Funk spends a surprising amount of time debunking bra myths. “I think I hear bras implicated in causing breast cancer at least once a week,” she said. (There is categorically no correlation, but she doesn’t fault the basic reasoning, as far as proximity is concerned: “Your bras are touching your breasts more than you or any lover ever did.”) She directed me to a line of “super-comfy postoperative bras,” designed by AnaOno, that Pink Lotus sells on its website, which was a segue to her main pandemic-related concern. “One of the alarming stats was from August 2020, and that is that, week after week, there are 50% fewer breast cancers getting diagnosed,” Funk said. “The point is these cancers aren’t sheltering in place; they’re there, undetected, growing, dividing, metastasizing. And the latest computer models predict an increased 10,000 deaths this year from breast cancer because of the delay in screening [due] to COVID.” Behavioral shifts associated with risk factors—higher alcohol consumption, obesity, sedentary living—are a double whammy, she added. (After our call she emailed a link with tips for a monthly self-breast exam. Consider this a PSA.)
But even if Funk practices nonjudgment on the bra front, her prediction about gravity still sits, well, heavily. That led me to Iris Clarke, who operates a basement-level store on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue. Iris Lingerie is basically the closest thing to Zizmorcore that you can find in the bra space: Originally from Belize and based in Brighton Beach, Clarke has been fitting bras for 47 years, having learned the trade while working in a Hasidic woman’s shop. “When women come to me, I fit them differently,” she said, as the radio in the background murmured about a Lamborghini car chase in Queens. “I tell them, ‘I’m coming in the fitting room. I’m going to touch your body. I’m going to show you how to scoop up your breasts.’ I do more detail work. The art is gone! It’s leaving.”
Clarke took one look at my triangle bralette—decorative at best—and shook her head. “You need support! None at all,” she said. “And you’re looking like a D cup.” I asked how it was possible that I’d never heard anything close to that letter: “Because you’ve never gone to get fitted!” she laughed. (I flashed back to that scene from Broad City in which Ilana and Abbi go for a bra fitting. “Fresh, virgin breast meat,” one of the proprietors quips.)
Inside the fitting room, Clarke handed me a cycle of options: a black lace bra, a navy blue number, a soft, plunging pullover. “I call this the COVID bra because it’s what everybody was wearing,” she said of the comfort-first style. Her main lesson was that size is not static—life happens, be it weight fluctuation or pregnancy—and therefore our bras should evolve in kind. “You have to change them. Nothing’s going to last forever,” she said, casting what sounded like a bigger-picture message about adaptability into the air.
I ended up buying a pale blue lace-front bra—uncharacteristic for me (as was the size: 30DD), but it seemed to mirror the blue-skies optimism of this spring’s vaccine rollout. (Plus, I couldn’t walk out of there wearing what I wore in. Clarke agreed with mock consternation: “No, you cannot. Iris won’t let you!”) Later that week, while rewatching an old Seinfeld episode, I realized that the bra was a ringer for the “very traditional, very supportive brassiere” that Elaine buys for her bra-less friend Sue Ellen, who then goes rogue and flaunts it under an unbuttoned blazer. It prompts Elaine’s boss, J. Peterman, to imagine a new bra-as-shirt trend that eerily evokes our thirsty summer to come. “Here’s the angle,” he tells Elaine. “Zelda Fitzgerald or somebody in the ’20s wearing this at wild parties, driving all the men crazy.” At home I held up the bra next to my new Batsheva jacket—pale blue moiré silk—and started scheming.
This past November, smack in the middle of this supposed bra-less stretch (never mind that WWD charted industry-wide growth), the fashion writer Marjon Carlos assumed a new post: editorial director of Cuup. If its models speak to an appealing plurality of shapes (the line offers cup sizes from A to H), its editorial platform, BodyTalk, does the same with storytelling. “A lingerie brand, historically, it’s about seduction and desire and sexiness—all the things that I’m like, Yes, yes, yes, love, love, love,” Carlos said by phone. But she sees Cuup pushing further: “How can we start conversations? How can we normalize things around beauty or body image or career or mental health?” A Cuup initiative that launched last May offered a discount to first responders; when we spoke, Carlos was exploring an effort to support Texas, her home state, as well.
Carlos, whose pre-pandemic freelance life prepared her for WFH dressing, prefers the opposite of no-pants fashion: a state of semi-dress involving basic Hanes sweats on the bottom and a Cuup bra on top. She understands the category’s bad rap, remembering a time when she used to wear “horrible bras—like, padded, stupid bras that were cheap and would dig into your back,” she recalled. The implications of fit are real. Carlos brought up an episode of Sex and the City where Miranda is bra shopping for her mother’s funeral, looking for her usual, if incorrect, size. Before long, she finds herself in a tearful embrace with the saleswoman.
My Zoom with Tania Garcia, the Cuup director of fit, didn’t get emotional, but the session did feel emotionally in tune. “We call ourselves ‘fit therapists’ because we like to not just suggest a size, but be like, ‘What is it that you want out of your bra? What are you feeling at the moment?’” said Garcia, who got her start in a mom-and-pop lingerie boutique in Greenwich Village during college nearly 20 years ago. “I fell in love with helping women, and helping myself understand at a young age what our bodies do, how to feel confident.” I thought of Cuup’s tagline, “We Support You”; however much reading into such things seems guileless in this age of savvy marketing, the words nonetheless resonated. If the mere act of smiling can perk up one’s mood, maybe a physical lift—some sense of structure or care or snap-to-attention rigor—might bring a psychological boost as well.