In February 2010, fashion designer and product developer Dana Donofree was in the final stages of planning her wedding and collecting bridal showers gifts. Then she found a lump in her breast. It was not a false alarm.
She postponed her wedding, scheduled a double mastectomy, then chemotherapy. The treatments were successful but extremely arduous. And she was thrown into early menopause at age 27.
When it finally came time for the rescheduled wedding, she dug into the loot from her bridal showers.
“I'm pulling out this sexy lingerie, fun little teddies, and I'm trying them all on because I thought I wasn’t that different,” Donofree said. “I thought I just had new boobs instead of my real boobs and it should be fine. Well, nothing fit me.”
She dropped off all of the gifts from her friends and family at a donation center. She realized her body had dramatically changed forever.
“I was depressed—looking at myself with no nipples, scars all over my body, developing body dysmorphia—a total disconnection to my physical body,” Donofree said. “And one night I woke up in a sweat (early menopause-induced) and was like, I need to do something about this. I have the career in fashion, I have all the connections, and I'm kind of crazy enough to do this.”
Three years later in May 2014 Donofree launched “chest-inclusive” lingerie brand AnaOno with the philosophy that “cancer gives you enough problems, your underwear drawer shouldn't be one of them. Whether you have two boobs, one boob, no boobs, or new boobs, we're here to support you.”
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And just in time to celebrate a decade in business, the brand is celebrating a major milestone: AnaOno products are now available at Victoria’s Secret, a store that was once a reminder of the fashion industry's societal perceptions of post-mastectomy bodies as unattractive and undesirable.
Donofree credits other champions of chest inclusiveness, including Jill Brzezinski-Conley, who appeared on the Today Show in 2013 and often urged mainstream lingerie companies to offer inclusive bras. A grassroots petition collected nearly 130,000 signatures urging industry leader Victoria's Secret to carry mastectomy bras.
“This collaboration signifies a monumental step towards inclusivity and body positivity in the fashion industry,” Donofree said in a statement. “With Victoria's Secret’s brand transformation and commitment to celebrating and supporting all women, AnaOno's journey comes full circle.”
Victoria’s Secret underwent a major rebrand in 2021 after criticism of its longstanding use of homogeneously tall, thin, wing-wearing models in its annual fashion show and in its ads. The brand’s longtime CEO Lex Wexner, came under fire for ties to Jeffrey Epstein and stepped down in 2020. An investigation that same year by The New York Times said the brand had fostered a “culture of misogyny, bullying and harassment.” Market share plunged.
Victoria”s Secret canceled the 2019 show, and kicked off the revamp by ditching its famous “Angels” and recruiting a diverse “VS Collective” in its place, which included soccer star Megan Rapinoe, Chinese-American freestyle skier Eileen Gu, biracial model and inclusivity advocate Paloma Elsesser, and Indian actor and tech investor Priyanka Chopra Jonas.
The Victoria’s Secret fashion show was reimagined in 2023 as Victoria’s Secret: The Tour, streamed on Amazon Prime and featuring 20 creatives from around the world. And the brand continues to feature models of diverse sizes, colors, and ages.
If the AnaOno collaboration is any indication, the brand seems to be staying on track with inclusivity.
Meanwhile, Donofree was becoming aware of different image problem. Most of the messaging around breast cancer featured pink ribbons and happy, older women smiling on billboards, jumping up and down in pink feather boas and tutus.
“I've never met a breast cancer patient who’s smiling and jumping up and down, so happy that they have breast cancer,” she said.
Her solution was a fashion show of her own, with breast cancer patients as models. In 2017, just as criticism of Victoria’s Secret’s unrealistic depiction of women was mounting (and viewership of its fashion show fell to 6.7 million in 2017 from 10.3 million in 2011, and sunk to just 3.2 million in 2018), AnaOno partnered with Cancer Culture for their first runway show.
Gearing up for the event, the producer had one urgent request: don’t expose the models’ nipples. That wouldn’t be a problem, Donofree said, because most of the models didn’t have any.
The show went viral and was featured in The New York Times, and People magazine featured AnaOno’s 2018 runway show. The shows have showcased women from 18 to over 70, some including exclusively models with metastatic breast cancer—all patients who were dying of their diagnosis.
It really does feel like a full circle moment now that AnaOno is sold on the Victoria’s Secret website, featuring diverse models, including women who have had mastectomies.
AnoOno bras come in every conceivable shape and size to accommodate any surgical outcome. Whether patients remain flat after a mastectomy or whether they reconstruct, Donofree wanted to help patients make choices that are right for them, rather than choices society is telling them to make.
“So if they don't want to have breasts after their surgery, they can still have something beautiful and sexy and soft against their skin that allows them to express their femininity if they want to,” she said. “Or it's pocketed if they want to have breast forms, or sometimes they want to be flat, sometimes they want breast forms—you get the choice.”
Stay tuned for a potential AnaOno runway show in the spring of 2025.
AnaOno is also available at Third Love, Soma, and at AnaOno’s online shop.