Recently, I have taken my shirt off twice while video chatting. No, I’m not that starved for excitement during quarantine. In both cases, I was being fitted for a bra. “So let’s talk bras and boobies and things like that,” Tania Garcia, my “fit therapist” at CUUP, said. CUUP is one of several e-commerce lingerie startups founded over the past few years. Most of them were established by women, many of whom, according to their companies’ mission statements, had been so frustrated by all the ill-fitting bras in their drawers that they decided to revolutionize the industry. Kind of like Moses being fed up with the pharaoh and leading the Israelites to freedom across the Red Sea.
The products featured on these Web sites look comfortable—designed with you and your friends in mind, instead of Barbie, Eleanor Roosevelt, or one of the Hadid sisters. A few of the companies whose founders I talked to saw an uptick in sales starting in April, particularly of wireless bras and other comfortable styles. On the other hand, a report from Adobe Analytics showed that bra sales across the industry (including at brick-and-mortar establishments) declined by twelve per cent from March to April, supporting anecdotal evidence that many women have used self-quarantine as an opportunity to go braless. “My bra probably thinks I died,” a Twitter user who goes by AJ said. (Meanwhile, some companies have been turning bras into face masks—perhaps inevitable, since the idea of the N95 mask was partly inspired by the bra.)
Sooner or later, the day might come when you are again allowed to be within six feet of someone other than your six-year-old or your poodle, and, at that time, you might want to wear a bra. How different are these newfangled garments from the ones we’ve been wearing forever? Are they more or less groundbreaking than, say, the spinning jenny or hot pants? Cora Harrington, the author of “In Intimate Detail: How to Choose, Wear, and Love Lingerie,” told me, “A bra is a bra is a bra is a bra. Most bras have the same structure: you have cups, you have straps, you have a band.” True, the bandeau of wool and linen that the ancient Greeks devised to strap themselves into is recognizably bra-like, as is the backless “brassiere” patented in 1914 by the twenty-three-year-old American Mary Phelps Jacobs, who’d tied two silk handkerchiefs together with a pink ribbon and wore the contrivance to a dance. (This invention became more popular after 1917, when the United States War Industries Board asked women to stop wearing corsets so that the metal could be used for ammunition and warships.) True, too, that innovations such as the bra that texts you to stop eating or corrects your posture did not take off. “What I see from a lot of these so-called bra-disrupter brands,” Harrington said, “is that they are making the same thing we’ve already had, but they have better P.R. and marketing.” If you are on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, you know what Harrington is talking about. Bra advertisements—touting body positivity, inclusivity, and mind-altering levels of comfort—are inescapable.
What has also changed is the way in which we buy our underwear. Until the advent of the e-commerce ventures of the past decade, the default retailers were department stores and Victoria’s Secret, both of which now seem as viable as Blockbuster Video and buffets. There you could try on a bunch of sizes and styles, hate them all, and then consult with a saleswoman for reassuring lies about how you look. Or you could go to a bra salon, an unappealing ordeal for some, like Patty Volk, a writer. “Oh, my God, I hated going to stores for a bra,” she said. “My first bra was a 32 AAA, and the saleswoman came into the room with me while my mother waited outside. She saw them. It was traumatic. But worst was the famous place on Lex, or Third, uptown. You’d have to get undressed and be touched by a woman in a tiny dressing room with a shower curtain for a door. The woman was the owner’s daughter, and she stared in a way that was humiliating and chilling.” Ann Foley, a former TV executive, was similarly non-nostalgic about buying a bra up close and personal. “These stores can be intimidating, as only the generally disapproving salespeople are permitted to go into the drawers, and they pull up one option at a time, and I at least feel bad about rejecting their selection,” Foley said. She added, “I also do not like to be yanked into my underwear, and, despite the fact that I happily eat raw fish of similar cost, am not happy to spend big bucks on an item I will forget to handle properly and find tangled around the sheets in the dryer.”
The notion of selecting your bra virtually might seem cockamamie. Then again, who’d have dreamed, years ago, that you’d be ordering a pair of eyeglasses online or receiving a diagnosis of eczema through telemedicine? A widely quoted statistic in the undergarment world estimates that eighty per cent of women are wearing the wrong size bra. The number seems questionable—who’s to say what’s wrong?—and is based on only a few small studies. Still, I’ve never had success the old-fashioned way (I am in possession of so many bras that don’t fit that it might pay to have breast surgery so I can wear them), and I’ve spent the past three months effectively under house arrest. So I decided to give nine of these online companies a try. “You can exchange all day long,” Colleen Leung, the director of technical design at the brand Adore Me, told me. “We give you a voucher code right away so that you can buy more bras to try before even returning the bras that didn’t work.”
Back to the CUUP fitting. “So, tell me a little bit about what’s going on with your bra situation,” Tania said, exuding warmth, even on a laptop display. In her mid-thirties, with hair pulled back tight, ballerina style, she was wearing a loose cardigan over a leotard over CUUP’s Scoop bra. Around her neck hung a tape measure, which she’d later use to demonstrate how to take measurements of the ribcage and fullest part of the bust. This was not as embarrassing as talking about sex with your mother, but close. (Fun distraction: when the fitter discusses whether you should wear a bra with underwire, pretend you are talking to the F.B.I. about taping a mike to your chest.) I confessed to Tania that I hardly ever wear bras because they feel like “breast prisons," as a cast member on the reality series “Vanderpump Rules” put it. Tania suggested that perhaps my bras did not fit. She explained “sister sizes,” a term used in the lingerie industry to refer to bras that hold the same volume of breast tissue but have differently sized bands. By this system, a smaller band with a larger cup is more or less equivalent to a larger band with a smaller cup. For example, a 34A is the “sister” of a 32B, but, depending on your particular anatomy, one might be a better match than the other. I pictured a waffle cone and a sugar cone with the same amount of ice cream.
Unaccustomed as I am to wearing bras, I enlisted the help of friends to evaluate the goods (or the bads, as the case may be). Each agreed to test-drive a bra or two. The online-shopping process usually begins with a sizing questionnaire, which asks more questions than you’ve ever been asked about your breasts. It can be daunting. Gena, an artist in Washington, D.C., was assigned to try out True & Company, which claims to have created the first Fit Quiz. The company, which has been called the “Netflix of bras,” was founded in 2012 as a startup, but grew up and got rich in 2017, when it was acquired by the PVH Group. On its Web site, Gena encountered a testimonial reading, “The MOMENT I tried this bra on . . . I cried with relief.” Gena said, “I wanted a bra that would bring me that much joy, but I worried I failed the quiz. . . . I felt like I was filling out all C’s on the SAT multiple choice. There were many questions about my cups: Do they runneth over? Dunno.”
On the other hand, Victoria, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., found the questionnaire from Third Love to be encouraging. “Although I was excited that they asked what my biggest bra problem was (sagging straps on my narrow shoulders), it is not obvious my response really made a difference. But I felt ‘understood,’ for what it is worth.” By the way, Third Love, which was founded in 2013, is the only company that stocks half-sizes, but, to Victoria’s disappointment, her size was determined to be the same whole size she’d been wearing. Only one bra guinea pig was surprised by her results. After entering her measurements on the Adore Me Web site, Cynthia, a prisoners-rights advocate in New York, was gobsmacked: “I was a 34DD, not a 36C!” She went on: “After adjusting to the disappointing news that I had even bigger stripper boobs than I’d thought, I ordered a lacy black lined bra. It turned out that going down a band size made me feel more pulled together, but it wasn’t too tight.”
Adore Me, launched in 2012, was the first of the digital-bra startups. Its founder, Morgan Hermand-Waiche, came up with the idea when he was an M.B.A. student at Harvard. (Talk about a hard origin story to spin into an inspirational feminist tale.) It is adored by Cynthia, who said her Rire Contour bra, a balconette with an overlay of lace that peeks out from the top to resemble a camisole, “almost felt like a weightless suspension bridge, holding me up without effort.” She was impressed by the stretchiness of the fabric and the level of craftsmanship. Adore Me has hundreds of styles (I dare you to try telling them all apart), and they tend to be lacier and more elaborately designed than the offerings from other brands. (Prices range from $40 to $50, and were all reduced, in a recent sale, to $25.)
By contrast, the seven bras from KIT Undergarments, founded last year by two longtime celebrity stylists, are of almost Shaker simplicity, providing support in a mild, unimposing way and made of a nylon-and-spandex fabric that feels like smooth, stretchy cotton. (Prices range from $48 to $68.) Anna, a writer in Los Angeles, found her black Triangle Underwire so flattering that she wears it as an outergarment. She explained, “With just enough coverage and no padding, it’s not overtly sexy, providing a sly, not vulgar amount of cleavage, so you don’t look like you’re ‘trying too hard.’ It’s sporty without veering into sports-bra territory.” She plans to purchase the brand’s Classic Demi bra in black and the Triangle Soft bra in Made-to-Order Tie-Dye next.
Negative Underwear—another label whose signature is sleek and minimal design—received a rave from Ann, a TV producer in New York. (Prices range from $60 to $80.) Both models she sampled, a lightly-lined black Stealth Mode Demi bra with a wire and the Silky Non-Wire in buff (“a slip of a thing”), were exceptionally comfortable, and invisible under the most unforgiving T-shirts. She pointed out that the Web site gives instructions for how to put on your bra so that it stays put all day and does not not ride up or shift. It involves a “shimmy shake,” which Ann says “sounds silly but actually insured a proper fit.” And Gena, having survived True & Company’s Fit Quiz, was won over by the brand’s Triangle Lace Racerback. (Prices range from $44 to $64.) This sturdy apparatus, seamless and wire-free, is the opposite of skimpy and sexy; it looks like a heavy-duty sports garment whose straps come together in the back to form a lacy Y. “It doesn't provide a ton of support, but it does feel like a second skin,” Gena said. “Enough so I might even need another sports bra over it.”
When you hear the word “system,” you think “irrigation” or “Dewey Decimal,” not undergarment. The Nuudii System ($44), made from the thinnest and stretchiest of nylon and spandex and devoid of hardware, is, according to Annette Azan, the C.E.O. and founder of the company, “a brand-new category we like to call ‘boobwear body essential,’ between bra and bralesss.” It is not meant to change your shape, hide your nipples, or give you much support. I suppose you could consider it a training bra for those too old to train. “It looks like a shredded ball of old pantyhose when it comes out of the envelope,” Ariel said. “And I don't know why Nuudii has so many double vowels. But the thing is remarkably comfortable (I sometimes forget I have it on), and my boobs don't embarrass me in public.” Each strap is two-pronged, like a tuning fork, so that the non-bra can be worn in at least twelve ways by twisting it this way and that. And you thought tying a scarf was hard!
The match between bra and breast doesn’t always turn out so happily. Victoria said that her Classic T-Shirt Bra by Third Love, a sixty-eight-dollar unembellished bra in “soft pink” (one of eight colors) with memory-foam cups, was “definitely more comfortable than my current Natori model. But not widely so: more like mildly so.” She had “VERY HIGH HOPES” that the advertised “luxe pleated straps with super-soft lining for no-slip comfort" would stay put on her shoulders. Those hopes—you guessed it—were dashed. They did not do the trick, she said, but are prettier than her current “slip-slide-y” straps, and have “almost sort of a Deco design.” Still, she’d buy again.
Judith, a writer, tried three sixty-eight-dollar CUUP bras, which she deemed well made, attractive, and comfortable. She was especially fond of the Scoop, “a lovely underwire bra” that comes in a satiny, opaque fabric. However, in the case of all three bras, “the cups do not contain the boobs.” “The online fitting was fun,” Judith said, “but underlines my conviction that, if you have big, weirdo breasts, in a weirdo size, you cannot buy your bras online, unless you are reordering a bra you already have. You simply have to try it on, try a number of bras on, in a dressing room, with an old Jewish lady running interference, to find the style that best fits your figure.”
When Sarah P., a writer, fled New York City for Shelter Island, where she was sheltering in place, she’d forgotten to bring bras. She had high hopes that the two bras she sampled from Harper Wilde, a company founded by two women in 2016 (and named after Harper Lee and Laura Ingalls Wilder, who’ve hitherto not been associated with underwear), would give her the support she needed. The Bliss, a wireless number with thick straps, was, she said, “the opposite of sexy—it looks like I’m going in for or coming out of surgery.” She preferred a style called the Move. “It also looks terrible on me, but feels good, and has a pocket in between my shoulder blades that I will never use, but I like knowing it's there.” Harper Wilde, she added, tries very hard to be “with it,” referring to breasts as “ladies” and offering customers “boob puns.” The brand’s bra-recycling program, it claims, is the industry’s first such endeavor. It is also the only company I know that sells a Black Lives Matter bra. (All proceeds from the bra will be donated to the Loveland Foundation, which helps girls and women of color receive therapy.)
The best part of the SomaInnofit, from the brand Soma, according to Sarah S., a writer in New York, is that it shipped quickly. At $59, it looks like a baggy black sports bra, but it isn’t a bra. What is it? “According to the packaging, it's a ‘revolution’ and ‘the future,’ ” Sarah explained. It’s also a Bluetooth-connected garment that takes your measurements. Here’s how: press the sensor on the back (which looks not unlike a Lidocaine patch), wait for the green light to flash, slip the smart bra over your normal bra, and tap Measure on the SomaInnofit app, which will then give you your true bra size. “The app then suggests which bras to order,” Sarah said, adding, “The whole concept is over-engineered. I do not find that my boobs are constantly changing sizes, so you really would only need to use it once.” On the bright side, there’s no need to fill out a dreaded Fit Quiz. Also, Sarah added, “Unlike most revolutions, this one has a generous return policy.”
