JUST UNDERTHINGS - Plus-Size Fashion Tips by Gabbi
Fall 2005
Keys to a Sleek Silhouette:
Opt for a monochromatic outfit where your top and skirt or trousers are the same color or hue.
Wear blazer and cardigans long and unbuttoned for maximum vertical lines.
Oblong scarves are a great accessory when tied loosely around the neck, creating a long, vertical line.
Match pantyhose hue to skirt or pant and shoe color to create a slender silhouette.
Avoid chokers; long necklaces or pendants are more slimming.
Choose shoes with at least a 1-inch heel — the taller the better.
Elongate the neck with open necklines such as v-necks, sweetheart necklines and vertical cowl necks.
Make sure the undergarment you are wearing enhances the silhouette of the outer garments that you are wearing.
Twenty Fashion Tips:
Remember, it is not about size, it is about fit.
1. A one-piece body slimmer will create a sleek look under your figure-hugging dresses.
2. Try on all of your favorite clothes. Take notes on how they fit and flatter you. Then shop for similar colors, fabrics, shapes and lengths.
3. A well-cut suit is one of the most flattering outfits you can own. Great fit can make an outfit, just as a poor fit can break it!
4. Remember: dark tones create a long line. Select flat knit, fine rib and jersey tops.
5. Choose pants with pockets without flaps, flat fronts have just enough stretch for added comfort and do not pop forward.
6. Choose a fingertip-length jacket or one that falls mid-hip. For straight leg or boot cut pants, the hem should be worn slightly long.
7. Any color worn head to toe (monochromatic) in a clean, unbroken line will produce a dynamically slimming effect. Remember, monochromatic doesn’t have to mean boring — mix textures to keep the look interesting (i.e. knits with leather)
8. The darker a print’s background, the slimmer the look. A slim v-neck makes the neck appear longer and is usually very flattering. Boat-necks are great for minimizing waists and hips, while maximizing sexy shoulders. Caution: Avoid if you have broad shoulders!
9. If your legs are fuller inside, try a side slit. If your legs are fuller outside, a mid-front or back slit is a better choice.
10. Bright colors accentuate an area - make sure you wear them wisely and only on your most flattering body parts.
11. Make sure that each time you buy a new bra, you are properly fitted with the help of a sales associate at the lingerie or department store. Wearing a properly fitted bra makes you look great and feel much more comfortable.
12. Proportion can play tricks on the eye. While an oversized handbag makes a great accessory, a small handbag will make your figure appear larger.
13. Choose a shape that flatters (ie: square shapes compliment a round figure) and make sure the strap length doesn’t land in a problem area (ie: don’t let the bottom of the purse rest on full hips).
14. If you are petite (5′3″ or under) make sure you scale everything down — smaller prints, pockets, etc. so they don’t overpower your figure.
15. Show off the trimmest parts of your body by combining a tight piece with a loose fitting one.
16. Don’t worry that separates don’t match exactly. Tonal colors provide for a creative alternative.
17. Taller bodies can take larger prints and more contrast.
18. The darker a print’s background, the slimmer the look.
19. A blouse with a collar always gives the torso a softer look and frames the face.
20. A slim v-neck makes the neck appear longer and is usually flattering.
Just Underthings - fashion always repeats itself but in slightly different twists
Bra Story
A tale of uplift.
By Anne Hollander
The bra is a keener pleasure for being optional. Thirty years ago, many items once necessary to female life–bras and girdles, hats and gloves, formal hairstyles and conventional makeup–were banished to the torture chamber of the patriarchy. One by one they have all come back, licensed frivolities rather than slavish concessions to the male beholder. Since they are subject to women’s freedom of choice, many women never make use of them, and that, too, has its own excitement. Of all the old appurtenances, the bra was the only one that never really disappeared, since some women can’t do without it. In fact, developments in bra construction and embellishment speeded up when not wearing them became a natural right instead of a questionable perversion and wearing them became a sensual experience instead of a social duty.
Now there are tough sports bras for active women, cleverly minimizing bras for the very abundant, and scores of confections with no function but to delight, whether on bodies or in pictures. The Wonderbra was a popular sensation a couple of years ago, and Madonna in her Gaultier monstrosities was a show biz sensation four years before that. It’s clear that breasts well emphasized by artfully designed bras are thrilling to all sexes and ages, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The Victoria’s Secret catalogue makes a fine successor to the one from
This year we can also relish the flat-chested puberty look of what used to called a “training bra” and is now being worn as part of the dress. Designers are enclosing nearly nonexistent breasts in the familiar bra-shape, then sliding a dress around it (attached with little rings), or over it (so it shows through), or below it (sewn on, sometimes in a different material). The more the bra seems like underwear, the sexier it is; when it’s more like a bikini top, the effect is simple modishness. In any case, though, the idea is never to thrust actual breasts into actual prominence. It’s a reference only, a delicate allusion to that deeply satisfying modern icon, the brassiere-clad bosom with its distinctively engineered shape.
The fetishism of female underwear dates, in its current incarnation, to the second half of the last century, before bras existed and when the prevailing excitement was all about underpants. For hundreds of years, women had worn only petticoats. The arrival of white, frilly panties caused a stir, especially since many were “open drawers”–that is, pants made as two separate knee-length legs, hung on a single drawstring around the waist but with no fore-and-aft crotch seam. The wicked Parisian cancan dates from this steamy epoch.
In those days a great divide separated underwear from outerwear, so a glimpse of petticoat frill was a thrill. But even more so were the lines of the figure created by the invisible corset (think Seurat), along with the knowledge of invisible underpants caressing secret places with every rustling step.
The bra is an early 20th century invention, born of a new ideal for the female body newly engaged in sports and gainful employment. This ideal had two elements, one forthrightly celebrating female anatomy in all its strength and elasticity, the other more covertly emphasizing a woman’s sensual pleasure in her physical self and in being touched by others. The corseted shapeliness of earlier decades had been a treat for the eye and the mind, but not for the hand. The new, flexible shape, covered by a few thin layers of fabric, was enjoyable to its owner and accessible to the male grasp. Fur coats came into vogue, the dance craze erupted, and the diaphragm was invented, all well before World War I.
Breasts, however, presented a problem. They don’t have muscles that can govern their own movements, and if they’re sizable, they swing and bounce with the slightest motion of the body. In the brisk new 20th century, it seemed a good idea for lightly clad but respectable women to cover up their breasts and make sure they were held still–without, of course, reverting to the lines of the old-fashioned corset. Some neat arrangement was required that would inhibit neither the tennis arm nor the Charleston. The first bras simply flattened the bosom with a band, to help create a radically immature-looking female form. That adroitly solved the public breast problem, while new cylindrical girdles flattened the hips, tum, and bum. But when ripe feminine curves came back into fashion in the ’30s, there appeared the double-breasted and cantilevered bra–the “uplift” bra. The Sweater Girl, exemplified by Lana Turner, appeared in 1937; you could see that under her sweater was her bra, lifting up, holding out, and separating and steadying her breasts with firm insistence. Before long, breasts in visible or invisible bras–torpedo-shaped, grapefruit-shaped, cone-shaped, headlight-shaped, all held impossibly high up on the chest–appeared in movies, in ads at every level, in comic strips, and in soft-core porn. It was the time of “I Dreamt I Ran for Congress in My Maidenform Bra.”
Later the padded bra and the underwire bra added perfection to individual outlines, and still later, the molded, seamless bra produced a skinlike surface under tight clothes. From roughly 1930 to roughly 1970, the bra-shaped breast was the only one anybody saw in public outside an art museum, and the vision was indelibly imprinted on the collective mind. A rage for that shape persists; breast augmentation and reduction procedures are popular, and the bra business is bigger than ever.
But contemporary women can have it both ways. Women who never really need bras can ignore them or wear them at will. Modern feminism, modern habits, and modern fashion have familiarized the eye with mobile and visible breasts of different shapes and sizes, even with the harsh truths of breast cancer. Breasts have lost much of their mythological aura and acquired some needed reality. But the delicious look of breasts in bras, to say nothing of the delicious feel of them for the wearer, taps into a very ancient human joy. Emphasizing breasts is too great a pleasure to abandon.
A brassiere or bra is an item of women’s underwear consisting of two cups totally or partially covering the breasts for support and modesty. In addition to the connection of the cups it has usually four bands, two on the sides that are fastened to each other at the back or anterior part of two over the shoulders, joining the other two at the back. A demi-bra is a bra with cups covering only the lower part of the breast showing the nipples. Shelf-bras are designed to help support the breast while leaving most of it uncovered.
The upper part of a bikini is similar, but with the social difference that it is part of a swimsuit and not underwear, i.e.. In western cultures it is considered suitable for exposure in s swimming pool, on the beach and other recreational situations.
In French, brassiere now refers to a baby’s vest, although it is now sometimes used for the “bra-top” without formed cups. The word brassiere derivers from braciere, an Old French word meaning “arm protector” and referring to military uniform (bras in French means “arm”). This later became used for a military breast plate, and later for a type of woman’s corset (The modern French word for a bra is soutien-gorge.)
Bra Sizes
The size of breasts is often expressed in terms of the size of the bra. This is measured as follows. Two measurements are taken the first is circumference of the body with the tape being placed under the breasts.
5 or 6 inches is added to this measurement in order to get to an even number. This provides the “band size”. An alternative method for the first measurement is to measure under the arms and across the top of the breasts, rounding up to an even number, if necessary. The second measurement is similar, but includes the breasts. The first result is then subtracted from the second. A difference of 1 inch requires an A cup size, 2 inches, a B cup, 3 inches, a C cup, and 4 inches, a D cup. Therefore, a woman who has a band size of 36 inches, and a measurement over her breasts of 39 inches, would be best served by a bra size of 36C.
Larger cup sizes can be confusing but the following will outline these unusual sizes. A 5 inch difference is either a DD or an E cup. There is essentially no difference between them, but some manufacturers are hesitant to use the “E” size fearing that it sounds too large, and therefore use “DD” because it sounds less imposing.
A 6 inch difference is either a DDD, an EE or an F while a 7 inch difference is a EEE, an FF or a G (again, depending on manufacturer’s preference). An 8 inch difference is an H cup.
After that, the sizes proceed through the alphabet with a letter and a double letter for each inch difference.
Bras and pregnancy
Due to the increase in size of the breasts during pregnancy it is recommended that under-wired bras are avoided. A nursing bra may be used when a woman chooses to breastfeed, allowing easy access to the nipple when the infant is to be fed.
Brassieres and breast sagging
Breasts naturally sag a women grow older. Traditionally, the idea that a brassiere will help reserve the youthful shape of the breasts has been assumed and promoted by brassiere manufacturers. More recently this has been disputed, and some researchers are finding that breast movement stimulates the lymphatic system and helps remove toxins from the body.
A woman may choose to wear a bra for social reasons or for reasons of comfort, but there is no proven medical reason compelling women to wear a brassiere. No evidence has been found to sustain the notion that women’s breasts will sag lower over her lifetime without a bra than with one.
· “…wearing a bra…has no medical necessity whatsoever…except for the women who find bras especially comfortable or uncomfortable, the decision to wear or not wear one is purely aesthetic…or emotional…If you don’t enjoy it, and job or social pressures don’t force you into it, don’t bother.”
Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book, by Dr. Susan Love
History
The concept of covering or restraining the breasts dates back to 6,500 years in Greece. Minoan women on the island of Crete 4,500 years ago wore brassieres that revealed their bare breasts. A binding known as an apodesmos or mastodeton was worn by Greek women for exercise. It is said that brassieres were invented by men so that women’s breasts would be smaller, more like a man’s.
A bra-like device to give a symmetrical rotundity to the breasts was patented (nr 24,033) in 1859 by Henry S. Lesher of Brooklyn, New York; although it is recognizably a bra, the design looks uncomfortable by current standards.
In 1889 Herminie Cadolle of France invented the first modern bra, a two-piece undergarment called le bien-être (the well-being). The lower part was a corset for the waist, the upper supporting the breasts by means of shoulder straps. By 1905 the upper half was being sold separately as a soutien-gorge (breast support), the name by which bras are still known in France. Cadolle’s business (http://www.cadolle.com) is still going strong.
In America, Mary Phelps Jacob was granted the first U.S. patent for the brassiere (nr 1,115,674), in 1913, she was aided in this work by her French maid, Marie. Her invention is most widely recognized as the predecessor to the modern bra. She sold the patent to the Warner Brothers Corset Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for $1,500 (or over $25,600 in today’s money). Warner eventually made an estimated $15 million off Caresse’s patent.
In 1922, Ida Rosenthal, a seamstress at the small New York City dress shop, Enid Frocks, along with shop owner Enid Bissett and husband William Rosenthal, changed the look of women’s fashion. The “boyish figure” then in style downplayed women’s natural curves through the use of a bandeaux brassiere. Their innovation, designed to make their dresses look better on the wearer, consisted of modifying the bandeaux bra to enhance and support women’s breasts. Hence, the name “Maidenform”. A later innovation is the development of sized brassieres. The company they founded became Maidenform Manufacturing Company.
In 1960’s, many women publicly discarded their bras as a symbol of female liberation as a form of protest; however, “burning the bra” was not a widespread practice.
The oft-repeated story that the brassiere was invented by a man named Otto Titzling is false.
