Bramancing the Braless: Notes on Nine Lingerie Startups (2024)

Recently, I have taken my shirt off twice while video chatting. No, I’m not that starved for excitement during quarantine. In both cases, I was being fitted for a bra. “So let’s talk bras and boobies and things like that,” Tania Garcia, my “fit therapist” at CUUP, said. CUUP is one of several e-commerce lingerie startups founded over the past few years. Most of them were established by women, many of whom, according to their companies’ mission statements, had been so frustrated by all the ill-fitting bras in their drawers that they decided to revolutionize the industry. Kind of like Moses being fed up with the pharaoh and leading the Israelites to freedom across the Red Sea.

The products featured on these Web sites look comfortable—designed with you and your friends in mind, instead of Barbie, Eleanor Roosevelt, or one of the Hadid sisters. A few of the companies whose founders I talked to saw an uptick in sales starting in April, particularly of wireless bras and other comfortable styles. On the other hand, a report from Adobe Analytics showed that bra sales across the industry (including at brick-and-mortar establishments) declined by twelve per cent from March to April, supporting anecdotal evidence that many women have used self-quarantine as an opportunity to go braless. “My bra probably thinks I died,” a Twitter user who goes by AJ said. (Meanwhile, some companies have been turning bras into face masks—perhaps inevitable, since the idea of the N95 mask was partly inspired by the bra.)

Sooner or later, the day might come when you are again allowed to be within six feet of someone other than your six-year-old or your poodle, and, at that time, you might want to wear a bra. How different are these newfangled garments from the ones we’ve been wearing forever? Are they more or less groundbreaking than, say, the spinning jenny or hot pants? Cora Harrington, the author of “In Intimate Detail: How to Choose, Wear, and Love Lingerie,” told me, “A bra is a bra is a bra is a bra. Most bras have the same structure: you have cups, you have straps, you have a band.” True, the bandeau of wool and linen that the ancient Greeks devised to strap themselves into is recognizably bra-like, as is the backless “brassiere” patented in 1914 by the twenty-three-year-old American Mary Phelps Jacobs, who’d tied two silk handkerchiefs together with a pink ribbon and wore the contrivance to a dance. (This invention became more popular after 1917, when the United States War Industries Board asked women to stop wearing corsets so that the metal could be used for ammunition and warships.) True, too, that innovations such as the bra that texts you to stop eating or corrects your posture did not take off. “What I see from a lot of these so-called bra-disrupter brands,” Harrington said, “is that they are making the same thing we’ve already had, but they have better P.R. and marketing.” If you are on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, you know what Harrington is talking about. Bra advertisem*nts—touting body positivity, inclusivity, and mind-altering levels of comfort—are inescapable.

What has also changed is the way in which we buy our underwear. Until the advent of the e-commerce ventures of the past decade, the default retailers were department stores and Victoria’s Secret, both of which now seem as viable as Blockbuster Video and buffets. There you could try on a bunch of sizes and styles, hate them all, and then consult with a saleswoman for reassuring lies about how you look. Or you could go to a bra salon, an unappealing ordeal for some, like Patty Volk, a writer. “Oh, my God, I hated going to stores for a bra,” she said. “My first bra was a 32 AAA, and the saleswoman came into the room with me while my mother waited outside. She saw them. It was traumatic. But worst was the famous place on Lex, or Third, uptown. You’d have to get undressed and be touched by a woman in a tiny dressing room with a shower curtain for a door. The woman was the owner’s daughter, and she stared in a way that was humiliating and chilling.” Ann Foley, a former TV executive, was similarly non-nostalgic about buying a bra up close and personal. “These stores can be intimidating, as only the generally disapproving salespeople are permitted to go into the drawers, and they pull up one option at a time, and I at least feel bad about rejecting their selection,” Foley said. She added, “I also do not like to be yanked into my underwear, and, despite the fact that I happily eat raw fish of similar cost, am not happy to spend big bucks on an item I will forget to handle properly and find tangled around the sheets in the dryer.”

The notion of selecting your bra virtually might seem co*ckamamie. Then again, who’d have dreamed, years ago, that you’d be ordering a pair of eyeglasses online or receiving a diagnosis of eczema through telemedicine? A widely quoted statistic in the undergarment world estimates that eighty per cent of women are wearing the wrong size bra. The number seems questionable—who’s to say what’s wrong?—and is based on only a few small studies. Still, I’ve never had success the old-fashioned way (I am in possession of so many bras that don’t fit that it might pay to have breast surgery so I can wear them), and I’ve spent the past three months effectively under house arrest. So I decided to give nine of these online companies a try. “You can exchange all day long,” Colleen Leung, the director of technical design at the brand Adore Me, told me. “We give you a voucher code right away so that you can buy more bras to try before even returning the bras that didn’t work.”

Back to the CUUP fitting. “So, tell me a little bit about what’s going on with your bra situation,” Tania said, exuding warmth, even on a laptop display. In her mid-thirties, with hair pulled back tight, ballerina style, she was wearing a loose cardigan over a leotard over CUUP’s Scoop bra. Around her neck hung a tape measure, which she’d later use to demonstrate how to take measurements of the ribcage and fullest part of the bust. This was not as embarrassing as talking about sex with your mother, but close. (Fun distraction: when the fitter discusses whether you should wear a bra with underwire, pretend you are talking to the F.B.I. about taping a mike to your chest.) I confessed to Tania that I hardly ever wear bras because they feel like “breast prisons," as a cast member on the reality series “Vanderpump Rules” put it. Tania suggested that perhaps my bras did not fit. She explained “sister sizes,” a term used in the lingerie industry to refer to bras that hold the same volume of breast tissue but have differently sized bands. By this system, a smaller band with a larger cup is more or less equivalent to a larger band with a smaller cup. For example, a 34A is the “sister” of a 32B, but, depending on your particular anatomy, one might be a better match than the other. I pictured a waffle cone and a sugar cone with the same amount of ice cream.

Unaccustomed as I am to wearing bras, I enlisted the help of friends to evaluate the goods (or the bads, as the case may be). Each agreed to test-drive a bra or two. The online-shopping process usually begins with a sizing questionnaire, which asks more questions than you’ve ever been asked about your breasts. It can be daunting. Gena, an artist in Washington, D.C., was assigned to try out True & Company, which claims to have created the first Fit Quiz. The company, which has been called the “Netflix of bras,” was founded in 2012 as a startup, but grew up and got rich in 2017, when it was acquired by the PVH Group. On its Web site, Gena encountered a testimonial reading, “The MOMENT I tried this bra on... I cried with relief.” Gena said, “I wanted a bra that would bring me that much joy, but I worried I failed the quiz.... I felt like I was filling out all C’s on the SAT multiple choice. There were many questions about my cups: Do they runneth over? Dunno.”