TO BRA, OR NOT TO BRA IN 2021?

EMMA FIRTH

ASSOCIATE EDITOr

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Associate EDITOR

AGAINST

I’m wearing a bra to the office. It feels, and not to sound overly dramatic, terrible. Like I’m cheating on a former self, my pandemic self, the one that has become comfortably accustomed to extrapolating this harness over the last year.

Perhaps you can relate to such newfound nerviness? In this time of Deep Reflection, we’ve re-evaluated our lives, shed dead skin (quite literally), questioned all that we thought made us happy but were, really, just exhaustive habits in need of bulldozing. Frankly, strapping myself in never made me happy. It was just something thrust upon me - aged 12, after a rather arduous turn around M&S with my mother. Why I had to resign to covering myself up in such alien and skin-digging apparel forever more was far beyond the reach of tweenage understanding (as Melissa Bank’s girl protagonist in The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing details, “my breasts seemed to say something about me that I didn’t want said.”)

Of course, standing in that hideously bright changing room was the beginning of a journey, being forced to view my body through someone else’s lens. As not merely a physical vessel to move through the world but as something to be concealed, protected, lest it invoke public scrutiny. In later, adult life, as something to be decorated. For whose benefit? Mine? Hindsight points to a distinct ambivalence. I remember an ex gifting me an underwear set one birthday; it left me feeling a bit perturbed, as though this somehow made my body, me, more appealing. More desirable. Like a naked Christmas tree in desperate need of lashings of tinsel before the big reveal. Though it’s unsurprising, for both men and women, to internalise this as a truism, when you consider the optics we’ve been fed over the years, in films to magazines. Last summer, flicking through a friends archive copy of Woman’s Journal in the 1960s I was struck by one advert, for Cupid Bras (“pre-shaped a new way to create the firm, naturally feminine young beauty-look that is fashion now…admired always!”) The tagline: the way to more beauty. God, give us a break.

To be clear, I have no interest in convincing anybody to go braless. Some are exquisitely beautiful artefacts in and of themselves (@illisasvintagelingerie, by way of an example). There’s ornamental value to them, they hold a quasi-liberating, seductive charm. Though, like any piece of cloth you don, it should be an individual pursuit, rather than one guided by a coating of societal shame (as Germaine Greer once said, bras were a “ludicrous invention” but “if you make bralessness a rule, you’re just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.”)

I’m just bored of pretending I like them anymore.