With her square-cut jade-black fringed hair, her crimson lips and her exclusively black wardrobe with discreet touches of white, Chantal Thomass' silhouette is recognizable far and wide as a fashion icon widely touted by style professionals and well known to the general public, who see in her one of the world's leading proponents of glamorous lingerie. Chantal Thomass was brought up in the Paris region, in a sedate bourgeois family. As the only child of a dressmaker mother and an engineer father, the little Chantal did not waste any time making a name for herself. When she was enrolled in a religious school, the young school girl immediately "customized" her regulation uniform. But her real adventure began towards the end of the nineteen-sixties. That was when she launched her first ready-to-wear brand, Ter et Bantine. Brigitte Bardot quickly became an unconditional fan of her off-beat, bohemian sense of style with its humorous undertones, followed by the fashionable Dorothée Bis boutique. Thomass broke with tradition by brashly using such surprising materials as wax cloth, flannelette or Lurex mesh.

Several years later - in 1975 to be exact - Chantal Thomass introduced lingerie into her fashion shows - creating a minor revolution in a decade heavily influenced by the women's movement. At the time, it was felt that women's undergarments should be made of the most basic materials and that their style should be entirely functional, when style was considered at all. Manufacturer's had only one real requirement: they must be practical. Chantal Thomass turned that state of affairs topsy-turvy by boldly adopting traditionally masculine fabrics, or by indulging in silk ornamentation and frills to her heart's delight. She successively rehabilitated the bra, the basque, the suspender belt, the corset, stockings, and later invented lace tights. "I treated undergarments much as outer garments - veiling and revealing women's bodies with lace and sensual transparent fabrics," the cheeky designer explained quite simply.

The Chantal Thomass style and label were launched that same year. Her signature look, which was extremely daring for the times, left an indelible mark on the fashion world in 1981, when advertiser Benoît Devarrieu created the logo and famous shadowgraph silhouette. By then the image was indelibly engraved on the collective unconscious... and as a result, sexy lingerie - or simply sensual, pretty underthings - became an object of desire, convincing women that they could be enticing and seductive, and, above all, that they could be beautiful for their own sake, by treating themselves to life's little luxuries." Little by little, the designer extended her activity to home decoration, opening a boudoir boutique in the heart of Paris. Designed as a ultra-feminine haven, it quickly attracted a cult following of women who loved to indulge their passion for frilly underthings.

In 1998, she joined the Sara Lee Corporation and began redeveloping her own label. She staged fashion shows and opened a new boutique designed by Christian Ghion in 2004. Today, the creations of Chantal Thomass are distributed in 18 countries and are still supreme examples of the ultra-feminine, sexy and glamorous style that opened the door for a good many other designers.