The curse of the curve

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:53:35 > A quick thought

Big bras and even bigger pants!…

I’ve just bought a bra! I have to say it’s not just an ordinary bra it is a gorgeous fuchsia underwired bit of outrageousness that glows out of my underwear drawer each time I open it.
I’ve decided that I am going to treat myself once a month to a different colour until they’re pouring out of the drawer like an elasticised multi-coloured waterfall. Gone are the days of the white ‘boulder-holder’ that was our only choice of bra if you were over a 38C just a few years ago. The thing that had straps so wide and reinforced that you shoulders had permanent dents in by the time you’d reached 30 or so – the thing that usually had the quality of lace only suitable for curtain netting and a variety of colours that stretched to skintone and black – if you were lucky.
There was a sudden proclamation and realisation that women’s boobs were getting bigger and all those unfortunate ladies that had convinced themselves that they were a size 38B for most of their lives were suddenly ‘outed’ – the mere vision of Trinny grabbing Susannah’s ‘Tit’s’ on one of their early programmes was enough to encourage women to poke at their greying lingerie and question the lumps that spilled out of every side.
There was a barrage of companies that promised big, beautiful bras for big, beautiful women – cup sizes up to FF and even GG – wow! The only problem was that yes, these bras ranges had bigger cup sizes but they did not have bigger back sizes – you were left looking at pages of lilac, coffee and umpteen gorgeous broderie or guipure bras that went up to a G cup but only a 38 or 40 back – again it was presumed that if companies increased their cup sizes all the woes of the world would be cured and tough luck if you happen to be larger in size as well as larger in cup size.
It took a few more years for manufacturers to take notice and now we are starting to see more and more variety in larger sizes.
All of us women were encouraged to get ourselves professionally measured and I seriously worried about the many poor shop assistants assigned to measure us all – scenes of little shop girls suddenly finding themselves lost together with their tape measures amidst an avalanche of un-tethered bosoms must have been quite terrifying – but nevertheless we all did as we were told and found to our absolute horror that we actually required a bra with dimensions that needed to be masterminded by a technical engineer and tested for robustness with industrial weights!

Now we come to the question of pants – I’m sure a lot of us sighed with relief as Bridget Jones made big pants acceptable and gone were the days of camouflaging the fleshy bits that did not do as they were told in a pair of bikini pants – let alone the horrendous outcome from an evening surviving a pair of G-strings!

Now we have the ‘short’ – which is neither a knicker nor a pant – not a brief or a bikini, it is the acceptable term for bigger pants which I am not going to argue with – as long as women are allowed some comfort together with a bit of froufrou that’s okay with me.

It is interesting however, that the word ‘control’ has come back into mainstream lingerie again. Corsetry has disappeared to be taken over by the softer more reassuring names of ‘compression hosiery’ and ‘shapewear’ - terms that have become very fashionable – promising a fabrication that breaths with you but at the same time controls and almost re-shapes your body. Coming in all sorts of rather bazaar shapes this new foundation-type of underwear supposedly providing a new self-confidence to women and her bodies whilst at the same time tucks and hides away all the unsightly folds of flesh that offend modern society.

Contrived terms like control, minimising, manage, curvy, shapely - amongst others have become acceptable slogans for dealing with larger size but whether they are designed so as not to cause offence to the larger people in question or simply more persuasive terms for marketing larger sizes in an image-driven society is open to interpretation. The importance of how larger sizes are sold is down to the individual customer – most are probably happy to be able to find anything that fits – the question then is - will they eventually be given the strength to start dictating what their needs are from manufacturers and will manufacturers listen and begin to realise that it is not necessary to sell plus-sizes in such a fabricated way.

UGH