB silhouette is the reason the brand belongs in this archive. Walker designed clothes "to give the illusion of an hourglass silhouette," and the tools for that illusion come straight from foundation garments. Many of its dresses rely on fitted bodices, shaping seams and sweetheart necklines that take over the job a separate corset bra or bustier would otherwise do underneath.

This is an old idea with a long history. Structured bodices moved from under clothing to over it many times in the twentieth century, from 1950s evening wear to the bustier tops of the 1980s and 1990s. House of CB's version was tuned for social media: tight, photogenic and built to hold a shape in a phone camera. The difference between a longline bra and a bustier or corset is a useful guide to the shapes such bodices imitate.

Lingerie and swim lines

Alongside the dresses, House of CB has sold lingerie and swimwear as part of its wider range. They follow the same logic as the clothes: satin, lace and smooth stretch fabrics, high-cut legs and shaped bodies that read as outerwear as easily as underwear. The current homepage, checked for this entry, leads with gowns, lace dresses, mini dresses and coats rather than intimates, which is a fair picture of where the brand's weight lies. Lingerie at House of CB is a supporting category, not the core.

Celebrity customers as marketing

The brand's growth was driven by visibility more than by advertising in the old sense. Its garments have been worn by Beyoncé, Gigi Hadid, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez and members of the Kardashian family, and each sighting fed straight back into Instagram, where the brand had about 4.5 million followers by May 2024. That loop, from a famous body in a fitted dress to a product page within hours, is the same one that built a generation of online fashion labels in Britain and the United States.

What separates House of CB from many of its peers is that it moved into physical retail and kept its design in-house. The company says its collections are developed by a London design studio staffed by a women-led team.

Oxford Street and Stratford

The brand now trades from bricks and mortar as well as online. Its flagship store is on Oxford Street in London's West End, at number 225, and it also lists a shop on Montfichet Road in Stratford, the address of the Westfield shopping center in east London. Bridal appointments are offered alongside the ready-to-wear.

House of CB's own description of its mission is to dress "women for every kind of event with total confidence," from parties to weddings. That is broad, and the brand has broadened to match. For lingerie history its contribution is narrower and easier to pin down: it is one of the clearest examples of the 2010s habit of turning foundation-wear construction into the visible part of the outfit, and it built a London business, with shops in the West End and in Stratford, on that idea.

Last updated October 7, 2026