Marks and Spencer Lingerie

Marks and Spencer Lingerie is the bra, knickers and nightwear business of Marks & Spencer, the British retailer that grew from a market stall Michael Marks opened in Leeds in 1884. M&S has sold lingerie since it opened its drapery department in 1926, and for most of the century since it has been the largest bra seller in Britain. The company's own archive puts the current figure plainly: "one in three women wears an M&S bra."

No other high-street name has that kind of reach in British underwear. The story of how it got there is mostly a story of volume, sizing and a few very successful products.

From the Penny Bazaar to the drapery counter

The business began with Michael Marks, an immigrant trader who took a stall at Kirkgate Market in Leeds in 1884 and sold homewares under the slogan "Don't ask the price, it's a penny." He later went into partnership with Tom Spencer, a cashier at the wholesaler Dewhirst, and the pair opened a chain of Penny Bazaars. The company's head office is now Waterside House in Paddington, London.

Clothing came decades later. The drapery department opened in 1926 and included lingerie from the start. Staff bulletins from 1927 recorded the bestsellers as "fleecy knickers, free-run bodices, cami-bockers" and elastic garters. The oldest bra in the M&S Archive dates from the late 1920s, with cups of artificial silk and front panels of cotton and elastic.

For a period the lingerie, along with women's clothes and girls' school uniform, carried the label St Margaret. By 1950 all of it had moved under St Michael, the house brand the company introduced in 1928 and used across almost everything it sold. For several generations of British women, a St Michael label was what the inside of a bra looked like.

A fifth of Britain's bras by 1953

Scale arrived quickly. According to the M&S Archive, more than a fifth of all bras bought in Britain by 1953 came from M&S. At Christmas 1956 the Leeds store sold 660 pairs of knickers in a little over two hours. Until the 1990s the company also kept a policy of selling almost entirely British-made goods, which means that for most of the century the lingerie on its rails was largely British-made too.

The product timeline from those years reads like a short history of British underwear:

Year	M&S lingerie milestone
1957	Corselettes for full-body shaping
1961	First tailored slip, cut for the pencil skirt
1963	First tights on sale
1969	International cup sizes A, B, C and D adopted
1971	Lace unlined bra launched
1972	The lace bra becomes Britain's best-selling bra

The 1971 lace bra

The lace bra deserves its own paragraph. It was an unlined bra in lace, light and soft at a time when many everyday bras were still stiff and heavily constructed. The archive says it sold a million within 18 months of launch, and by 1972 it was the best-selling bra in the country. Lace was no longer reserved for the special-occasion drawer. It was in the everyday one, bought alongside the weekly shopping.

The 1969 switch to standard international cup sizes was less glamorous but arguably more important. A retailer selling that many bras could set the sizing habits of a nation, and M&S did.

Rosie, Autograph and the fitting room

The modern business is built in layers. Body by M&S covers the everyday basics. Autograph is the premium label. Collections such as Jasmine Lace, Boutique and B by Boutique sit between and above them. In 2012 the model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley launched her first range with the company, described in the company's archive as her first M&S range, which implies it was not the last.

Service matters as much as product. M&S introduced post-surgery bras in the early 2000s, offers in-store bra fitting, and added virtual fitting appointments in 2020 and 2021. Its size range now includes a dedicated F to K section, alongside full cup, demi and balcony styles and first bras for teenagers.

The website has also become a marketplace. Next to its own labels, M&S now sells third-party lingerie brands including Freya, Panache, Triumph, Sloggi and Bluebella.

The overseas business follows the same pattern. In India, the company reported that lingerie made up more than a fifth of its sales there, and that lingerie sales grew by about a third in the second half of 2013.

Still the default British bra

M&S Lingerie has rarely been fashionable in the way a Paris house is fashionable. That was never the point. Its achievement is ubiquity: a bra that most British women have owned at some stage, sized on a system the company helped to standardize. The M&S Archive at the University of Leeds now holds more than 72,000 objects from the company's history, the late-1920s silk bra among them.

Last updated October 7, 2026