How to Find the Perfect Bra?
Otherwise known as Those Things You Can’t Wait To Take Off, bras have been around for a century. But is wearing a bra is actually good for you? We break down the science behind the support bras offer, and if they’re worth wearing, in the long run.
Where Did the Bra Come From?
Bras have been around for a long, long time. Paintings from the 1300s depict female Minoan athletes wearing bandeau-like tops while playing sports. Until then, women were generally bare-breasted under simple sheath dresses. In the early 1500s, women in France embraced the corset in order to achieve the perfect female figure — an inverted cone shape. Most were made with a long piece of wood (busk) or whalebone sewn into the casing.
The first bra was born in 1869 in France and was called the corselet gorge (“the well-being.”). This bra was born when Herminie Cadolle cut a corset into two separate undergarments — the top supported the breasts by means of straps, while the lower part was a corset for the waist. In 1905, they started selling these new “bras” alone.
The next big revolution in bras happened in 1932 when the cup size emerged. The brassiere became a bra, and large-scale production began!
Is Bra Indian?
The bra wasn’t always part of the Indian wardrobe. In fact, ancient Indian paintings and sculptures depict women as topless. The first endemic breast-wrangling garment, the choli, dates to the reign of the eponymous Chola Kingdom, when women wrapped unstitched cloth tightly around their breasts to flatten them and keep them small. During the Vijayanagara Empire that followed, the kanchuka — a tightly fitted bodice — was popular, and throughout the 1300s, there were tailors who specialized in these tight fitting garments.
At the same time, in Kerala, the covering of breasts was closely tied to caste, and lower caste women were forbidden from covering their breasts, until the Channar Revolt which granted them the right to do so, while women in Bengal regularly wore sarees without blouses. It was only with the arrival of the British that the traditional saree blouse as we know it today became a staple in women’s wardrobes.
Parts Of A Bra
- Cups of a bra
Cups aka the most important part of a bra! The cup can fully cover the breast or be 1/2 or 3/4 covered. It can be padded or non padded. The cup size is usually determined by calculating the difference between the bust size and the band size. You know those alphabets that bra salespeople often use? Those are cup sizes! And they are usually around eight cup sizes to cover the majority of breast sizes starting from A.
2. Side Panels/Wings
This is the part next to the cup that gives side support. A bra can have high (tall) wings or low (short) wings. Also called underband or chest band, this is the band that runs around the rib cage of the wearer that secures the bra.
This is the most important part of the bra as it supports almost all the weight of the breasts!
3. Back Underband
This is the band that goes around the back, and is attached to the cups. It sits horizontally level across the back, holding the fasteners and the straps.
Only some bras are equipped with the support known as underwires, fitted at the bottom edge of the cups. Basically, the main purpose of the underwire is to lift up the breasts for a more uplifted look.
Remember, the underwire part of your bra should lie under the breasts and not on it! If the underwire lays on the breasts or the breasts poke out of the wire channel, this indicates that the bra is not your size.
How Do Bras Work?
Wearing a bra should be like a hug — it should feel snug but not tight, and it should not feel loose because it won’t support you! See the thing is, internal suspensor ligaments hold up your breasts naturally and the skin enveloping outside the breasts. It’s generally thought that bras can help keep breasts perky by supporting the suspensory ligaments, and keeping those ligaments from stretching out with constant movement of the breasts.
To best support breasts, a designer has to understand how they move. An individual breast is made up of between 15 and 20 sections, known as lobes. These are composed of smaller lobules that end in bulbs that produce milk and are interconnected by a network of ducts. But breasts contain no muscles at all, and the bulbs and ducts are essentially the same in all women. The size of the breast is mainly determined by how much fat the breasts contain!
The larger the breasts and the more they move, the more momentum they generate. To change or stop that momentum requires a large force, usually applied through bra straps.
In fact, when straps are thin, the pressure exerted through them can be so great as to leave furrows in the shoulders of large-breasted women. As the straps dig into the brachial plexus, the nerve group that runs down the arm, they may cause numbness in the little finger. In some cases, breasts can even slap against the chest with enough force to break the clavicle!
Basically, the right bra is something you need; not only to look good, but also for your health!
Breasts are like snowflakes. They’re different for every woman, and bras need to catch up. The main thing is inclusivity and diversity when it comes to accepting how different womens’ bodies are and how they evolve with age.
