La Perla

La Perla is an Italian luxury lingerie house founded in Bologna in 1954 by Ada Masotti, a corsetiere and dressmaker. It made its name with fine lace, silk jersey and sculpted bras sold at the top of the market, passed through four owners in the decade after 2008, went through insolvency in 2024 and was rescued in 2025 by the American businessman Peter Kern.

Few lingerie houses have had a more dramatic last twenty years. Its first fifty were steadier.

Ada Masotti's Bologna workshop

Ada Masotti started La Perla as a small corsetry workshop in Bologna in 1954, at the start of Italy's postwar economic boom. Bologna was not a fashion capital in the way Milan later became, but Emilia-Romagna had a strong base of knitwear and garment workshops, and Masotti brought a corsetiere's precision to lighter, softer foundations.

In the 1960s the company widened its palette, producing colorful, floral and checked lingerie at a time when much lingerie still came in white, black or flesh tones. It also made its first bikinis and swimsuits.

Silk jersey and the triangle bra

The 1970s brought the product that defined the house for a generation: a soft triangle bra in silk jersey. It suited the unstructured fashion of the decade and showed that a luxury bra could be minimal instead of armored. In 1983 La Perla introduced what it called the under-jacket, lingerie designed to be seen under an open suit jacket, a small step toward lingerie as outerwear.

Alberto Masotti's expansion, 1981 to 2007

Ada's son, Alberto Masotti, ran the company from 1981 to 2007 and built it into an international brand. In 1985 production extended to men's underwear and beachwear. In 1994 the house launched the Sculpture bra, still one of its best-known shapes. In 2000 the Icelandic designer Steinunn Sigurdardottir became creative director of ready-to-wear, part of a move into clothing that ran alongside the lingerie.

Two pop-culture moments helped. In the 2006 Bond film Casino Royale, Daniel Craig wore Grigioperla swim trunks, the group's menswear line; the trunks later sold at auction for 44,450 pounds. The 2007 Cage Bustier, a strapped corset, was worn by Victoria Beckham and later by Beyonce at the 2014 Grammy Awards.

Four owners in ten years

The family sold in October 2008 to JH Partners, a San Francisco private equity firm. The timing, weeks into the global financial crisis, was poor. Under the new owners the house collaborated with Jean Paul Gaultier in 2011 and launched a shapewear line, ShapeCouture, the same year.

In July 2013 the Italian entrepreneur Silvio Scaglia and Pacific Global Management bought the company for 69 million euros. In February 2018 Sapinda, the investment group of the German financier Lars Windhorst, acquired La Perla. Neither change of ownership produced a stable business.

Insolvency, 2024

In February 2024 a Bologna court declared La Perla Manufacturing, the Italian production company, insolvent. Proceedings ran in parallel in Italy and in the UK, where the group's holding companies were based. The fate of the Bologna atelier and its workers became the central question of the sale.

Peter Kern's rescue of La Perla, 2025

The buyer was Peter Kern, the former chief executive of Expedia. In June 2025 he acquired key assets, including the Bologna production plant, paying about 25 million euros for the site against a minimum price of 22 million. The full deal, which combined three transactions under different insolvency proceedings, was completed on 30 September 2025. It was the first use of the EU's principles for cooperation between courts in cross-border insolvency cases in a deal of this kind after Brexit.

With support from Italy's industry ministry and the regional government, the Bologna atelier reopened in September 2025, saving about 200 jobs. The new management said it would focus on re-editions of archive pieces, bespoke and made-to-order lingerie, and new collections.

What survives

The brand's value has always been in its workroom: the patterns, the archive and the seamstresses who know how to make them. That is exactly what the 2025 deal bought back. Seventy-one years after Ada Masotti opened her workshop, La Perla is again a Bologna company first, with the factory, rather than the logo, at the center of the plan.

Last updated October 7, 2026