I used to think that bikini shopping was the worst kind of shopping of all. But now I realise at least bikinis are optional. Brassieres, however, are not – especially when, like me, your breasts have become a potential tripping hazard.
I will put bra shopping off for as long as I possibly can. It’s no matter to me if the underwire is threatening to give me a lumbar puncture at any given moment or has gone MIA all together. It’s no matter if my “flesh-coloured” bras have taken on the hue of a four day old corpse or they’ve got so many holes in them that they look like a fishnet bra. I don’t care. I’ll do anything to avoid bra shopping.
But then recently, my dear friend KT bought a fantastic bra with a fancy French name and became some kind of bra born-again.
“My breasts feel fantastic in this bra!” she told me, with bras in her eyes. And indeed, when she gave me a quick flash, they looked fantastic, too.
“All you need is a good bra!” she said, suddenly looking at me with a corsetiere’s eye. “We’re going bra shopping this week. I won’t take no for an answer.”
So next thing I knew, I found myself staring at my semi-naked reflection in the change rooms of a department store lingerie department. The light was so harsh, I could practically see the cracks in my self-esteem widening with every breath I took.
KT brought in the first round of bras for me to try on. Turns out that these days my breasts are a lot like sleeping bags – there’s a fine art to rolling them up the right way to fit them back neatly in their covers. But the problem was finding the right cover. Of course the whole notion of ‘sizing’ didn’t help – in one bra, a 16D made me look like the Michelin man with water retention, while a 14C in another bra made my breasts looked like a 3 year old’s feet her mother’s shoes. And all the while, I kept seeing those little pictures of the 10B models on the sales tags. Why put a 10B model on a 16D tag, or even on a 10A one for that matter? Most certainly, most women do not look like that and the suggestion that we should all want to look like that is just plain insulting.
As KT went off to try and find some better styles, I found myself really looking at my body. That flabby tummy had nurtured three new lives. And those saggy-baggy breasts had given sustenance for a total of fifty-seven months. My body rocked, goddammit! It was a magical marvellous mystical place and I should be wearing those stretch-marks proudly like sergeant’s stripes.
Still, when I tried on the next bra and it cut into my breasts, dividing them neatly into four like some kind of cow, I had one last stab at self-loathing.
“My breasts are stupid!” I moaned.
“These are shit bras,” KT said. “They’re all gapey and baggy and bulgy and badly made. They’re all wrong. That is all. Your breasts are just right.”
And we walked out of the department store, our heads held high – although admittedly, one set of breasts wasn’t held quite as high as the other.
Good call KT.
Many a time have I battled lingerie or clothes in a department store changeroom and thought about how wrong my body was because it didn’t fit any of the clothes… but that’s just arsebackwards (and not because I was trying trousers on the wrong way although I probably was, let’s face it.) The clothes are supposed to fit us, not the other way around. Stupid stores. Stupid clothes.
Also, I badly, badly need new bras. Sigh.
I think it’s time someone invented a spray-on bra.
I still think bathing suit shopping is the worst. One-month-post-baby-number-two I had to find a bathing suit. The bathing suit found me crying in the dressing room. My squishy boobs, stretch marks and muffin top rocks. Except when it doesn’t. Like summertime.
At least bras are hidden under our clothing. (On good days)
For sure, wearing a bathing suit is much more traumatic than wearing a bra – but my point was that bra shopping was unavoidable and therefore worse, unlike bathing suit shopping which I have managed to avoid now for eight years, along with making appearances in my bathing suit in public places.
Try bra shopping while lactating. I blame pregnancy hormones for letting a ridiculous 13 year old ‘bra fitter’/sales assistant talk me into buying nursing bra’s that she convinced me I’d grow into once my milk came in. Yes the boobs grew, just not that much. Throw in some nursing pads and I was slip sliding around like a greased up Survivor contestant on a mud wrestling platform. Ah, the joys…
I always loved it when my nursing pads rode up and made a surprise “peek-a-boo” guest appearance during conversations with other people’s husbands.
Well-timed, NDM. All the guys will be watching the World Cup so you can safely get in all the boobie posts now without getting lascivious comments.
And with that he was gone….
Somehow, I’m not sure that describing my breasts as being like sleeping bags will earn me any lascivious comments, even from my husband.
Finding myself in a similar position to you, there’s nothing for it but to pretend I am playing netball for 16 hours a day, and I buy only sports bras. Berlei High Performance to be exact. It’s the only way to keep everything where it should be.
Does pretending to play netball for 16 hours a day mean you have to wear one of those little skirts as well? #shudder
Bra shopping sends me insane. So much so that I only bought a new bra a week or so ago, after 4 years in maternity bras. (yay me)
So, I suggest target, cheap yes, but also, their bras seem to hoist my breasts up to where they’re meant to be, rather than leaving them falling out (look! a stray nipple, there it goes…) or down near my belly button.
That “Belly button, meet nipple. Nipple, meet belly button” moment is awkward for everyone. They should never meet and yet…
Oh NDM, I was simultaneously chuckling and sympathetically sighing – bra shopping sucks, regardless of age! did you try the Berlei Barely There?
The Berlei was the first one I tried on, having had a happy experience with one the last time I went bra shopping (I’ll spare you the details). However, either I’ve changed or the Berlei Barely There has, because our compatibility score was depressingly low…
I remember when bra and bathing suit shopping was fun. I was young and fit (totally unaware of that fact though) but still gutsy enough to show my boyfriend at the time. He would get so turned on, and from memory I think we were evicted from one lingerie shop after he joined me in the changing room. (We did end up buying the lingerie though).
Now it is difficult, almost humiliating … and yet I am more confident now then back then, and do not have a boyfriend or a husband. I think your man is a keeper though, he handled it all diplomatically and lovingly – you’ve got to admire that!
While my husband is incredibly enthusiastic about my breasts, I should point out that the supportive person in the post was my good (and female) friend KT. But she’s a keeper, so the compliment still applies.
GAH bra shopping has been so horrible for me, from the first time (fitted by stranger at age 11- GAH) to subsequent shops (always, ALWAYS with my mum – GAH) to post teen years (no money = no nice underwear GAH) then baby bras (oh good grief who designs maternity bras GAH) and now, well, now I find it very very hard to find a bra in my size with NO BLOODY PADDING – see I don’t really want to take my breasts off at night – while they aren’t very large, I still don’t think they need “padding” or “shaping” Sigh. Bra shopping. Hate it.
You had a bra fitted at 11? I didn’t actually need a bra until I was in my early 20s. Up til then it was an accessory, like leg warmers.
“… my breasts are a lot like sleeping bags – there’s a fine art to rolling them up the right way to fit them back neatly in their covers… ”
Snort.
So I was reduced to fitting these puppies into el cheapo Kmart bras and lo, it came to pass that it was not my eyesight causing me to fall over but my breasts dragging along the ground in front of me.
Then I happened to be in DJs (very rare as all retail therapy-both looking and purchasing- are on a total embargo these days) and there was this rack of bras reduced by 50%. So now I have a bright blue one, a bright crimson one and a beige one made of bamboo (wtf?) – all great, all bought without trying on. GO FUCKING FIGURE. I could have spent over an hour of self-loathing in those hideous DJs changeroom trying on bras for three times the price and walked out with nothing but my self-esteem embedded in permafrost.
Bras and swimming costumes – guaranteed to crush your spirit no matter what.
Are the cups on the bamboo bra made of coconuts? If so, how very Gilligan’s Island…!
this makes me remember that emornously disturbing Jeremy Irons movie when he plays a set of identical twin gyaenaecologists (i can never spell that) who get fixated on how women’s bodies are “just made wrongly”…. i mean, seriously, get f**ked! i’m sure your breasts are perfect, NDM, because you nurtured three strapping infants with them@! So stuff the bra makers!
Like your work, one little bird.
BTW, that Jeremy Irons film (Dead Ringers) put me off pap smears for life. Because I’d probably be really into them if I hadn’t seen that film.
Well it was clearly just a shit shop with shit bras. Apparently, nearly 80% of UK women wear the wrong-sized bra (mainly owing to the lack of availability of the right sizes).
You must check out (or at least show KT – she’ll love it):
http://www.bravissimo.com/perfectfit/wrong-size-bra/default.aspx
Online bra-hunting is not nearly as bad as the real-life thing!
Thanks for the link – I’ll give online shopping a go. Even if I get an ill-fitting bra online, at least I didn’t have to look at myself in the changeroom mirrors to buy it!
We must share the same bras. I think that’s why I’m extra careful with my life these days, taking the time to cross the street and driving slower, because literally, I wouldn’t want to be caught dead wearing those things I pass off for bras (and sometimes underwear)!
And when I do finally get out there to look for a decent one, I almost die from sticker shock. Really? I can get a trench coat for that price, and there’s way more fabric in that! Oh well – I’ll get there eventually. Good luck to you…and to me.
Go boobs!
Go boobs, indeed! I’d suggest we post photos of our new bras (personally modeled) once we’ve manage to buy them, except I’m not sure I need any more unsavoury visitors than I already have. (Top search terms for this site include “lactating asian babes” and “anal grooming”).
Oh, and also I have a fear that I’ll get caught in a situation like the final scene in Zapped (starring Scott Baio of “Chachi” fame) and everyone will see my grey fish net bra.
Oh god I hate bra shopping. There isn’t a single bra in the whole world that fits me, I swear. I have been measured and fitted by at least a million department store workers and have been deemed everything from a 34 b to a 32 d, and still have never been given a bra that fits properly. It’s enough to make me weep.
34B to 32D? Obviously you have a fat distribution problem that means it shifts between your breasts and your back and back again. Either that or bra sizing is shit.
I can say this is a travesty I am not faced with as I have not been blessed by the boob fairy in any way what so ever (except when nourishing my three babes). So while I know what it is like to have breasts even though it was for a relatively short time I am now faced with a different type of shopping……lets just hope that the surgeons work on an acurate size chart unlike the bra manufacturers!
I hope they do, too, considering the price tag on those puppies!
I’m new to your site and i love it. I’m new to blogging too and have just abandoned my previous topic of marathon running training, to embrace the marathon of motherhood as i head towards our first baby due at the end of this year. I found you through the nsw writer’s centre who was featuring you as one of their blogs and i’m glad i did – is this what i have to look forward to??? cheers, naomi http://www.naomihart.blogspot.com
Thanks for seeking me out, Naomi! Yes, this is what you have to look forward to… and more. So much more…
I have such bra buying issues! I also put it off. Mostly because my boobs are huge, which means that the only bras that work on them are ugly and basically only available in shades of boiled custard or off-black with 17 hooks up the back. And they cost about $67 each, which is far too much to pay for the privelege. Particularly since the small-boobed ladies get to buy cute multi-colored lacy things at 3-for-ten dollars with matching undies. It’s like someone decided that having giant boobs is sexy enough, so no worries if they spend their days wrapped up in pig-pink satin sacks that can double as reusable grocery bags.
I have to say I like your Australian sizes…they sounds so small and lovely. In America I’m a 36DDD, which is really more of a serial number than it is a bra size.
Triple D? I’m surprised your bra size doesn’t have its own barcode.
As someone who used to have small breasts and could go without bras for months at a time and buy little tank tops without built-in scaffolding, I know what you’re talking about.
However, I do love my breasts, saggy-bagginess and all.
I’m so with you on the bra shopping. Can’t stand it. For me, I have the opposite problem. My breasts are so small, all the bras seem to have air pockets in them. I can’t fill them to save myself. I spend all day tugging them back down under my breasts, because there just aint enough there to hold them down!
So I put off the bra shopping. And put it off and put it off. One pair currently has a hole in the strap from where I’ve pulled them down one too many times. But I will soldier on until the damn thing snaps.
Air pockets can be solved by chicken fillets. They sell for $16.99 a kilo at Coles but start to smell a little by Day 3.
I once commented to a sales asisstant that the bra I was trying on was a funny shape (the cups). She said no that was my breasts. Oh right..thanks.
After 3 stores and a billion horrid experiences not too dissimilar to yours, in the search for a good maternity bra for my 14HHs, I found this blog to be the laugh I needed!
I don’t know who designs these things but it sure isn’t someone with boobs. Well, not REAL boobs anyway.
Thank you, NDM, for making me laugh! God, if feels good to know there are others who feel the same about bras as I do! I firmly believe that bra-trauma should be a recognised medical condition. I still suffer it after this episode:
N 🙂
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