Lauren Hutton, the 78-year-old model and actor who appeared on the cover of Vogue 26 times, is a discerning buyer of lingerie. “I never wore bras until I was 50,” she says. “I didn’t need them. Around 50—or maybe it was 47—I got a hold of an underwire bra, I think in Paris. And I picked one up and I put one on and I suddenly looked 30.”
This love affair lasted for about a decade. “Then around 60, I started taking them off in the backs of cabs, covertly, so the drivers couldn’t see. I’d unsnap them, pull one shoulder out, and stuff them in my purse. But ever since then, since 60 or maybe 57, I had been looking for a decent bra and I couldn’t find one.” That is, until the direct-to-consumer brand CUUP sent her a few of their signature minimalistic bras, which Hutton thought looked, “like the first Neutra buildings,” and were “smooth as a silkworm.”
Hutton—who is starring in CUUP’s newest campaign, Supported By, photographed by Alexandra Nataf—is perhaps so knowledgeable because she’s shopped for lingerie from the best of the best, but she’s never really needed it. She started modeling in the ’60s, when undergarments were far more conservative than they are today. “Panties went from your waist—you certainly didn’t see a belly button—to an inch past the tops of your legs,” she says. “No such thing as a hipbone showing, no no.” She preferred to go without. “I didn’t wear bras and I didn’t wear underwear,” she says. “It left a line, and it was uncomfortable to me. I just wore a T-shirt and jeans to work anyways, so I didn’t really need them.”
Still, she wanted beautiful undergarments, and looked the world over for the best. In addition to the bra she found in Paris that sparked her interest, she shopped at a renowned lingerie store in St Barths and even paid a visit to Queen Elizabeth II’s corset maker. “I only went once, but I never forgot it,” she says.
Despite having a prolific, decades-long career, when Hutton was approached to appear in the campaign for CUUP she says, “the hairs went up on the back of my neck… Those images can be so lurid, especially when you’re 422.” Her fears were assuaged when she learned that Nataf, a close friend, would be photographing the shoot. Hutton posed with the minimalist bras peeking out from under button-down shirts and blazers worn with jeans: natural, effortless. “I think that oxford was one that we pulled off the back of my chair,” she says.
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