Anekdot: Stylish & Sustainable Lingerie from Berlin
Ellen Lewis
By ESTELLE PULESTON
Hailing from Berlin, Germany, Anekdot was founded in 2015 by Sofie Andersson after various stints in design, buying and visual merchandising. Having become disillusioned with the fashion industry’s overall lack of ethics and sustainability, and having recently begun sewing lingerie for herself, she wanted to create a brand that offered the opportunity to wear exciting, comfortable, consciously-made intimates on a daily basis.
The Anekdot collection includes wirefree bras and stylish bottoms, bodysuits in interesting fabrics, simple, elegant robes in silk and cotton, and a swim collection where many pieces are designed for versatile styling options, to encourage the idea of owning less clothing. It’s fashion that’s designed to feel good on the body and celebrate its natural curves, and which you’ll keep loving for many seasons to come.
Adhering to the motto that “waste isn’t waste until we waste it”, many of the brand’s garments are made using deadstock fabrics – some even from vintage market finds – meaning they’re strictly limited editions that can never be exactly reproduced once the material’s used up.
For customer favorites that Sofie wants to keep available longer term, she uses locally-sourced organic cotton or turns to options such as ECONYL® nylon (made from waste such as carpet fluff!), B.Recycled polyamide, and Q-NOVA® with ROICA™ recycled lace.
Most of what she sources however is surplus from an OEKO-TEX certified manufacturer in Italy. Maybe it turned out a slightly different color to what the original customer had asked for. Or maybe it has small defects that can be easily cut around when you’re manufacturing, as Anekdot does, on a smaller scale without the use of lasers.
She also invests time in thoughtful patterning that reduces fabric wastage to almost nothing. Even the scraps get used somehow; the Bouquet range is patchworked together from irregularly-shaped pieces of different black laces, while other materials might be turned into small accessories such as hair scrunchies.
Anekdot may be in its tenth year but it’s still, by design, a small company with only Sofie and her studio manager Sophia as core team members. She finds that this makes the business not only more efficient, but more sustainable too since there’s less pressure to mass produce and mass sell to cover increased staff costs.
As of 2019, the company has also worked with a small, woman-owned factory 4 hours away in Poland for selected items, but many items are still being sewn by Sofie and Sophia in Berlin. This allows them to continue offering customizations, such as swapping fabrics or creating a made-to-measure size.
Anekdot lingerie’s standard size range covers XXS to XL. Lingerie sets and bodysuits run from 135-295€ (approx. $140-310), and robes from 169-235€ (approx. $175-245). If you ever find yourself visiting Berlin, you can make an appointment to shop in person at the brand’s studio, right where the design and (some of) the sewing happens!
