Emily Bendell founded Bluebella in 2005 with a proposition the lingerie industry had somehow never taken seriously: design for the woman wearing it. Not for the person looking at her. For her.
To fund it, she pitched in rooms that were 95% male, asking men to back a lingerie brand that explicitly rejected their idea of what lingerie should be. Consider that for a moment. The very product she was proposing set out to dismantle the gaze of the people holding the chequebook, and she stood in those rooms and made the case anyway. That is not a values statement dreamed up by a brand agency; it is the origin of the company's entire point of view, and it gives Bluebella a weight most of its competitors simply do not have.
Twenty years on, the case has rather been made for her. Bluebella is stocked around the world, has designed lingerie for the Fifty Shades of Grey films, and holds its place in a brutal category by doing what it said at the start: directional design, fashion-led rather than frilly, sensual on the wearer's terms.
What earns Bluebella its place on Women's Work is the stubbornness of it. Plenty of brands now borrow the language of dressing for yourself; Emily built a company on it when the money in the room found the idea baffling. The result is lingerie you buy because of how it makes you feel from the inside, which was always the point everyone else kept missing.