China’s lingerie shelves looked completely different five years ago. Padded cups, heavy underwire, push-up structure everywhere: the whole category copied a Western silhouette that Chinese women were buying because there was nothing else on offer. That is no longer true. Wireless, wire-free, “no-wire” bras (无钢圈内衣) now account for more than 58 percent of online bra sales in China, up nearly 20 percentage points since 2020, growing at a compound annual rate of 18 percent or higher according to industry white papers. For any brand selling intimate apparel into China, this is not a niche trend to monitor. It is the market.
The shift has a name in Chinese social commerce: 舒适内衣, comfort-first underwear. It reframes the bra from a shaping tool into a piece of clothing you are meant to forget you are wearing. Search interest for related categories, including period underwear, jumped 300 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2026, and multi-layer gusset engineering has been compressed from 3-4mm down to 1.5-2mm while keeping the same absorption. That level of fabric R&D investment tells you this is not a marketing repositioning bolted onto old stock. Factories are re-engineering the product.
Who built this market: domestic brands, not foreign giants
The clearest sign of how far this shift has gone is who lost. Triumph (黛安芬), the German brand that defined structured, underwired lingerie in China for decades, has been quietly retreating from the mainland’s main shopping districts, with Chinese media reporting store closures and a shrinking retail footprint as domestic comfort-first brands take over the category’s centre stage. That is a foreign heritage brand losing ground to local challengers on its own core product, in its own category, in a market it used to dominate.
Neiwai (内外) is the brand most often credited with starting the shift. It built its identity around the “No Wire, No Shame” idea years before comfort became a mainstream buzzword, and it did so with unretouched campaign imagery showing women of different body shapes, skin tones and ages rather than a single idealised model. Bananain (蕉内) took a more technical route, marketing itself on fabric science and smooth construction, essentially selling comfort as an engineering claim rather than a lifestyle claim. Ubras built scale through livestream and Xiaohongshu-native distribution, moving fast on trend cycles that legacy brands could not match. None of these three needed a Western playbook. They read the Chinese consumer directly and built for her.
What ties them together is not the product alone, it is the refusal to sell insecurity. Older lingerie marketing in China, much like the category globally for a long time, sold the idea that a body needed correcting. Comfort-first brands sell the opposite message, and Chinese consumers, especially urban women under 35, have rewarded that pivot with real revenue.
Body positivity on Xiaohongshu is a commercial strategy, not a slogan
On Xiaohongshu, body-positive lingerie content performs because it solves a trust problem that catalogue photography cannot. A flat product shot on a size 4 model tells a shopper almost nothing about how a garment will sit on her own frame. Real user posts, showing a range of body types trying the same bra, do the persuasion work instead. Brands that lean into this, publishing diverse creator content rather than a single polished hero image, consistently see stronger saves and comment engagement than brands running traditional glamour photography.
The tone matters as much as the visuals. Captions that talk about how a bra actually feels after eight hours at a desk, rather than how it looks, tend to outperform. Reviews and honest before/after fit notes read as credible in a way brand copy never will. A Xiaohongshu store and promotion strategy built around this kind of grounded, creator-led storytelling is what separates lingerie brands that convert from brands that just get impressions.
Douyin is where the try-on happens
Xiaohongshu builds the brand story. Douyin closes the sale. Try-on video, whether short clips or livestream, is the format that actually moves lingerie inventory on the platform, because it answers the two questions a shopper cannot resolve from a static photo: does it show under clothing, and does the band dig in when she sits down. Livestream hosts who demonstrate range of movement, not just a static pose, consistently drive stronger conversion than hosts who simply hold the product up to camera.
This is also where price gets tested in real time. Comments during a livestream will tell a brand, within minutes, whether a price point feels fair for the comfort claim being made. Brands that ignore that feedback loop and run Douyin as a one-way broadcast channel waste the platform’s biggest advantage. A properly resourced Douyin strategy treats try-on content and live commerce as the main conversion engine, not a supplement to Xiaohongshu awareness.
Sizing is where most foreign brands actually fail
This is the part brands underestimate most. Chinese band and cup proportions do not map cleanly onto European or American sizing charts. Average band sizes run smaller and cup depth-to-band ratios differ, which means a straight international-to-metric conversion table will misfit a meaningful share of buyers, generate returns, and generate the kind of critical Xiaohongshu review that follows a brand for months. Return and complaint rates for foreign lingerie brands entering China without a localised size chart are a known pain point, and one bad fitting review can undo weeks of paid content.
Local comfort-first brands solved this early by developing size charts from Chinese anthropometric data rather than adapting a Western one, and by publishing fit guidance directly inside product listings and short video content. A foreign brand entering the category now needs the same investment: real local fit testing, not a spreadsheet conversion, before the first SKU goes live on Tmall or Douyin.
Put together, the opportunity is specific rather than general. It is not “sell lingerie in China.” It is comfort-first product, fitted to Chinese measurements, told through honest Xiaohongshu storytelling, and sold through Douyin try-on content. Brands still running a padded, underwired Western catalogue into this market are competing against Neiwai, Bananain and Ubras on the exact ground those brands already own.
Sources: 2026年内衣市场：技术驱动下的增长蓝海与2032年展望; 昔日巨头黛安芬退场，本土内衣品牌”接棒”主舞台, 新京报; 2026年无钢圈内衣选购参考, CNASA
Harry Huang is the founder of Ecommerce China Agency. He has spent the last decade helping apparel and beauty brands enter Tmall, Douyin and Xiaohongshu without the guesswork that sinks most first launches, including two lingerie brands that had to pull and re-cut their entire size range after a European chart failed on Chinese buyers in the first quarter. If you are weighing whether your product, and your size chart, are actually ready for this market, get in touch with our team before you commit to a launch date.
