A Burst of Competition Over High-Tech Pushup Bras Is Touching Off a . . . : Tempest in a B Cup
Remember lift and separate ? This is about lift and unite.
And there’s nothing to be ashamed of. We can talk about this calmly. This doesn’t call for subterfuge or embarrassment. This is about clothing for the healthy.
This is about a bra, a sumptuous B cup.
In a feat of marketing and in the spirit of whimsy, “dramatic cleavage apparel”--as it’s called in the lingerie biz--is making a comeback.
“This may be a tremendous blow to the legmen of America. Really it doesn’t matter if a woman is tall and lanky. Breasts have resumed their primacy in the American pantheon,” said one man who insisted, urged, pressured his wife to buy one of the newfangled bras.
Even as these words are being written, thousands of these bras are being shipped to New York to begin the big push.
Not that pushups were ever out of style.
For 30 years, a British lingerie company named Gossard manufactured the Wonderbra, an ordinary item of underclothing that used the principals of both aerodynamics and architecture to create cleavage. Other brands, more or less, did the same.
Then two years ago, British Vogue featured an article on the return of these bras and the underwear-as-outerwear fad. At the same time, full-bosomed women were coming back into vogue. Not that a D-cup could ever be discounted, but we’ll get to Kate Moss later.
By the summer of 1992, Gossard was turning out 20,000 bras a week and madly advertising its product with the memorable slogan “Say goodby to your feet.”
The Wonderbra was actually created in 1963 by a Canadian company, which licensed it to Gossard to market in Britain. Not long after, the Canadian company was sold to the all-American Sara Lee. So when Sara Lee, which had also bought Playtex, saw those 1992 Wonderbra figures (1.5 million bras sold in one year!) it immediately revoked Gossard’s license and gave Playtex the pushup franchise.
Consider that the first shot fired over the bow.
After 18 months of research and development, the Brits at Gossard came out with their own version of the Wonderbra. The new product was extensively tested by 250 unembarrassable British women who volunteered to be probed, prodded and measured by perfect strangers at the Gossard factory. The bra was renamed the Super-Uplift and introduced at Saks Fifth Avenue on March 15.
The company flooded the media with information--and free pictures--about Gossard’s “Call to Cleavage.” But even before the media blitz, with just word of mouth going for it, Saks sold 109 bras in four days in its Manhattan store.
Meantime, the people who brought you the best chocolate brownies imaginable were working feverishly in their engineering labs to bring back the original, the first, the classic, “The one and only Wonderbra,” the slogan says.
On May 9, Sara Lee will introduce its new and improved original in New York stores and then launch “a full national rollout in the early fall, beginning in Los Angeles and moving on to the rest of the country,” said Jill Golden, a Sara Lee spokeswoman.
“This is part of the evolution of women’s position in the United States work force,” she said.
Right.
But before we get to philosophizing, it might be wise to explain how these contraptions work. And the Super Uplift (constructed in 48 parts) and the Wonderbra (54 parts) do work, say sources who would only be identified by their cup sizes.
A discreet A cup explained during a dressing-room interview that the underwire seemed to be at exactly the right pitch to encourage her to stand erect and to encourage her breasts to, well, do the same.
But a C cup, overhearing this explanation, vehemently disagreed. (Remember, this is New York.) The C cup insisted that the confluence of fabric and wiring seemed to push her breasts up and forward in a way that they hadn’t since she was in her 30s.
“Imagine this,” said the 48-year-old, parading around the dressing room area in her Super Uplift. At one point she demonstrated the boosting effect of two removable pads--called “cookies”--tucked under the side of each cup. She simply popped them out and said to her own amusement, “ Voila ,” as gravity took over.
Now we can get philosophical.
*
These bras are nostalgic, goofy and perhaps recognition of our collective absurdity. They are what some women wear to feel sexier and what others, who believe that sex is about fun, wear to have fun.
There are definitely women out there who object--who see this bra as binding evidence of a society contrived to make women feel inadequate.
“Ridiculous,” said a Harvard graduate used to her cotton sports bras, the kind that hook in the front and guys in college call “front loaders.”
“Next we’ll be wearing whalebone corsets,” she sniffed.
Whether these pushups are comfortable is difficult to determine short of doing some kind of statistically balanced poll.
Some women, already accustomed to underwires, seem to have no problem with the bras, which come in the usual variety--front hooked, back hooked, halter top, body suits. Others are bothered and report that after a couple of hours cosseted in one these things, they have slipped into a ladies’ room and simply slipped off the scaffolding. Watching a saleswoman at Saks maneuver a 34A into a cup of a Super-Uplift confirmed: It was not a pretty sight.
“You could put a gun to my head and I still wouldn’t have cleavage,” the 34A groaned. She also conceded, however, that all this pushing and mushing was better than surgery.
In fact, it may be no coincidence that pushups’ popularity coincide with women’s concern over implants.
“Women wanted the look without the danger of surgery and the potential aftereffects,” said Marjorie Deane, editor of the Tobe Report, a fashion trend weekly. She also doesn’t believe women are going to give up athletic bras.
“When they jog they still want the other kind of bra,” Deane said, “but this is for when you’re leaning over the cocktail table and want cleavage to show.”
Yet Deane could not predict how long the need for cleavage will endure or whether after the initial thrill of owning pushup bras, women will relegate them to the back of the drawer--along with black garter belts and red thong underpants.
Annette Tapert, a writer who recently completed the memoirs of Swifty Lazar, is already ambivalent about where and when she’ll wear her new pushup.
Tapert bought it at the urging of her husband, Jesse Kornbluth.
Here’s his attitude, delivered not without humor.
“I’m smart, I’m a writer, I’m cultured,” Kornbluth said, “but at the end of the day, I’m an American man . . . which means to be under such siege that an overflowing B cup looks like a refuge. Now, women are also under incredible siege and I don’t know what women do for succor. But for a man, there’s nothing better than. . . .”
So this is what Tapert was dealing with when walking down the street with Kornbluth, they came across a store advertising the Wonderbra in the window. The advertisement had a quote from superwaif Kate Moss about the uplifts: “They are so brilliant, I swear, even I get cleavage with them.”
Tapert, a slim 34B, later went to buy one, but after seeing the price came home empty-handed. “I didn’t feel like spending $40 on just another pushup bra.”
Her husband persisted: “Do this for me.”
So she went back, tried it on again and shelled out the $40: “I thought, hmmmmmm, this is pretty good.”
And then she bought another one for a friend’s birthday. “She was thrilled to death.”
But Tapert has been reluctant to wear her new bra other than around the house. (Once she wore it at a restaurant under a loose-fitting shirt.)
“Personally, I don’t like to wear really sexy revealing clothes out anywhere,” she said. “I like to be a little covered up. I don’t like people staring at me.”
Not that there is anything wrong with such displays of the flesh, she hastened to add. It’s just she’d rather keep her pushup to herself--and, of course, to her husband.
“You feel kind of sexy in it and I think women should get into feeling sexy,” she said. “That’s not compromising yourself. Ultimately, I think women want their mystery back. You can be a feminist and compete in a man’s world, but when the sun comes down you still want to be a woman. If people can’t cope with that, too bad.”
