For Palisadian Carol Maloney, lingerie should be as sexy and sophisticated as the word sounds when it rolls off the tongue. A designer with a 30-year career in the fashion lingerie business, Maloney is launching a new line that will debut at Saks in January. The label, called Carol Malony Signature, features bras, panties, camisoles and teddies made with Chantilly laces and silk ribbons. Designed for women ages 25 to 40, the black and cotton-candy-pink lingerie outfits come in a handful of styles, such as “Little Bow Peep” for the padded half-cup bra with embroidered bows and “Tickle Me” for the triangular soft-cup bra with a detachable feather. “I’m 55 and I want to wear it,” says Maloney, who has lived in Pacific Palisades since 1998. She opened her design studio on the ground level of the Spectrum building at Sunset and PCH three years ago because she wanted to be close to the beach, which she calls her “power spot.” Her line is French- and Brazilian-inspired, with skirted thong and bikini underwear. Prices range from $50 to $70 for bras and $20 to $30 for panties. “We call it ‘bridge’ because prices are not quite [as low as] Victoria’s Secret but it’s not La Perla,” says Maloney, who is passionate about bringing women high-quality, comfortable and affordable lingerie. “Hopefully, it’s the piece in your lingerie drawer that you wouldn’t mind if someone saw,” she says. A San Fernando Valley native, Maloney has always had a thing for beautiful lingerie, even before she was old enough to have discussed it with her mother. “I thought women’s breasts were beautiful when they were pushed up high,” she says, referring to bustiers and European-style lingerie that made women look voluptuous. When Maloney was in her early 20s, she flew to Montreal, “where they have the closest thing to a European market,” and remembers gazing at the French-style lingerie’brands like Lejaby and Simone Perele–in the windows of the Place Bonaventure market. “I just was knocked out by that kind of product,” she says. “I fell in love with it.” After graduating from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a philosophy degree and moving to San Francisco for a brief time with her husband, who was studying to be an architect, Maloney decided she wanted to return to Los Angeles and open her own fine lingerie business. She applied for and received an economic-opportunity loan and rented a narrow 1,000-sq.-ft. retail space in the Promenade mall in the Valley in 1976. Her shop, named “Fannie” after her grandmother, was located on the second floor, in the Saks Fifth Avenue wing. She imported European lingerie and transformed the empty 2,000-sq.-ft., rent-free space behind her retail shop into an atelier to provide clients with custom services like “build your own slip.’ “The term ‘lingerie boutique’ was new language,” she says. “It was a big step for my clientele because there was no competition at that time. The bra makers did everything in mass quantity, and making a strap change would have been an act of Congress. “The names of the past were Bally, Olga, Vanity Fair. These were billion-dollar iconic businesses that were not into fashion; they were into bread and butter. There was Frederick’s of Hollywood, which my customers weren’t interested in, or there was traveling to Europe, where you find these beautiful pieces and get shocked by the fact that the bras are over $200 and the panties are $150.” Within a year, Maloney’s business grew into a chain of four retail stores in the Los Angeles area and she began developing her own designs, which sold as well as or better than the imported labels. She also designed the store interiors and the marketing and sales catalogs, experience that led to her being asked to be a consultant to the forerunner of Victoria’s Secret. Maloney currently imports and exports lingerie internationally and is a supplier of specialty lingerie to Victoria’s Secret. She says her embroidered butterfly panty design was recently the No. 1-selling panty in the store. Her five-person team includes Jim Poleski (CEO), Kim Thayer (product management director), Rose Poulsen (design director) and Samantha Swain (sales/marketing director), in addition to a small sewing staff that makes the samples here in the Palisades. The firm employs an international sewing force for production. “I don’t know where I got my second wind, because I’m old enough to retire,” says Maloney, who is inspired by the three young women on her design team. She attributes her success over three decades to staying focused on lingerie and learning to master her trade. “When you really specialize,” she says, “you can build a craft.”
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