For Marlies Dekkers lingerie is not just a pair of underpants or a bra, but chiefly an expression of women’s increased self-awareness. Her first designs, such as the bare bottom dress and the spider’s web bra, already show Dekkers dispensing with the image of docile women who swathe themselves in charming lingerie to please men. Dekkers’ vocabulary is just as radical as the underlying idea. Frills, bows, and lace, the standard traditional ingredients of erotic lingerie, are utterly taboo in her work and are replaced by taut lines, ingenious straps, and sophisticated openings at unexpected places. To give women their self-confidence back, whether they’re sixteen or sixty, and to make them proud again of their own bodies – that is Marlies Dekkers’ most important motive. Marlies Dekkers provides insight not only into the designer’s motives but also into her style and sources of inspiration, into her ambition, and into the way in which she managed to expand a one-man business in the attic into a genuine multinational company. Writers and thinkers like Baudelaire and Bataille, filmmakers like Greenaway and Kubrick, painters like Gainsborough and Fragonard, Delft Blue, flowers and plants – they are all part of Dekkers’ universe and contribute to the creation of an oeuvre with a look completely its own. Marlies Dekkers is an ideal introduction to the life and work of the designer. For everyone who wears her lingerie, is interested in Dutch fashion, is studying fashion, or wants to read about one of the Netherlands‘ most successful women.