Chantal Thomass

French lingerie on the Paris runway starts, by most French accounts, with Chantal Thomass, the designer born in Malakoff, on the southern edge of Paris, on 5 September 1947, who put lingerie into her ready-to-wear shows in 1976 and has spent much of her career since fighting to keep her own name on the label. The house she founded in 1975, Chantal Thomass, is now part of the Chantelle group.

Ter et Bantine, 1967 to 1975

Thomass came to fashion through drawing school rather than a couture apprenticeship. Her first ready-to-wear label, Ter et Bantine, was a partnership with her husband Bruce Thomass, a former Beaux-Arts student, and it ran from 1967 to 1975. In 1975 she set up her own company and gave it her name.

The 1976 lingerie collection

In 1976 she folded a first lingerie collection into her ready-to-wear line, and French sources credit her as the first designer to show women on the runway in lingerie. That is the part of her record that matters most to this museum. Through the 1970s, lingerie at the Paris shows was something worn under the clothes; Thomass treated garters, corsetry and lace as part of the outfit, and as a subject in their own right. In 1980 she worked with the Austrian hosiery maker Wolford, a partnership she would return to.

How Chantal Thomass lost her own name

The business side went badly in the 1990s. In 1995 her principal shareholder, the Japanese group World, dismissed her for "faute caracterisee" (serious misconduct). World held the rights to exploit the brand until 2035, which left the designer barred from using her own name. During those years she kept working under contract, for Wolford again and for the lingerie brands Rosy, Rien and Victoria's Secret.

About three years later, after litigation, she recovered the brand. She brought it into the Sara Lee group, then the owner of Dim, keeping a 34 percent stake and the artistic direction.

Live models in the Galeries Lafayette windows

Thomass has always had a showman's sense of how lingerie gets attention. In 1999 she caused a scandal by putting live models in lingerie in the windows of the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris. The stunt did what it was meant to do and announced that the name was back in her hands.

Rue Saint-Honore and the move to Chantelle

In September 2004 she opened a boutique on rue Saint-Honore in Paris, fitted out as a boudoir, with alcoves and pink silk on the walls. In May 2011 Dim decided to part with the brand and sold it to the Chantelle group, which owns it today. Her signature fringe of bangs is part of the logo, which makes Chantal Thomass one of the few lingerie labels whose trademark is a haircut.

Earlier versions of this entry attributed several quotations to Thomass and claimed she showed lingerie as outerwear "a decade before Gaultier." Neither is supported by the sources consulted, and both have been removed.

Last updated October 7, 2026