Illustration by Madison van Rijn

Why Do Bras Still Do Up in the Back?

The lingerie biz has been wildly disrupted. But we still deserve better

Breasts are complicated. You dream about having them, but as soon you do, you realize that they come with a raft of expectations, scrutiny and constraint—of both the social and underwire kind. (Mo’ boobs, mo’ problems.) In our Free the Breast package, we seek to get all that baggage off our chest. 

One morning, not long ago, I realized that doing up my bra was often the worst part of my day. I’d grumble and curse while grappling awkwardly behind my back, trying to snag the miniscule hooks into place. Performing tasks of dexterity before coffee felt like a punishment for some past-life crime, but I did it, because, well, what choice did I have? Of all the varied pressures in my life—finding my kid’s precious blanket after he lost it, crushing unreasonable work deadlines, remembering the login password for my Air Miles account—struggling to do up those tiny hooks was surely the smallest burden in both size and importance, but still, it broke me. As I fastened only one out of four (four!) hooks, huffing, “Good enough!” before pulling on my shirt, I caught my husband snickering.

If I could have burned him, along with my bra, right then and there, I would have. He, I reminded him in a tone that could have melted the metal of any underwire, was required to wrestle with no f–king hooks at all. “We can get a man into space, but we can’t figure out a better bra?” I muttered to myself, storming past him to get on with my day.

This summer actually marked the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, a monumental and historically significant achievement not only for rocket scientists and astronauts, but also for bra makers. The space suit that carried Neil Armstrong safely onto the surface of the moon was made by Playtex, the popular bra manufacturer that brought women the beloved Cross Your Heart bra in 1965. That NASA, a bastion of IQ-veiled machismo, gave this critical contract to an undergarment brand was nothing short of jaw-dropping, but actually, it didn’t have a choice. Playtex was the only organization able to create a prototype that could shield an astronaut from the rigours of space, while also allowing him flexibility and dexterity. No other company even came close. “It was tough, reliable and almost cuddly,” wrote Neil Armstrong in a letter of thanks to the team of skilled lingerie seamstresses who created, largely by hand, his space suit that is now preserved in the Smithsonian Museum. “Its true beauty, however, was that it worked.”

A man trotted across the surface of the moon before women had access to even a rudimentary sports bra.

Despite the innovation displayed by a bra manufacturer in the name of the space race, very little changed for women’s lingerie in the decades following Warner’s invention of the cup and wire system in 1937. In fact, a man trotted across the surface of the moon before women had access to even a rudimentary sports bra—the earliest model was rigged out of jock straps in 1970. Some technological tweaks followed: Canadian company Wonderbra popularized the push-up bra in the ’90s, a style that women dutifully purchased from brands like Victoria’s Secret, which sold lingerie with a wink and a pat on the bottom.

“Have there really been no functional or innovative updates in decades?” questioned Michelle Lam, the Toronto-born founder of San Francisco-based company True&Co. in 2012 when she conceived her lingerie startup. After buying nearly 500 bras on her credit card and inviting 100 women into her living room to try them all on, she decided that, quite frankly, there hadn’t been—so she set out to make some changes. (Lam’s company was snapped up by retail giant PVH in 2017, though she remains at the helm.) The explosive popularity of wireless bra styles that have been pioneered in recent years by upstart brands like True&Co., Knix and ThirdLove suggests that, finally, the industry’s atmosphere is beginning to shift. “The question more and more women are asking now,” says Lam, “is ‘Does every woman even need a cup and wire bra?’”

But, lately, I’ve actually been wondering: Why are we wearing bras at all?

Everything in its place

Bras, of course, have always been branded as near-medical necessities; slings for lame body parts that can’t support themselves. We believe they improve posture and reduce back pain. (Though, as large-breasted women know, an ill-fitting garment can actually accentuate these grievances and create painful trenches under the straps.) But ask a woman why she reaches for a bra every day and she is likely to utter the word “discomfort.” I heard it, again and again, from my B-cup colleagues, from my C-cup friends, from my too-polite-to-say mother-in-law. The word discomfort, at its core, however, hints just as much at feelings of anxiety and angst as it does at any physical pain. Even my E-cup friend admits that, jogging-aside, her breasts don’t actually hurt when she doesn’t wear a bra: She just feels incredibly uncomfortable.

Most women, including me, have been wearing a bra since we were basically children. The feeling of adult breasts moving freely, swaying as you walk, is as awkward a feeling as trying to wear your purse on the other side. There is some relief in being trussed up; there’s an orderly sense that everything is neatly tucked away where it should be, a calm akin to opening a carefully organized drawer. “Wearing a bra can be psychological,” agrees Lam. “In my case, could I get away with not wearing one? Probably—but I would miss it. I would miss that container underneath my clothes that keeps everything polished.”

Illustration by Madison van Rijn

There is also, of course, the age-old threat that not wearing a bra will leave you with sagging, unsightly breasts. It’s often cited that the ligament in the fleshy middle of the breast will stretch out over time if not properly supported. “That is a myth,” says Dr. Toni Zhong flatly when I raise the concern. She’s been working hands-on with breasts for decades as a prominent surgeon and the clinical and research director of the University Health Network Breast Reconstruction Program, which makes her one of the country’s premiere specialists, since in Canada, women must direct most breast-health questions to their family doctor. (In the United States, gynecologists also specialize in breast health.)

“From what I’ve observed in my practice, having what we call ptotic breasts, which is a dropping of the breasts, is largely genetically determined,” she explains, citing that weight loss and gain can also play a role, as can other lifestyle choices, like whether you’ve breastfed a baby. “It’s completely not true that wearing a supportive bra can prevent stretch marks or sagging over time. Unfortunately that’s just going to happen; aging happens everywhere. If there was some kind of garment that people could wear to prevent aging, we’d all be wearing it as a mask.”

It’s easier and more delightfully self-castigating to blame the blurry late nights in flimsy bras than to rethink the decision I made to breastfeed two babies.

Regardless, the inarguable truth is that, for many women, our relationship with our bras becomes yet another stick we beat ourselves with when the inevitabilities of aging set in. “Patients are upset when they come into my office,” says Zhong. “They ask me if it’s because they didn’t wear a ‘proper’ bra during development. I tell my patients, like I’m telling you, that there is nothing you could have done.” I hope she’s right. I often look down at my slack breasts and wonder if the cheap strapless bras I wore under my university-era going-out tops are to blame, just as I look at the lines setting in between my brows and kick myself for falling into bed without serum most nights. It’s easier and more delightfully self-castigating to blame the blurry late nights in flimsy bras than to rethink the decision I made to breastfeed two babies.

Though women’s breasts may have evolved for a reason—function over form, as it were—their sexualization is omnipresent, a reality as plain as a full moon in the night sky. Girls learn that lesson early. Writer Hillary Brenhouse, for example, started wearing a bra at age 12. “It was a training bra, really: a band of pink nylon meant to protect my very slightly raised nipples from the fabric of my clothing,” she wrote in The New Yorker. “Or maybe it was meant to protect the girl who shared my school-bus seat and wondered aloud where my bra might be—summoning a shame I hadn’t felt since last wetting the bed—from the faint contour of my nipples. Who could tell?” When Brenhouse stopped wearing a bra in 2016, she explained, “It wasn’t a political decision, except insofar as everything a woman does with her body that isn’t letting someone else dictate what she ought to do with it is a political decision.”

“It’s sexy to think about women removing their bras and burning them, just as it’s salacious to think women were stupid enough to get ribs removed in order to wear corsets, which also never happened.”

Never was the political debate more storied than after feminists protested the 1968 Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, just a year before the moon landing. The first protest of its kind featured a “freedom trash can” into which women could throw away the objects that oppressed them, from bras to eyelash curlers. The next day, newspapers reported that women had set fire to their undergarments in anger, birthing the now-iconic image of the angry feminist, free-chested and wild-eyed. It was humorist (and misogynist) Art Buchwald who reported in a syndicated national column that “tragic” women had burned their bras, arguing that, “If the average American female gave up all her beauty products she would look like Tiny Tim and there would be no reason for the American male to have anything to do with her at all.”

But the truth is that this historic bra burning never happened. The women, reasonable and educated protesters with witty signs in hand, featuring jabs like “Welcome to the Miss America Cattle Auction,” merely expressed their discontent with an event they considered capitalistic, racist and sexist. “It’s sexy to think about women removing their bras and burning them, just as it’s salacious to think women were stupid enough to get ribs removed in order to wear corsets, which also never happened,” explains Dr. Alanna McKnight who researched the historical implications of corsetry at Ryerson University and will be publishing a book on the subject. “Those stories survive because they are just that: good stories.”

Around that time of social unrest, my mother was a 17-year-old hippie living in Montreal. That year, she watched a man land on the moon and held down a summer job at the button factory that employed her mother and aunt. Like many of her friends, she listened to Simon & Garfunkel, tucked flowers behind her ears and often didn’t wear a bra, despite her conservative mother’s impassioned warnings that she’d suffer a saggy bosom. Just recently, my mom confided that, one hot afternoon, the middle-aged factory owner called her into his office and grabbed her right breast, fondling her while cooing obscenities. She never told anyone. My mother has spent the last 50 years wondering if it was her fault for not wearing a bra.

Today, even with a thin layer of nylon and foam creating a boundary between her breasts and the world, that memory still hurts.

The complicated legacy of Victoria’s Secret

In 1996, as The Spice Girls, clad in shimmering sports bras and halter tops, invaded the world with their debut song, which challenged women to “tell me what you want, what you really, really want,” Quebecois retailer Francois Roberge bought what was then a failing chain of 26 Ontario stores called La Vie en Rose. The Canadian lingerie landscape was controlled by a handful of conservative department stores, which meant that the experience of bra shopping was dull and functional with only beige, black and white bras lined up on hangers. It was closer to the experience of buying a war-era girdle than to the vibrant and brash imagery women were falling for with a zigazig-ah. “It simply wasn’t a fashion market,” Roberge explains today from his office in Montreal.

The decade in which girls learned that having it all should be glamorous also spawned the legendary Victoria’s Secret Angels, women like Tyra Banks and Helena Christensen who accessorized their perfectly sculpted, buxom bodies with the brand’s lacy push-up bras and thongs, dominating the intimates industry. “At that time, the Angels had opinions and personalities and smoked cigars,” says Lam of True&Co. “They were the embodiment of what women wanted to be, of showing up to work and being sexy. That sexiness was a part of life was revolutionary.”

The message resonated with customers who, by the early 1990s, were eagerly spending US$1 billion at the retailer’s hundreds of stores. “Even five years ago, I thought Victoria’s Secret was a castle that was impossible to destroy,” says Roberge. “When the brand came to Canada in 2007, it was just before the recession, and a lot of my suppliers were scared we would not survive.”

Illustration by Madison van Rijn

Roberge was backed into a corner when Victoria’s Secret rolled into town: No one, he thought, could beat it at the game of selling hot-pink-coloured sex, the kind that hits about as subtly as a stilettoed kick to the groin. So he pivoted toward a more mature customer, a 35-year-old woman who prized work, family and comfort. (In the office, they call this avatar Isabelle.)

By the time the #MeToo movement urged us, in 2017, to reconsider our cultural comfort with disturbing abuses of male power, Victoria’s Secret’s castle was crumbling.

La Vie en Rose’s shift proved prescient of the massive ideological swing that would come to define our decade: the omnipresence of in-your-face sexuality had quickly become suffocating. By the time the #MeToo movement urged us, in 2017, to reconsider our cultural comfort with disturbing abuses of male power, Victoria’s Secret’s castle was crumbling. Its market share had plummeted to 28.8 per cent. Recently, it announced the closure of 53 stores and shelved its glitzy runway show after then CMO Ed Razek said in a Vogue interview that the brand wouldn’t hire a transgender model because the show, as he saw it, was an exercise in fantasy. The public outcry was swift, brutal and justifiable. (Victoria’s Secret declined to comment for this story.)

Heidi Zak, who founded challenger brand ThirdLove in 2014 and swiftly raised $8 million in funding, took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to publicize her displeasure. “I’ve read and re-read the interview at least 20 times, and each time I read it I’m even angrier. How in 2018 can the CMO of any public company—let alone one that claims to be for women—make such shocking, derogatory statements?” she questioned in the buzzy open letter. “You market to men and sell a male fantasy to women.”

Feminism sells

Today, ThirdLove is one of the loudest in the cacophony of voices that make up the $93 billion lingerie market, selling the sexiest of all female fantasies: Hey girl, we understand you. “We’re absolute individuals/Originals/One of a kinds/If we’re really all created equal/Why are we so unique, uncommon” preaches ThirdLove on its website, like a blush-toned beat poet hellbent on mass-market empowerment.

Every woman with a social media account—which is to say, quite broadly, every woman—has been flooded with waves of targeted ads from direct-to-consumer companies that make sure she knows that, even in her most private moments (scrolling her feed while peeing, lying sleepless at 3 a.m.) she is not actually alone.

These newer retailers tout body acceptance and self-love as modern alternatives to the lacquered sex appeal that defined Victoria’s Secret and La Senza. Brands like ThirdLove and True&Co., which are recording huge growth, opt to show their wares on more realistic and representative bodies, putting an end to the “endemic male gaze,” as Lam says, and “expanding the vocabulary of models.” Brands like Toronto-based Knix, which was founded by entrepreneur Joanna Griffiths in 2013, take things one step further, eschewing professional models altogether and inviting customers to take centre stage as campaign stars. Knix currently sells a product every 10 seconds.

It’s feminism, but it’s also capitalism.

Companies having been using feminism to sell products to women since before Dove launched its ground-breaking “real beauty” campaign in 2004, but the rise of social media, a platform that simultaneously gives everyone a platform and reduces the depth of any message down to a few sentences, has created a dizzying and pervasive situation in which our own individuality is packaged and sold back to us—a disorienting hall of mirrors in which your personal story is both corporate product and promotional tool.

“If you’re doing it to make a quick buck, then ultimately, you’re going to get caught for it.”

“The system is broken: People are frustrated, they’re tired, they’re exhausted by seeing their own humanity devalued,” says California-based leadership expert and author Glenn Llopis. “This is where we’ve come: Everything has become a commodity. The only thing left that isn’t a commodity is an individual’s ability to be themselves.”

If anyone understands the web of web-based marketing, it’s Griffiths. In her downtown Toronto office, there are orange Post-Its stuck on the wall next to her, scrawled with Sharpied thought snippets like “I wear this because.” She famously raised funding for the first run of Knix bras through Kickstarter; she’d hoped to scrape together enough to produce 1,000 bras—and ended up generating $1.5 million. “About three years ago, around the #MeToo movement, there was a pivot where female empowerment became a sexy way to market a brand,” says Griffiths. “But if you’re doing it to make a quick buck, then ultimately, you’re going to get caught for it.”

Last year, after suffering a miscarriage, Griffiths spearheaded a #FacesofFertility campaign and launched a podcast, inviting women to share their experiences with miscarriage, infertility and pregnancy. It’s a deeply personal and particularly triggering subject matter for an underwear brand to hashtag. “If you look at our Instagram feed, there was a shift about two years ago, to talk less about the products and to tell the stories of the women who are wearing them,” explains Griffiths, who says we should focus on the fact that these vital conversations are finally happening; we shouldn’t worry about whether it’s ideal if they are hosted in a corporate space. “Changing the way women feel about their bodies is my life’s purpose,” she says.

Griffiths explains her perspective with such obvious passion and commitment, but it’s hard for me to trust any capitalist enterprise with my secrets and my wounds, no matter how amicable and trustworthy it seems—and no matter how many times they like my Instagram photos. But maybe, in the privacy-eroding age of social media, we can’t have secrets anymore; maybe most women don’t even want to anymore.

“Six years ago, the concept of standing in your bedroom and taking a picture of yourself in your underwear and sharing it on social media was insane,” says Griffiths. In fact, in 2013, when she was attempting to organize her first photo shoot of Knix merchandise, she couldn’t get volunteers to sign on as models for the campaign. “It was impossible,” she explains. “It ended up being mainly my friends, and we didn’t show their faces; we only showed their bodies because they were really wary about the concept of being in an underwear photo shoot.”

Now, Griffiths can’t keep up with the spiralling list of women who want to be featured, looking to share their personal stories, connect with women in their community, and maybe even get famous. One of the women they often feature is Canadian “mother/writer/content creator” Sarah Nicole Landry, who gained more than 400,000 social media followers in the past year. “Social media is this place where people can come and often feel small, less, insignificant or alone. Or, it can be this place of being built up, seen, heard,” Landry wrote in a recent Instagram post, captioning a photo of the stretch marks striping her breasts. “We just forget sometimes that we have a choice.”

Illustration by Madison van Rijn

Choice, of course, is always at the heart of both feminism and open market capitalism. “Wearing a bra is sort of a form of body modification,” says McKnight. “There are different extremes, but if you can be a feminist and have your ears pierced, then you can certainly be a feminist and wear a corset or a bra.” You can also increasingly direct the market with the purchasing decisions you make. Lam, a self-proclaimed “algorithm nerd,” believes that successful businesses are those that are able to truly understand women. That’s why she laboured over True&Co.’s fit quiz, which collects useful data about what customers are looking for. When True&Co. noticed customer demand for underwire bras plummeting in the first three months of 2015, for example, it rushed to bring a wire-free option that same year to satisfy customers.

It traditionally takes at least 18 months to get a bra to market because of the product testing and raw material innovation required. It took about the same amount of time to craft the space suit prototypes. “Bras are a feat of engineering; you’re defying gravity with a garment,” says Lam, explaining that many have as many as 35 components. Lam was frustrated by some of those parts, so in 2013, she and her designer sent a schematic for a new hook-and-eye system to their overseas manufacturer. “We wanted to reinvent it—it’s demented,” she explains with a laugh. Her producer scoffed: Those seemingly simple little hooks are churned out by the millions on an endless production line. This is the conundrum of the bra business: Each individual component is created at scale for global consumption, so attempting to make a small change becomes wildly complex and expensive. “‘Are you going to stop this river of hook and eyes?’ the manufacturer asked me,” says Lam with a sigh. If they couldn’t redesign it, reasoned Lam, they would just opt out: True&Co.’s best-selling style of bra, the True Body, is formed out of bonded fabric and has a smooth back, and which women simply pull over their head like a shirt. It’s an innovation borne out of being backed into a production corner but one that signals a change in the game.

The industry is built on fast fashion: People buy and sell, buy and sell again. But one day, maybe that will stop.

The power of big data, which True&Co. carefully collects, Lam argues, is that it gives innovators the ability to “listen to women at scale” and then act to address their desires. But what if women decide to stop talking? Or more frightening still, what if we decide to stop buying?

“What scares me a bit with millennials is that, maybe one day, they will realize: Do I need to buy 10 pairs of jeans a year? Or six pairs of shoes?” muses Roberge. “The industry is built on fast fashion: People buy and sell, buy and sell again. But one day, maybe that will stop.” His youngest daughter recently went on a shopping hiatus for six months as an experiment. Imagine, he says, if all young Canadians decided to stop buying? “It would change retail.”

Roberge is matter-of-fact about the future: In retail, as in life, anything is possible. “Right now, 90 per cent of our company’s profit is in Canada, so I would like to go outside the country to have a backup.” In August, La Vie en Rose unveiled its first international corporate store: a sprawling flagship store in Guangzhou, China. “We’re going to China to try to find the recipe for the future,” he explains pragmatically. After all, despite the mission statements and the positive mantras of love and acceptance, selling bras is a business. “In Canada, people smoke less, but if you go to China, they smoke five times more than us. If you go to India, they smoke, too. Maybe, one day, in Canada we will decide that we won’t put bras on anymore—but in other countries, they will continue to wear them.”

“In a hundred years, people will look back and think we all had breast implants and wore six-inch heels every day.”

Despite recent technical and social advancements, we are now, at the heart of it all, trying to express our individuality through an industry built on economies of scale. No matter how much a bra brand seems to be speaking directly to you, the garment was likely produced in a factory that made the bra your co-worker is wearing, and your sister’s and that girl’s on the bus. We’re all the same in that we believe ourselves to be unique; and the myth of individuality helps obscure our mass market world, like an eclipse we can’t look at directly. The irony, for instance, that a female astronaut couldn’t go into space last year because there was no suit on hand to fit her is almost too much to swallow.

The moon keeps circling around the earth, and with every couple of hundred rotations, we like to comfort ourselves with the thought that we’re better off today than before: We don’t have to wear corsets anymore, after all. “In a hundred years, people will look back and think we all had breast implants and wore six-inch heels every day,” reasons McKnight. “‘Oh, those poor women,’ they’ll say. ‘Look what they did to their bodies.’”

Some women, says Zhong, are choosing to free themselves from bras, regardless of what history will think of them, as a tiny upside to a long battle with cancer. “A lot of women feel quite liberated after breast cancer reconstruction because, with implants, there is no need to hold anything up,” Zhong explains. After hours-long surgery to remove the natural tissue and nipples, most women are left with a scar over each new breast. “I always ask my patients if they want nipple reconstruction to cover it, but now some women are saying, ‘No, I don’t want to have to have anything that’s going to make me have to wear a bra.’” So these women leave her office to rejoin their lives with perfectly smooth, orb-like breasts that sit high and happy under a T-shirt, always appropriate yet never bound. In some ways, this is the bra that futurists would have predicted back in the days of the space race: one that is so weightless, it’s part of your body; one that frees you from the constraints of a garment, but not from those of society.

 

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