The over the shoulder boulder holder

What do an egg cup, a tea cup, a coffee cup and a challenge cup have in common? 

They are the original cup sizes for bras.

Who knew? 

Having just experienced a female lingerie emergency, I thought I’d find out more about this garment that I either love or loathe.

I suppose I better own up to the nature of the emergency. Well, it wasn’t a 911, but it did draw blood. I was happily chatting away to my male colleagues when all of a sudden, the underwear on my, rather nice bra, stabbed me brutally in the boob.

 

“Are you okay?”

“Um… yes, I’m fine,” I replied breathlessly and a little desperately trying to find a way out of the conversation and into the sanctuary of the ladies’ room.

“Seriously, what happened? You look pale?”

“Really, I’m fine.”

“Why are you crossing your arms like that?”

“You want to know? Fine. I tell you. My bra just tried to stab me in the heart! OKAY!”

 Funny, how quickly they vacated my office and left me to try and extricate myself. Of course, it would be one of those days when you can’t take 20 minutes to run to the mall and buy a new one, so I had to resign myself to having one boob up one boob down for the day.

In fact, when asked about my most embarrassing moments, underwear malfunctions feature high on my list. But that is another story.

The bra is officially 115 years old. However, it has appeared in history all the way back to the ancient Romans, Greeks and Minoans. Then of course we had the corset. Now, I am not an advocate of wholesale whale slaughter, but I venture to suggest that whalebone might be more comfortable than the steel underwire that just almost gave me a mastectomy.

By 1900 several “emancipation garments” had been designed and patented. One rigid metal structure resembling a large dustbin was designed by Henry Lesher. Thank the Lord it didn’t catch on. Olivia Flynt had a “bust supporter” that sort of designated each boob into a pocket. Charles Moorhouse offered a “breast-enlarging garment” complete with BDSM rubber straps and cups.

In 1907, French Vogue coined the term brassiere or bra and voila here we are. Mary Phelps Jacobs is widely recognised as the architect of the bra. In a very Scarlet o’Hara fashion crisis she made a bra from two silk hankies and some ribbon. Not quite as impressive as the ballroom curtains, but functional nonetheless.

Credit for the first brassiere usually goes to Mary Phelps Jacob, a 19-year-old girl-about-Manhattan who, in 1910, bought a sheer evening gown for a party. The whalebone corset that was supposed to define her figure actually poked out of the plunging fabric. What was a girl to do? She and her maid dug two silk hankies out of a drawer, sewed them on to a length of pink ribbon, added some string and tucked her breasts in place. Girlfriends asked if she would make a similar device for them. Then somebody paid her a dollar to do so, and she took the hint.

Now corsets went out of style with the French Revolution, or started to, but really ended up on the trash heap of history with the advent of World War 1. Corsets were outlawed, apparently the steel was needed to build battleships. Who knew. By World War 2 women in the forces had to wear bra’s for “protection”? The advent of the bulletproof vest?

The only real blip on the sales horison of the bra came in the 1960s with the bra-burning Germaine Greer. When Ira Rosenthal, wife of William, the minds behind our current cup size conundrum and the Maidenform bra, was asked if she was worried, she replied that she had gravity on her side. Sure enough once the bra burning teens became breast-feeding baby boomers, they were back in Maidenforms.

Then along came Larry Nadler, the MBA behind the Wonderbra. It claimed to the first bra to empower woman rather than disempower them. I think that is a pretty lofty statement for a bra, but hey, its advertising.

What is more bizarre is what goes into making my Victoria’s Secret over the shoulder boulder holders. The Today Show says, “Even the simplest bra is composed of complex industrial parts that require the expertise of chemical engineers, biomechanics scientists, veteran seamstresses and color specialists. It takes hundreds of machines to produce…”

 

Did you know:

• Caterpillar spit and crude oil are among the ingredients of some bras
• Over 4,000,000 new bras are created on average every day
• Women own an average of 6.5 bras (The half bra, is what I was reduced to with the underwire crisis – we keep these in the hope that we can fix them, which we can’t)
• In the last 15 years, the average bust size has increased from 34B to 36C
• How many ounces in a cup? An A cup – approximately 8 fluid ounces; B cup – 13 ounces; C cup – 21 ounces; and D cup – 27 ounces. They were originally known as egg cup, tea cup, coffee cup and challenge cup
• Women spend around $16 billion a year on bras

(I found these on http://www.intimateguide.com/bras/bra-history-101-with-nifty-vintage-photos/)

Agent Provocateur and the Lingerie Phenomenon

Lingerie. Why do we spend so much money on it? One silky negligee will put you back about as much as a pair of Levis, if not more. I wore some killer lingerie today, but the only person who ended up appreciating it was the chick in the loo when I was adjusting my bra strap. It was lovely though, white with black polka dots and pink trimmings. 

Women buy lingerie that is either comfortable enough to get through the day or the type of stuff you put on in the hope someone will remove for you in the next twenty seconds before you die. We also choose our underwear depending on our mood.

Sometimes, when we have a horrible meeting, we will don siren red underwear. We do this so when some pinstriped suit is telling us how we just got passed over for promotion, we can say to ourselves with a small secret smile “I’m wearing siren red panties so go... yourself!” And all the while he stands there wondering why on earth we are smiling and are we about to go postal.

Men buy lingerie that is made of lace and itches like you have rubbed yourself down with poison ivy or that is utterly impracticable to wear for any length of time. Hence most of men’s lingerie purchases for women fall into the category of “get it off me now” – which is exactly what they intended anyway.

The thing is that when you’ve spent upwards of 45 minutes (not including all the prep work – waxing, trimming, scent, make-up etc.) doing up a million tiny clasps and lacing yourself into a corset that would make an Edwardian lady blush; you’d like it to be appreciated for more than a nanosecond. Especially if you’ve also spent an additional 20 minutes trying to make the bloody suspenders do up with the stocking seam going perfectly down the back of your leg. You might find suspenders sexy and they are, on other women. Suspenders are designed in a stupid way that mean that the back clasp digs into your thigh leaving you supremely uncomfortable and doing a Sharon Stone all night long.

It is not easy, which is why women are frequently late for dates and why we have the 3 date rule. The 3 date rule is not there to preserve our maidenly virtue. It is there to give us at least 2 dates to figure out if going to all the primping and preening is worth it. Trust me, if we’ve gone to all the effort, had our hairs pulled out by the roots, had the manicure, the facial, the hair done and the makeover, do not make the error of disappointing us. Remember what they say about a women scorned? She isn’t scorned, she’s pissed off that the ROI is practically nil.

I once had the amazing opportunity to purchase some lingerie at Agent Provocateur in London. The women were spectacular. On the day I arrived they were dressed in nurses’ uniforms, under which they modelled a startling array of the latest line. 

Men could walk in with no idea of their girlfriend’s cup size and just point to the one that matched the closest. They’d even model your choice for you. Most importantly for me however, they did not touch me. Madonna buys her panties there and I can see why.

It couldn’t have been more different than the horror I experienced at the French Shop. I went in there to buy my wedding lingerie. At the time, 11 odd years ago (you tell how it scared me) the French Shop was about the only decent place in South Africa you buy some fancy French thong. I was not served by the AP supermodels. I was served by a Granny. Much to my fiancé’s amusement she proceeded to follow me into the changing room and brutally fondle my breasts into submission. I wanted to die. I felt like Joey in that episode of Friends when finds out that tailors are not to supposed to touch you quite so intimately. I didn’t buy the lingerie, I flew to San Francisco and bought some at Macy’s.

Cup sizes are another bizarre and often misunderstood thing. The girls and I figured it out today – the rating system, I mean, so here goes:

A is for Adequate

B is for Better

C is for Comfy

D is for Downright delicious

E is for Enormous

F is for F@#%ing hell!

G is for Good God!

H is for Hide me quick, the cops are coming!

Finally, if you think the underwear she wore on the 3^rd date is what she wears all the time, man are you going to be disappointed when she moves in.

PS: To my husband who buys me beautiful underwear (11 years of training, ladies!) thank you.