We love a sustainable fashion queen. And Hailey Bieber certainly knows how to hold court in that arena. The supermodel showed off her latest find, in a series of images posted to Instagram to promote her new skincare range Rhode. Posing in cult-favourite lingerie brand Cou Cou.
"Her stylist Dani Michelle have been such great fans of Cou Cou literally for months and so supportive and saying how much they love it and how it's their favourite underwear." Cou Cou’s founder Rose Colcord tells Hello! Fashion over the phone after she discovered Hailey had posted the pictures, "They asked for Cou Cou for Hailey Bieber and some other clients. And so I thought, Oh, you know what would be cute is if we got this embroidered. So it was hand-embroidered just to make it a bit more special."
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The request for Cou Cou came months ago however and so Rose only found out Hailey had worn it via Instagram like the rest of us, "I was like screaming. I was like, This is insane. I knew it was huge. But I also genuinely feel the same when I get an amazing message from like one of our customers. From people who have bought them and said 'I'm so in love with them.'"
The idea for starting Cou Cou actually came to her when an ex-boyfriend asked her why she didn’t have any nice underwear. "I was like, I have a whole drawer of Agent Provocateur and La Perla. What are you talking about? And he was like, you know, I mean, your daily underwear. It's always granny panties." Rose at the time was studying Philosophy with a focus in corporate social responsibility and ethics, and applying for a Masters in LA, "I came to realise that brands really can change cultural narratives and I started to just become hyper focussed on my daily underwear after my boyfriend said that and I realised how essentially I have these two drawers of lingerie and then granny panties from, you know, M&S or H&M. It just represented how as women like I had to pick between feeling comfortable every day or beautiful as if they're mutually exclusive concepts." Rose explained. "I just felt like maybe the reason people aren't paying any attention to our daily underwear as women, period, is because that's the one thing that isn't performative as a garment stores, as women. That's the one thing that we generally pick to wear that we don't expect to be seen."
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Cou Cou's offerings are made from 100% GOTS certified cotton
Rose had never wanted to start a brand, but Cou Cou was born when she realised we needed underwear for those of use who didn't want to have to choose and when she noticed traditional lingerie brands like Victoria's Secret which were created for the male gaze rather than female needs, were failing. Thanks to her studies she was also acutely aware of the social responsibility brands need to take when it comes to their environmental impact, "Everyone was so focussed on fast fashion and hyper aware of the impacts of the fashion industry on the environment. But no one was paying any attention to our daily underwear or underwear in general," she says, "Our underwear is actually the only thing we can't resell on Depop and that actually has the shortest life cycle of all of our garments."
That statement in itself was what inspired her to launch the brand, "I just literally in the middle of the night in November 2021, out of nowhere, I woke up at 3 a.m. and wrote the business plan for Cou Cou."
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Made in small independent factories in Portugal the brand has quickly gained traction as one of the key sustainable lingerie brands to have on your radar.. In order to recycle a garment you just cut out the tags from your Cou Cous et voilà they are then fully compostable, meaning they will naturally break down in the environment, "I call them intimate essentials… elevated intimate essentials made with 100% GOTS certified organic cotton." Rose tells us, "And basically why I call them and intimate essentials is because people will call it lingerie. But it's not lingerie or daily underwear."
"I want to carve this whole new category of intimate essentials that bridges the gap between our lingerie and daily underwear and make us feel comfy, cute and confident every day." With fans including Sydney Sweeney, Matilda Djerf, Paloma Elsesser and of course Mrs Bieber… it's a message everyone can cleary get behind.
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