I love lingerie. I have a dresser draw filled to bursting with pretty underpinnings in black and white lace and satin. I buy most of my bras from Chantelle Paris, because French lingerie, but also because their extended size range caters to less conventional body types like mine. But it hasn’t always been this way – my relationship with lingerie has been long and sordid, and it began before my tenth birthday… When I was in fourth grade, my well-meaning teacher showed a series of 1970s videos about “changes” to our class at the end of the year. The only thing worse than the outfits the children wore was the awkward, shame-based dialogue that provided no actual information about the transition to adulthood. We all knew all the bad words already, and we learned nothing else from those films, apart perhaps from a subtle sense of looming dread about the next few years of our lives. That summer, mom took me shopping for my first bra – I was an early bloomer, and was probably several months past needing one, but I can’t blame any parent for putting that shopping trip off. It was uncomfortable. For some reason, talking about our bodies, and the things we wear closest to them, is uncomfortable. It took a few tries and some guess work, but that afternoon at Target, mom and I determined that I was a size 34B. The truth is neither of us really knew what we were doing, because no one wants to talk about these things so there is nowhere to find reliable information about them, and I can’t imagine how we came to that conclusion, but I wore a 34B until my early twenties, when my bra size doubled almost overnight when I started taking birth control. In fact, I probably wore a series of the same bras, purchased over and over, until my size changed, because I was intimidated by the idea of bra shopping; I felt overwhelmed in the sea of undergarments at a department store but was far too nervous to ask anyone for help. I hated seeing myself so close to naked in the fitting room mirror; the idea of letting anyone in with me was appalling. I’m curious to know how many of you would be able to tell me confidently that you know your bra size. And the reason I say that is when I finally called on the lingerie experts at Selfridges during a visit to London in 2013, I learned very quickly just how ignorant I had been. It took all of my nerve even on a day when I felt good about how I looked, but I forced myself to stand half-naked in a fitting room with a very reassuring sales girl who pulled at my worn out bra from every different angle, and I distinctly recall when she made me turn sideways to show me how far the band gaped – with just one finger, she could pull it at least four inches away from my skin. I am not a 34B. I am not the 34D that I was wearing at Selfridges that day. I am a 30DDD. It was a revelation to learn that, but it came with an entirely new set of challenges. Lingerie, even more than clothing, is not really made with different shapes and sizes in mind – if you don’t fall between a 32B and 40DD, many conventional lingerie brands would have you believe that you are the only one of your kind. They are wrong. But you believe them – we all believe them, and so at least half of us probably don’t know what our bra size really is, because we are trying to fit into that very small size range. It’s a terrible shame cycle – we feel uncomfortable with our bodies, we try on a garment that doesn’t fit and makes us feel more uncomfortable, and we come away feeling still more uncomfortable in our skin. We aren’t inclined to talk about it and even if we do, most of us don’t have the knowledge we need for an informed discussion, because we learned about breast development from sexual education material written decades before we were born, when the idea of women as independent sexual beings was still taboo. There is no handbook, no guidelines – we look to stores that sell lingerie for expertise and so often, their silent response is, “You don’t fit in.” I can honestly say that I never thought I would appear in lingerie in photos, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why. I am at age when I have finally come to accept that this is the body that I have – it is the most powerful tool I will ever be given and what it can do is so much more important than how it looks. But not everyone feels that way – there isn’t a magic moment in time when you suddenly begin to feel comfortable in your skin, it’s all a process of trial and error and so, so much depends on your life experiences, because we all know that even one off-hand comment about how you look can set back how you feel about yourself by years. In many ways, my feeling comfortable with my body coincides with finally knowing my bra size and finding a lingerie brand I could rely on to offer the size I need, which, I feel compelled to say, is not as unusual as many other brands would have had me believe. It’s been three years since I stood in the corner of a fitting room, trying to avoid really seeing how I looked in the mirror with nothing but a bra on and, in the moment when I finally dared take a good look, tugging at straps and strings to force whatever I was wearing to fit so I could just leave, already, and not have to think about bra shopping again for six months, until the one I was about to pay for wore out. I remember the version of me who went on those solitary bra shopping trips, filled with dread from the minute I left home and defeated when I returned. So here I am – just me, my bra and my iPhone, since it never leaves my side. The struggle to feel comfortable enough to expose our bodies to the world (and to the criticism that will inevitably ensue) is very real. But for me, the change started to happen when I finally learned what a good bra could do, and began investing in them accordingly. For me, buying lingerie is a form of self-love – it took many years and many bad bras to get here, but I now believe that my body, with its imperfections, is good enough and deserves to be dressed in quality garments of all kinds, not just the ones that the outside world gets to see. And I think every woman deserves to believe the same thing about herself. A good bra may not be the solution for everyone, but it can’t hurt to find out. Every little bit helps.
J’adore la lingerie. Aujourd’hui, dans mon texte anglais, je vous raconte toute l’histoire de ma vie en ce qui concerne les soutien-gorges, mais arrivé le moment de la traduction, je me suis demandée si cette histoire serait la même si j’étais française. Et honnêtement, je n’ai aucune idée. Je vous explique donc – en Amérique du Nord, où nous sommes plutôt gênés au sujet de notre sexualité, c’est très commun que les femmes ne connaissent même pas leur vraie taille de soutien-gorge. J’ai appris la mienne à mes vingt-sept ans, et je portais un soutien-gorge bien avant, bien sûr. Personne n’en discute, personne ne veut en discuter, ça nous mette très mal à l’aise. L’acte d’acheter un soutien-gorge, ça nous mets même plus mal à l’aise – la bonne partie des boutiques de lingerie vendent très peu de tailles, et la bonne partie des marques de lingerie fabriquent très peu de tailles, une manière discrète de nous suggérer que si les tailles ne nous conviennent pas, c’est de notre faut. Après trente ans, je me suis enfin décomplexée – je sais où trouver ma taille de soutien-gorge, et je l’achète très souvent chez Chantelle Paris. Enfin connaitre la taille qui me convient m’a beaucoup aidé à apprendre que normalement, si la bonne taille n’existe pas en magasin, ce n’est pas que ma morphologie m’a trahi et ce n’est pas que j’ai fait quelque chose de mal. Je suis, enfin, bien dans ma peau et je voudrai vraiment que toutes les femmes soient aussi à l’aise. Ceci dit, ici en Amérique du Nord, nous connaissons la lingerie française comment étant la meilleure du monde et je me demande si la culture de la lingerie en France soit donc moins imprégnée de gêné et de honte. Je vous pose donc la question : racontez-moi vos expériences en lingerie pour que je puisse comprendre comment elles diffèrent des nôtres (ou bien, pour que je sache que, en tant que femmes, nous nous complexons au sujet de nos corps.)
