By college, all that pubescent shame had been replaced with the timid exhibitionism of the lacy demi, that jiggling French cut that we had never seen our mothers wear. We liked how they looked under winter sweaters: a visible softness moving under the wool as if we were walking on the beach, instead of across the quad. We liked how they looked draped over a chair or drying in the sun. We had traded utilitarian garments for real lingerie, for an adult femininity that required girl gear.
In the next decade, many of my sisters – mostly in the English Department -- experimented with the option of going without. I made my own furtive runs to the grocery store in just jeans and a t-shirt, more self-conscious than liberated. I had passed the anatomical “pencil test,” read Erica Jong and Marge Piercy, but never mastered the detachment required to stand in the checkout line without remembering what I wasn’t wearing.
Flash forward to the summer of 2009, when I learn that the axis of the underwear world had flipped while I was sleeping and that someone has brought back not Sexy, but Shame. Silicone petal tops, built-in modesty petals and foam-lined T-shirt bras – a merchandizing movement motivated not by body acceptance but by loathing. Enough to make Don Draper crush his cigarette on the desk and stomp out of the room.
Nippies silicone petals allow you to convert any immodest bra into one that will “Let you wear today’s fashions and still keep your modesty,” one Amazon reviewer notes. The Bali Concealers Collection (genus, T-shirt Bra, species, built-in concealers) promises that if you wear their “revolutionary” bra, you’ll feel confident and look flawless. And for the most modest, there are Privacy Petals, ten-to-a-pack stick-ons that allow you to pass through an airport body scanner with your dignity intact.
Basically, the message is: erase the indecent evidence of mammalian function. Wrap yourself in foam or slap on adhesive tape. Engage in refining, not binding. Delivered within the shame-based modesty pitch, these garments speak to a new aesthetic that celebrates perfect globes, rounds them out with implants, displays them with deeper than ever cleavage cuts, presents them to the world streamlined, marble-smooth and stripped of nipples. Barbie boobs. Flawless.
Does the mysterious inhibition of the American bra recapitulate our attitudes toward female anatomy? Three decades after women were encouraged to fling off or burn their Maidenforms, stop shaving body hair and revel in being natural, they are being encouraged to encapsulate and streamline their waxed-clean bodies in spandex, plump up their lips and lashes, eschew natural as immodest and inferior.
It makes you wonder what may come next on the phylogenic tree of foundation garments.
