Lingerie has a storied image, historically shaped by how others see it.
Corsets enforced ideals with painful precision—imposing impossible waistlines, injuring ribs, restricting breath. Design–its color, form, and material provoked an external response rather than an interior experience. Lingerie, as a discipline, was rarely granted autonomy as a site of expression or pleasure on its own terms.
The word feminine is a slippery one. Historically—across art, literature, and design—the feminine has been treated as ornamental, admired but flattened, stripped of complexity. The female body became an inert object: a surface to behold, to possess. What remains absent mainly is the interior perspective—the lived feeling of inhabiting a vibrant, changing body rather than merely observing it from the outside.
Cult classics:
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Araks approaches lingerie from that missing vantage point.
Designed by and for women, our work is rooted in the female gaze. We work from within the body, beginning with sensation: the tactility of silk against skin, soft and luxurious. We approach color as artists—hues and palettes used to convey mood and create story. Form and function are developed in dialogue with the bodies they support, honoring variation, movement, and change over time. Araks pieces are not costumes or made to correct or hide; they are companions to the body’s natural rhythms.
One can’t talk about the female gaze without Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) — Agnès Varda’s intimate, time-bound portrait of a woman seeing herself, and the world, anew.
We are ever inspired by artists and writers who worked wholly outside of this framework: the independent authority of subjects like Alice Neel; the rich interiors of Édouard Vuillard; the dynamic intimacy and use of color in Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstractions—each centers experience and creative presence over desirability shaped by the male gaze.
Like these works, Araks lingerie resists excess. Line, color, and form are distilled to their essentials, allowing the wearer’s body, presence, and inner life to contribute to the composition. In this way, each piece is co-created—imbued with an inherited history, shared with a lineage of artists and women who create their own worlds outside and within.
Everyday staples:
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From$70
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$140
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From$70
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