Escaping confinement: How the lockdown has allowed women to choose comfort over conformity

Is there a garment more loved and hated than the bra? Last year, as lockdown wore on, the often-controversial underthing (except when it’s also an outerthing) set in motion a barrage of tweets on the discomfort many women suffer only for the sake of others.

“If I wear a bra all day to make sure men don’t get distracted by my nipples, you can wear a mask so that we can end a national pandemic,” tweeted Bravo star Hannah Berner. Women discovered they could at least escape confinement of the bra-wearing kind. (“I’ve worn a mask more often than I’ve worn a bra,” was a much-shared sentiment.) The Miami Herald declared the bra “cancelled”.

Well, not just yet. It’s unlikely the pandemic has changed anything fundamental that might stop the judging of women, particularly those with larger chests, who go braless in public. And even as many women have stayed at home, theoretically revelling in bralessness, sales of bras actually rose 1 per cent in the last six months of last year, according to figures from the market research firm NPD Group. This while total sales of women’s clothing fell 19 per cent.

“The truth is, women are still wearing bras,” says Todd Mick, NPD’s underwear analyst. They are just wearing very different ones, such as wireless (sales in the second half of 2020 were up 14 per cent over 2019) and pull-on (up 31 per cent). In January, a “DIY bralette challenge” swept TikTok, where tutorials demonstrating how to pare padded, structured bras into liberating wisps of lace racked up millions of views.

And, at the other end of the comfort and utility spectrum, women are buying racy bras with open cups, demand for which Jennifer Zuccarini, founder of luxury lingerie line Fleur du Mal, says the company can’t keep up with. (Mick says he has noted the rise in provocative purchases, which he describes as a “self-care moment”, but NPD can’t quantify sales in sexy. “It’s too subjective,” he says.)

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‘We’re seeing a lot of overlap in the way women used to talk about the corset and the way we talk about the bra now,” says Colleen Hill, curator of costume and accessories at the Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology, or FIT.

The trend towards wireless and other more forgiving bras wasn’t created by the pandemic, only accelerated by it, Hill says. Modern wire-free bras are more than 50 years old – one of the first was a nylon “no bra” bra in 1964 – but Hill noticed a real shift in adoption some six years ago, when she organised “A History of Lingerie”, a FIT exhibition in 2014.

That year, advertising for Aerie, which is American Eagle’s lingerie brand, created a sensation with its unretouched photos of models, offering an alternative to the pushed-up perfection of Victoria’s Secret. Companies such as Knix, which sell soft-cup bras exclusively, were springing up, while other brands began ditching wires and leaning hard into bralettes, which typically offer coverage but little support. For the debut of Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty line in 2018, the singer requested more soft-cup styles, says Chloe Julian, the brand’s former designer.

“Rihanna champions a real natural shape,” says Julian, who in September introduced Videris, her own line of wireless-only bras designed to support both chest and mood. (Using principles from colour therapy, you’d choose her deep amethyst bra to boost imagination.) Julian, who has designed lingerie for Stella McCartney and Agent Provocateur, stopped wearing underwired bras in 2014 when she was pregnant with her son, and then couldn’t face being so constricted again.

“There’s been this unwritten rule that our breasts need to be strapped up and held up, and we have to pretend we don’t have nipples,” she says. “And we’re starting to question that.”

Despite – and because of – bras’ lack of material, they are complicated to make. They can have 18 to 20 parts, and these days a range can include more than 80 sizes, where an eighth of an inch of material can make the difference between a punishing fit and a perfect one. Development of a new style can take two to three years, which means much of what will be appearing this year and next is down to forecasting, not the lessons of lockdown.

Many companies are racing ahead with plans to expand sizes, especially because the market for larger cups is still underserved – and because many of these customers wouldn’t be physically comfortable going braless no matter how acceptable it becomes.

“Everyone wants to get on the wireless train,” says Knix CEO Joanna Griffiths, who says sales were up 100 per cent in January compared with the same month in 2020. The company recently rolled out H cups and size 44 bands; 70 per cent of its wireless bras are a D cup or higher.

“It used to be aspirational to be skinny and rich,” Griffiths says of the more relaxed bra styles. “Now what’s aspirational is liking yourself and liking who you are.”

Cosabella, a 37-year-old Italian lingerie company, has also been expanding its sizing. The company went big on bralettes about two years ago, producing them in a dizzying range of styles (racerback, plunge, bandeau) in an effort to convince customers they needed more than one type. The move paid off during the pandemic, when bralettes became 50 per cent of the company’s business, says Cosabella CEO Guido Campello. The company also grew 30 per cent in 2020, he says.

Cosabella recently introduced a style tested on an Olympic swimmer, with wider band sizes and smaller cups, which had proved surprisingly tricky to make, Campello says. The company has also worked hard to convince anyone with a chest above a size double D that she, too, can wear bralettes – as long as there’s power mesh support.

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Later this year, the company is hoping to bring new customers into the bralette fold by introducing the style in a gender-fluid line.

Bralettes, of course, are particularly appealing to lingerie companies because they’re so much easier to size than “finicky” bras, says Cora Harrington, founder and editor of The Lingerie Addict. “And customers aren’t expecting the same fit as a bra,” she says. “It’s a way to decrease manufacturing costs and increase profits.” (Harrington has also gone braless for much of the last year. When she has worn a bra, it has usually been wireless.)

At Aerie, boy-brief underwear has long been the brand’s “lipstick” – the gateway to its other products. But bralettes and easy little pull-on bras may some day eclipse the underwear. Aerie has seen double-digit revenue growth for 25 consecutive quarters, says global brand president Jennifer Foyle, with “nice increases in bras”.

“It’s a movement, and we are pioneers,” Foyle says of the bralette shift, which the company has been promoting since 2014. “It’s less about perky and more about being comfortable. Women don’t want to be harnessed anymore.” (Of the brand’s 15- to 21-year-old customers, she says: “We focus on the 21-year-old because all 15-year-olds want to be 21.”)

For companies such as Aerie and Knix, sports bras have been another pandemic hit, especially hybrids without too much compression that are designed to go from Zoom calls to Zoom yoga. (Cosabella will release its first sports bra in 2022.) But women are wearing even heavier-compression ones as go-to all-day bras, thinking a quick workout is likelier to happen if they’re already dressed for it.

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Will this continue? Lululemon certainly hopes so.

“I don’t think women are going to want to go back to wearing their regular everyday bras,” says Sun Choe, the company's chief product officer. Choe suggests the pandemic – and the rise of pandemic-safe solo exercise – will make Lululemon look at expanding beyond its core assortment of clothes for running, training and yoga to activities such as golf and hiking.

Danielle Hayden, 32, a writer in Bothell, Washington, has gone braless during the pandemic about 90 per cent of the time, though not boldly. “I have my coat on,” she says.

Post-pandemic, she can see herself ditching the bra with a dark sundress or a loose tank, but not, say, a white T-shirt “because of the assumptions that people make about people with breasts who do that.”

If she’s actually going to wear a bra, “then I want it to look really good”, she says. “Either I wear none or wear one that really makes the girls stand up.”

© The New York Times