Celebrating the sisterhood

Who is your muse? Which remarkable woman inspires you to dream, grow, and be the best version of yourself? This International Women's Day, let's reverse the stereotype that women don't uplift women. Let's celebrate the sisterhood by honoring our muses! I'll start by introducing you to the muse who became my soul sister: writer, activist and feminine feminist Naomi Wolf.

Right around the time that I designed the bra that helped shape the Third Feminist Wave, Naomi Wolf penned the book that launched it: 'The Beauty Myth' (1991). Exposing the tyranny of our obsession with physical perfection, she wrote: "She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.” And: "The myth urges women to believe that it's every woman for herself." This was an empowered woman with the sincere desire to empower others. I had found my muse.

Entering a new phase of womanhood, we sometimes 'outgrow' our muses, but mine continued to rise right alongside me. Naomi was there when I navigated motherhood, built my career and entered midlife. Journaling her own growth, she kept inspiring me to dream bigger and never cease to look for the truth. Together, we defined my femininity. When Naomi and I finally met for an interview recently, we both felt like finding a long-lost sister. Holding each other’s hands, looking into each other's eyes, I realized the magnitude of Naomi's gift to me: she had helped me become my own muse.

Happy Women's Day, enjoy these inspiring quotes from a selection of Naomi Wolf's books:

1. 'The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women' (1991) “For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious--or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution.”

2. 'Fire with Fire: New Female Power and How It Will Change the Twenty-First Century' (1993) "While victim feminism urges women to identify with powerlessness and be sexually judgmental, power feminism is unapologetically sexual, for it understands that good pleasures make good politics."

3. 'Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood' (1999) "I believe the myth about the ease and naturalness of mothering—the ideal of the effortlessly ever-giving mother—is propped up, polished, and promoted as a way to keep women from thinking clearly and negotiating forcefully about what they need from their partners and from society at large in order to mother well, without having to sacrifice themselves in the process.”

4. 'The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See' (2006) "Dante's Inferno begins with the narrator lost: 'In the middle of the journey of our life I came / To myself in a dark wood where the straight / Way was lost...". In the middle of my own life, I was lost, in some ways. I had to be willing to learn to listen, and to listen in order to teach. I had to grow up, essentially."

5. 'Vagina: A New Biography' (2012) "Female sexual pleasure, rightly understood, is not just about sexuality, or just about pleasure. It serves, also, as a medium of female self-knowledge and hopefulness; female creativity and courage; female focus and initiative; female bliss and transcendence; and as medium of a sensibility that feels very much like freedom."