As larger cups and smaller backs are normalised, women no longer have to suffer in misfitting bras – bra-vo!
‘In 20 years of doing this, I’ve probably fitted about three 36B ladies who actually said they were a 36B,” says Kelly Dunmore, chief lingerie stylist at Rigby & Peller. It’s one of those ambient truths; we all know that what we think is our bra size is probably wrong. Josie Fellows, Kelly’s bra-fitting apprentice, walks me through this tactfully. “It’s often, 85% of the time, a big shock in the fitting room.” We are in the fitting room. “People think E is the biggest size there is.” That’s more or less what I thought. “They think of D as such a full size and they’ve been buying a B for 20 years.” Yup. “And to compensate for the fact that their cup’s too small, they go up in the back and think they’re a 36.” OK. “So you’re a 32D.” She fits me in a bra, and I have to hand it to her, they do look different, more like breasts, less like a sideways banana in a Waitrose bag. But this is absurd. I’m a 36B. Fellows says ruefully: “If you say to a client they’re a G cup, it’s like saying to someone who thinks they’re an 8 that they’re actually a 14.”
We will consider in due course what has led generations of women to think their breasts were a size they categorically weren’t. But this is also a story about a mistaken market. Bras have been misfitting for years; suppliers failing to approximate women’s actual shapes. Perhaps in the olden days, when materials were less yielding and there was a strong call for structure and upholstery, the lack of range was more explicable, the way you don’t expect to get a sofa in 90 different varieties (although … Loaf?). But more recently it has been hard to escape the sense of a generalised market failure, driven by fashion, which sees breasts as an impediment to design, not so much a secondary characteristic as a nuisance.
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