From a young age, bikinis meant more to me than a couple pieces of fabric to swim in. To me, it symbolised summer—a time to spend with loved ones by the beach. Having grown up in a Greek family, naturally, as the sun-loving Europeans we were, summer was the pinnacle of the calendar year. Growing up with women who loved to lounge under the sun evidently had a lasting effect on me.
Every summer, we sit on the same beach. Different bathers, different beach chairs, different versions of the same women we were the year before. All in different phases of life, but the same laughter, the same tanning oil (Carroten, naturally), and the same—if not even more food. A sacred family tradition.
Almost ritualistically, we arrive and undress into our bikinis, fitting our curves so differently each year as our bodies evolve and change. Pull up a chair to the mouth of the shore to enjoy the water and each other's company.
It's crazy to think about how when I first decided to start Doxxia, I had no idea the depth behind what bikinis would eventually symbolise to me. When I started the brand, I was just a 20-year-old girl who struggled to find bikinis that fit her bust—a girl who, at her core, just liked to make things, so asked her yiayia to help her whip one up.
Little did I know at the time, sitting at my yiayia’s kitchen table, cutting up one of her old dresses over some Greek coffee, learning how to sew for the first time, that it would lead me down a path of so much growth.
All I wanted at that point was a cute bikini that actually fit me—it seemed so simple, so simple I could do it myself—and then I did. After many years in the mirror of shopping centre change rooms in tears, hating my body, hating my curves for not being able to squeeze into the styles I liked without overflowing or in fear of it looking “too sexual,” it felt like a deeper calling—to fix that narrative for other girls experiencing the same.
Doxxia has essentially become a fragment of me, of my experience on this earth—I grow alongside it. Whatever I tend to go through on a personal level, I see it paralleled in my work subconsciously. On reflection, how can I not, when it all has come from a place deep within me? When I’m aligned, I don’t even feel like it is a conscious choice—it flows through me and spurs out. When I’m disaligned, I see it reflected in the business.
When people would ask what I did for a living, I used to joke and say, “Oh, I just make G-string bikinis in my grandmother’s basement,” but as I get older, I see how it is so much more. Working alongside my grandmother—a woman who wasn’t even allowed to wear a bikini at my age—me being one of the first liberated women from a line of ethnic, subservient women, I’m starting to see the significance and the power behind that. The power of having choice, and further, the privilege behind that. For me, it feels like Doxxia is a way to bridge the old with the new. To carry on the beauty behind tradition: working with my grandmother, her passing down her knowledge to me, making everything by hand—and then the new being liberation. Liberated to be able to wear what I want, owning my body and not having the overarching, internalised, misogynistic shame for doing so.
I often think about the women who came before me. A lineage of women who were proxied off (organised marriage) for a good deal of just the right amount of donkeys, goats, or land. I feel grateful every day for the strength of the women who broke these chains to give me the space to live the life I do now.
Unfortunately, these misogynistic values and belief systems are still amongst us—it just presents itself under passive and more digestible language and, personally, I think even filters into us subconsciously and can be internalised when we aren’t aware.
In my experience, men-and no pun intended, but not all men (lol) - either like to downplay what I do, mansplain a better, more productive way of how I should be doing it, or in juxtaposition, because of their blatant inability to control their cardinal urges to look at a bikini without frothing at the mouth, make Doxxia seem like a promiscuous thing. Of course, missing the whole vision.
For years, this has made me anxious. I tried to stop this by blocking any man that goes to follow the Instagram page (unless they are my friend who truly supports the vision—thank you to you), and truthfully, any time a man goes to follow Doxxia to perv—I do wish I could banish these types of men off the face of the earth.
But along my journey, I've learnt there is nothing I can do about these creeps and the perceptions of bikinis through a lustful lens (except block them—one creep at a time—poof, bye). If my yiayia’s story has taught me anything, it’s that this is so deeply ingrained in our societal fabric. All I can control is my little corner of the world—my little corner of DOXXIA—where we celebrate our bodies and make cute bikinis for boobs of all sizes. So we can all sit on our different beaches, in our own corners of the world, with the people we love, by the water, feeling good in our bodies and in some cute bikinis—without shame.
To me, Doxxia symbolises female empowerment at its core.
There is nothing more heartwarming than receiving a message from a customer who expresses how the bikini made her feel comfortable, sexy, and empowered. The years and many hours of hard work on top of the sewing machines doesn't feel heavy, knowing that I’m doing it for something bigger than me. Doing it for the women who don’t have that many options as busty girls—or the women who came before me who didn’t have a choice to pursue a career like this, or even to be able to wear the product that I make. Who would probably be banished from their village for even breathing near a bikini.