A few years ago I remember reading that the average dress size for American woman is now 12 or 14 (can't remember) and the average bra size is now D.

It's rather well-established that the fashion industry very shabbily serves the fashion interests of average size, let alone above-average sizes. It's less well-established that the industry also shabbily serves adult women who are undersized.

Back when my blog was more about the ins and outs of sex than the cultural influences and consequences of it I was online friends with a number of women bloggers who were highly fashion-conscious but very small breasted. Small-breasted in the specific sense that the "foundation garment" industry didn't produce bras, slips, camisoles, or lingerie in general that simultaneously a) looked sexy but also b) fit them.

While surfing to see who was referring to my site this morning I ran across vintage erotica collector Silent Porn Star. I'd lost track of her years ago but as of March 2010 she seems to be back.) Anyway, while catching up with posts (she's interested in everything from naughty embroidery to cheesie "nudist camp" jigsaw puzzles to scholarly analysisPaul Klee and sexual fluidity) I noticed she kept referencing the author of the vintage lingerie blog Slip of a Girl.

And to get back to the original point of this post, I ran across Slip of a Girl's post Smaller Busted Or Know Someone Who Is? An Exclusive Interview With Lula Lu Petite Lingerie Designer Ellen Shing! Shing owns what Slip of a Girl says is the only retail shop in the U.S. and Canada that caters to small-busted women of all heights and sizes.

[SoaG] As a larger busted woman, and indeed a larger woman in general (actually, I am average size, but you know how fashion goes!), I've often been frustrated with way sizes are created. If I'm unhappy with the poor fit of the ill-conceived "just add a few inches all over," I imagine the problems are similar with "just shrink it all over." How does Lula Lu actually address the proper lingerie sizing for petite women?

[Shing] We don't start with a 34B, like many bra companies do for the fit of our bras as it makes no sense as we haven't even really added B cups to our collection! We start with AA cups and work our way up a little to an A cup and down a little to a AAA cup to keep things accurate. We keep the range of our sizes focused and test the size samples on actual women of each size to make sure they fit well. Having said that, no bra can ever fit everyone perfectly in a particular size because everyone's built differently and thus the bras will wear differently on women's bodies (and you also have to account for everyone's different tastes on how they would like to appear in a bra).<

...

[SoaG] Do you feel that the American obsession with big breasts (and implants) have negatively impacted not only the smaller-busted, perhaps, with self-esteem issues, but lingerie companies and retailers too — resulting in offering less options for those women with petite bustlines?

[Shing] Most of my customers are happy with their body type and bust size and they just feel defeated by the actual bra shopping experience when they realize that they cannot find anything that fits them or are told to go to the children's department. I think the biggest misconception about women with small busts is that the all want to appear like they have a big bust. It's not true and a lot of my customers like their shape and just want some bras that fit well. Read the whole interview here.

A lot of my old blogging friends have moved on, their sites are now dark, and I don't know how many of them still read me. And if they do I'm sure they'll be tickled that I'd stick with the issues of sizing lingerie instead of, oh, maybe what Shing's products actually look like and whether I think they're sexy (they look nice, I think they're sexy.)

Not everyone cares about fashion, but some people do. And like most people in general, most of those who do care about fashion don't have the standard 34B body industry seems to insist on designing for. There's been more activism lately to get industry to begin accommodating actual average bodies. But it's nice that someone's taking the interests of "minus" sized women, most of whom also aren't model shaped seriously.

I mentioned earlier that I’ve noticed more posts about breasts than usual this week. Here’s another good one. F.F. of Feminist Finance, in a continuing series called “How to Care For Your Clothes” says

I will break the ice by telling you a somewhat embarrassing story about myself. Hi, my name is feminist finance, and I wore the wrong size bra for about 15 years. I bought bras based on the size I thought I probably ought to be. My breasts weren’t small, but I didn’t think they were especially big, either. I am not quite sure who or what I was comparing myself to, but I have a sneaking suspicion it was, oh, boob-fetishizing culture at large. So, not so big and not so small: a B-cup sounded about right based on that description. So that’s what I wore from the start of high school until the very recent past.

Ding, ding, ding, guesswork and habit is the wrong way to buy a bra. My idea of what I looked like, and consequently what size bra I should be wearing, didn’t match reality. ... But dysmorphic thinking can take a lot of different, less extreme forms, and the form it took for me was thinking that because I didn’t look like a Hooter’s poster girl that I could not possibly be larger than a B-cup. That is also the form it apparently takes for a lot of the women who appear on Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style (I’m such a sucker for Tim Gunn ), who says that in all the episodes of filming that show, he has never worked with a woman who was wearing a correctly sized bra. It’s not necessarily about body hate or even mild body dislike, but it is always about unreality.

... It wasn’t enough of a prompt that I always had to wear a sweater over my button-down shirts because they would gap and pucker across my chest. I thought that was just an occupational hazard of buying cheaply made stuff. It wasn’t enough that I could sometimes see the outline of my bra through my sweaters where my breasts were spilling out over the top of the cup. I thought maybe my sweaters had shrunk. ...I decided that just for shits and giggles I would swing by my friendly neighborhood department store lingerie department. It was there that I learned that I have probably not been a B-cup since early in puberty. Me and my properly supported 34-D’s can now quite happily wear the exact same button-down shirts that used to make me swear and foam at the mouth.

She said it here.

I strongly endorse f.f.‘s recommendation that women get fitted by someone who’s trained to do it, even though I don’t have breasts, because just before I moved to the northwest young I worked briefly with a young woman from a fairly rural area who’s starchily conservative, religious mom happened to sell foundation garments out of her home. And while she very strictly managed her daughter’s relationships (“so… exactly what are your intentions with my daughter?” “Um, I’m mostly giving her rides to work since she doesn’t drive”) she was absolutely relaxed and almost, well, evangelical about breast care. And so on the few times I had to wait for my coworker to get ready I got a living earful of not-immediately-applicable information about the importance of breast examinations, the merits and demerits of underwires, the proper adjustments of straps, changes in breast size over the course of menstrual cycles, and quite a bit about the arcane system whereby bra size is determined. And, as f.f. discovered, just how much a correctly or incorrectly sized bra affects the fit of one’s clothes.

The main upshot though being, yeah, especially considering how expensive they are and how much they affect comfort, fit, and even health, it’s really a good idea to get properly fitted before you buy bras.

Update: Doh! I should have added “...if you intend to buy or wear them.” Which not everybody does or should or needs to or wants to, and which some people say one ought not to.

I’ve kept meaning to mention this but Helen G of The F-Word Blog, astutely riffing off a RenegadeEvolution post about bra cups specifically designed to disguise hard nipples.

It seems that Playtex has introduced an additional little piece of foam lining in the bra cup – to disguise hard nipples. Shock horror outrage! Teh Wimminz have nipples! And they get hard! Ohz noez!!!1!eleventy-eleven!!1!!

As Ren says, Playtex have been “long known for their attention to modesty and the use of the word in their advertising” but I wonder quite what this is really all about. Is it, perhaps, an attempt to ‘help’ women take another step closer to appearing about as anatomically correct as Barbie, further objectifying and curiously de-sexing us on the way? Or is it Teh Menz who are offended by our natural bodies’ reactions, and wish us to cover ourselves to spare their blushes? Whose modesty is it anyway, to coin a phrase…

She said it here.

“Whose modesty is it anyway?” That is wonderful coinage! I’ve mentioned that one strategy inside the “no-sex” class paradigm is sexualization with overt signs of arousal (tip the pelvis back and breasts up with heels, redden the lips and cheeks with makeup, Victoria’s Secret marketing lingerie as something to be worn under business attire) even when someone’s not aroused in order to make it harder for potential partners to notice when she actually is interested. The new Playtex cup liners (like Wonderbras that expand the bustline while de-anatomizing actual breasts) would seem ideal for that purpose.

And one of the funny things about that, and the question “whose modesty” is that… well… chances are you know darn well if you’re actually aroused and… call me wrong here but if you really are then you’re not likely to mind letting your prospective partner know so… if the goal of clothing is to mask your arousal from others but not you then… yeah, it’s protecting men’s modesty.

And yes, that really is silly sounding since, after all, we’re supposed to be thrilled by loose blouses or short skirts. But that’s going back to the whole sexualization thing — if you just look “sexy” then we men can imagine ourselves picking and choosing where and when to “make our moves.” If we thought you were actually already horny then OMG*!!!WTF?K!: that would mean you might have a libido that we’re not in control of and as Helen G puts it Ohz noez!!!1!eleventy-eleven!!1!! (I just love imagining how that might actually be pronounced.)

I have a hunch it may actually be some kind of twisted amalgamation of the two. On one hand, women are being told that we may be embarrassed to discover – suddenly! – that we have nipples. On the other hand, perhaps it’s because of the risk of inflaming the manly-men’s passions, poor lambs: maybe they’re just unable to control their wild, animalistic urges if confronted with even the faintest shadow of a nipple through a bra and (presumably) top, and need to be shielded from this dangerously provocative sight.

Or maybe it’s that the construction of the male gender as “always ready” leaves us astonishingly vulnerable to the minor-in-real-life inconvenience of being approached when we might not be ready, willing, or able to respond and, therefore, might have to decline or ask for a rain check.

And I’m not trivializing that, if 10,000 versions of manliness (written, incidentally, by a parade of alcoholic, often successfully-suicidal, gay men trying to pass authors of fiction) says you have to always be in the lead, always in charge, always on the initiative, never not ready, then breakdowns of the illusion really might be cause for alarm.

Too bad about that though. Humans being human we’re all perfectly capable of both giving and receiving the initiative and enjoying it. Although for it to really work you both have to be able to give up the notion that men can’t say “no” and women can’t be told no without the universe collapsing on itself.

But now I’m really digressing. I just really, really like the question “Who’s modesty is it anyway?”