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NEW YORK – In the last two years, many of us abandon the office, travel, parties, family gatherings and, apparently, the underwired bra.
“At least there is something happy coming out of this pandemic,” says Kristen Classi-Zummo, apparel analyst at NPD Group.
For many women, underwire bras and comfort remain mutually exclusive concepts. When underwire bras go rogue, they don’t mess around. They go straight for meat and bone.
In the post-lockdown era, if casual wear becomes the norm for work, will underwire bras go the way of ties, suits, and dizzying heels? Instead of being burned, will they be thrown into our collective dump forever?
Since 2019, sales of sports bras, most of them non-wired, have stretched by more than 50 percent, according to NPD — even if the “sport” consisted of walking from the bedroom to the fridge. Women embraced everything elastic. They loved pajamas, with sales expanding 43 percent. For the first time in five years, non-wired and soft-cup bras outsold those with underwires, the latter collecting a lot of rust.
“All I wore was sports bras for the last two years, like six bras, all for comfort,” says Susan Dowd, 69, who teaches citizenship classes and lives in North Andover, Massachusetts.
Today, she opts for earrings. We know this because Dowd does much of the interview shirtless while she attends the Curve expo for intimate shoppers; her daughter, Libby Basile, is one of the hundreds in attendance. Here On the trade show floor, it’s not uncommon for women to drop their shirts to present an undergarment or spontaneously declare their bra size.
Underwire bras, the first patents dating back a century, raise several existential questions.
Why, in this moment that celebrates the positivity and diversity of the body, the natural neatness of all figures, do women continue to wrap their breasts with wire, lifting them inches above their innate resting position? Also, why so many hoops Do bras protect nipples like they’re in some witness protection program?
What it’s like That women are obsessed with bodysuits that reveal their true shapes, but ask their bras to perform gravity-defying, form-defying engineering miracles? Is the underwired bra an enduring holdover from antiquated beauty standards dictated by the male gaze? Has the pandemic brought us to a point where women see it as a wire-reinforced booby trap?
“I want my breasts to be raised to the gods,” says model Naimah Terry wearing a matching Elila ensemble at the frigid Javits Center. She jokes: “I want my breasts up to my neck.”
Coming out of the pandemic can be a transformative moment, intimate experts say, an excellent opportunity to rethink what women (and non-binary people and some men) they want from their bras. It is also an ideal time to reckon with our crisis in a way that the pandemic has only exacerbated.
“Between 80 and 90 per cent of women have no idea what size they are,” says Frederika Zappe, national fit specialist for lingerie brands Eveden, a sentiment echoed by many experts. They are using the wrong band size (usually too large) and the wrong cup size (often too small, resulting in pronounced overflow).
Women can also have different breasts than before, especially after two years of eating cashews and cheese. “Our breasts are made of fatty tissue, and our bra sizes change all the time,” says Kimmay Caldwell, an “underwear educator” who offers online workshops and frequently appears on talk shows.
“I see myself as a self-love coach,” says Caldwell. “I know I can change someone’s life with the right bra.”
Given the people haven’t shopped in person for months, if not two years, many are wearing bras that are too old (“vintage” an unseemly concept in lingerie) and possibly dead (the elastic was stretched to the point of uselessness). How long does a bra last? Six months or 100 uses.
Bra styles are constantly changing, as subject to the vagaries of fashion as shoes and denim. Styles that flatter the smaller, demure chest were all the rage in the 1920s. 60s feminist and today’s gamine in chiffon bralette, while bullet models gained popularity after WWII, supporting the two Ja(y)nes, Mansfield and Russell, and with Madonna in the iconic Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra.
Meanwhile, breasts have evolved and changed in size, even among tweens and ectomorphs. “They started getting bigger,” says Danny Koch, fourth-generation owner of the Town Shop of New York, founded in 1888. (When his grandmother Selma died, her obituary read: “She was 95 and 34B.”)
“The point of this game is to keep your breasts closer to your chin than your belly button,” says Koch, who employs a dozen fitters. “We are trying to defy gravity, and gravity is very hard these days.”
For years, lingerie sizes came to an end at DD. The breasts, however, did not. Maybe the fear was something higher it would look unseemly, as if the buyer were failing bra school. Now, brands like Parfait and Elila follow suit, producing sizes up to J or K, the latter the equivalent of a DDDDDDDD.
At the lingerie expo, there is a lot of talk about the complexity of bras, how one can consist of 25 or 30 components. They do hard work. A fuller chest: There is a concerted effort to move away from loaded language like piled up either flat – can weigh four pounds.
“You’re part psychologist, part engineer,” says Ellen Jacobson, the third generation to run Elila lingerie, which specializes in styles for larger figures, many of them soft cups. “Women can be in a lot of pain. They may not know where it comes from. Getting the right bra is transformative.”
With a dizzying array of cup and band sizes, underwire bras are a challenge of fitting in when shopping online. “From brand to brand, one size fits completely differently,” says Jacci Fredenburg, a designer and stylist who teaches corsetry at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “I think we are at an interesting moment in time. Underwired bras are not the most comfortable for everyone.”
In addition to avoiding the body aches of underwire, sports bras offer the simplicity of small, medium, or large, which means consumers can usually avoid the headache of returns.
At the intimate show, there are a plethora of soft cup options, including a full sheer line from Slovenia touted as Europe’s top pole dancing wear. Manufacturers learned from the pandemic. They are producing more wireless models. Even the French. It’s what women want, say representatives of the brand, so here they are.
“A good bra should feel like two hands holding you, two hands liking you,” says Zappe, teaching a fitness class. Also, “don’t be afraid to touch your boobies.” He frequently grabs his breasts as if they were plums. She compares her bras with her friends.
“This is Mathilda,” exclaims Zappe. “She always works.”
Then it happens, the moment of Dowd’s intimate epiphany. “I’ve been wearing the wrong size forever,” she says, locked in on Mathilda. She has “bra burns”, until now an unknown concept, on her back. Dowd is upset? No, she’s excited, lit. She always believed that she was a 38DD. Always. Lo and behold, she is a 36G.
master bra fitters say that this is at the heart of the bra crisis, and that underwires can be friends if consumers buy the right size. Most stores do not have expert installers. When she worked at a specialty store, Anita’s lingerie sales consultant, Lauren Preszler, received six months of physical training. When she left, they were down to six weeks. Now, with retail employees quitting in record numbers, there may be no training or installers at all.
Experts say the right underwire bra feels great, you hardly know it’s there. “If you come home and you’re uncomfortable, and you can’t wait to take it off right away, you have a bad fit,” says Mary Alice Kelly, executive at Parfait.
In this post-pandemic period, we may not get as much home from elsewhere. In a January Pew Research survey, 60 percent of workers who could work from home did. Just over a quarter of workers in America’s largest business districts had returned to the office, according to a Kastle Systems survey that month, and more than half of those who work from home considered quitting if they had to return. Fashion experts point out that many people return to the workplace with a marked affection for more relaxed clothing. “This idea of comfort is here to stay,” says NPD’s Classi-Zummo — partly because our old work attire no longer suits her.
Few experiences are as disconcerting as attending a lingerie show in an old, pre-pandemic underwired bra that needs something new and Type. The assemblers know it. They are all visible, especially between the navel and the neck. They are quite capable of offering sidelong glances that are best summed up as “Oh darling.”
Hallways are filled with fresh colors and quirky designs in every size imaginable, a boudoir of endless options. However, they are all available for trade orders only. It’s similar to Samuel Coleridge’s old sailor who drowns in the sea: bras, bras everywhere and none for sale.
Dowd later bought a new underwire bra elsewhere. It didn’t go well.
“Oh, I don’t think I can spend all day on this. I felt confined. Instead of two hands stroking, it felt like daggers,” she says. “I felt it right under my armpit. So many things were happening under my arms.”
She adds, “I felt like it lifted everything. I felt like it gave me an hourglass shape and made me slimmer. But why do I need that wearing sweaters and baggy clothes? I really don’t need a curvy look.”
Instead, before teaching his citizenship class, he opted for a bra bought before the pandemic, an old wireless favorite.
Source: www.washingtonpost.com