Women's Fashion Brands B

Welcome to the B section of the Women's Fashion Brands directory. In this area of the fashion brand directory you will find women's fashion brands from leading apparel companies and fashion designers that begin with the letter B: 17 brand profiles in all, gathered in the grid below. When browsing this directory you will find some of the most stylish clothing and hottest fashion labels in the world of ladies fashion - and in this letter, an unusually outdoorsy cross-section of what a women's brand can be, with surf, snow and water labels standing alongside the dress designers.

If you know of an important women's fashion brand that begins with the letter B and is not listed in this section, please let us know, as the original B hub invited readers to do. And if you prefer to search by clothing category rather than by a specific clothing brand, the Clothes Guide linked from this page organises the same wardrobe by garment instead of by name.

Seventeen Brands, From Board Shorts to the Trench Coat

Start at the water's edge, where this letter is strongest. Billabong began on Australia's Gold Coast in 1973, when Gordon Merchant triple-stitched board shorts at home; Body Glove began in 1953 in Redondo Beach, where twin brothers Bill and Bob Meistrell are credited with the first practical wetsuit; and Burton built its women's range around snowboards, bindings, boots and winter outerwear, with over 40 years of mountain innovation behind it. Three B brands, three elements - surf, sea and snow - all founded on equipment first and fashion second.

The dress-and-designer tier answers them. Burberry is the letter's luxury anchor: Thomas Burberry's 1856 house, inventor of gabardine, maker of the trench and the famous check. Bill Blass carries American formal dressing from 1945 to a $700-million business; Betsey Johnson has partied exuberantly since the 1960's; BCBG Max Azria, founded 1989, put a designer's name on affordable occasion dresses before its 2017 restructuring; and Bruno Magli has handcrafted Italian women's shoes in Bologna since 1936. Birkenstock reaches back furthest of all - to 1774 and a German village - and its contoured cork footbed, from Karl Birkenstock's 1964 Madrid sandal, may be the oldest idea in this directory still selling.

The everyday wardrobe fills the middle. Bali supplies the intimates drawer, owned by HanesBrands and built on fit institutions like Double Support. Baby Phat merged hip-hop and high fashion in 1999 under Kimora Lee Simmons. Bisou Bisou mixed Parisian roots with a California state of mind from 1987. Boden sketched eight menswear pieces at a kitchen table in 1991 and became a family catalogue favourite. Bobby Jones turned a golfer's four-leaf clover into country-club womenswear in 1989. And the letter's honest footnotes matter as much as its giants: Ben Sherman's page preserves its 2018 note that the brand was not then focusing on women's clothing, while BC London and Bella stand as directory stubs whose originals recorded no history at all - kept, labelled as stubs, and never padded with invention.

Where the original B pages pointed readers onward - to company profiles in the names directory, to the HanesBrands and Kellwood and Global Brands Group pages, to the women's fashion brands directory pages 2 and 3, to the Fashion Designer Directory and the other letters of this directory from A to Z - those editorial links are carried in the rebuilt pages, woven into the copy or listed under More to Explore. The letter grid below carries the 17 profiles in A-Z order, and the alphabet bar above carries the other letters of the women's brands directory.

Every profile in this letter follows the brands rule for this directory: the facts are the originals' facts - founding years, designers, sales figures, restructurings and pauses as the original pages stated them - with shopping guidance built around them and nothing invented in between. Eleven of the seventeen originals reset on every direct fetch during this rebuild, so their profiles were reconstructed from the live pages as rendered, with their links and photos inventoried from that rendering. Start with the name you came for, or read the letter whole: B is a good letter to browse, because almost every way of dressing women - surf, snow, silk and sandals - is represented in it.

Photos From Our Original Guide