Spoiled for choice, NIKKI DAKE checks out a bra-fitting party
Never having been a particularly ‘girlie’ kind of girl, the idea of a bra-fitting party raised some consternation last month. I admit to never setting foot in those terrible open-plan boutique changing rooms, not because my underwear (or underwears as the two essential pieces are still called in Singapore shops!) lacks style, but just from an innate dislike.
I’ve had a sort of love/hate relationship with bras since my teens in a boarding school, where I was the last to require a B-square, convent speak for the ‘bust bodice’ of which three were required by the clothing list. In those days of Berlei ring-stitched cups which moulded one’s form into a shape reminiscent of walnut whips, the whole bra thing was daunting. The colour choice was white and… white, we ‘nice girls’ had to wait a decade or more to possess a black bra!
Along with many of my generation, in the intervening years I have burned mine in protest, gone fashionably bra-less for a while, then flirted with Ann Summers for a season. So, coming about the same time as the invite to a Bra4Me party, Kathy Lette’s joke about the Wonderbra – ‘You wonder where your breasts have gone when you take it off!’ – hit a resonant note.
Bra4Me’s boss Sandra says research shows 85 per cent of women are wearing the wrong size bra – but, was I brave enough to find out whether I was one of that majority? At a bra-fitting party? In company?
I needn’t have worried; Sandra’s a gem! Her parties are set up to be exactly as all parties are meant to be: to have fun. In between you get to take your clothes off for a short while in a private room and try on decadently pretty underclothes which, more miraculously, really fit! And, if brave, you can don your clothes over your new undies and go out for approval, accolades even, because the first thing that’s noticeable is your body looks longer, slimmer, more ‘together’ and, despite the improbable DD cup you’ve been sized, not at all top heavy.
The science behind a Bra4Me fitting is that most stores/brands that measure women for this most intimate of apparel get the ratio of back size (the number in the equation you see on the label) to the cup size (the letters) wrong. And it shows in the fit. Sandra confided to me that she thought even ‘glamour model’ Jordan – the hyper-mammaried Katie Price who designs an underwear brand – was wearing the wrong size on TV recently. The whole undergarment hitched up most unattractively in the front at one point, Sandra remarked: “And that’s just what you don’t get with a properly fitted bra.”
A woman’s body changes up to seven times during her lifetime, Sandra explained, due mainly to hormones. And women wearing the wrong size or shape of bra are doing untold damage to their bodies, especially if there is not enough support for the breast or the currently fashionable underwiring cuts into soft tissue because the cup size is too small. This also impacts on the lymph glands in the armpits – which is why underwired bras have come in for some bad press from breast cancer websites.
Having been through the fitting process, I can understand that wearing the correct size and shape is actually strangely empowering; girls should know about sizing at a much earlier age and be fitted, rather than popping off to Dorothy Perkins for the prettiest, flimsiest model they can afford, which probably only fits where it touches.
Sandra started her bra-fitting training with a London supplier. “There started my enlightenment!” she admitted at our Bra4Me party. She then opened a shop but was disillusioned with the number of women walking past her window-display, patently wearing the wrong underpinnings, but not taking any notice of her fabulous stock.
Now she operates her highly successful business on the party system, where she turns up with a mass of stock to talk to and fit women gathered together informally to learn her secrets.
Needless to say, it transpired that I was wearing completely the wrong size in both letters and numbers, despite it being a hugely comfortable favourite French number. I almost wept as it was tossed aside! But not for long; Sandra selected a racy pink and black confection which she maintained was what I should be wearing… and I succumbed. Having kept my elbows together for half my life to create any kind of cleavage on my younger beanpole shape, I could never have imagined that I’d later be contemplating a DD cup size; that’s Page Three stuff, surely?
Sandra also sees clients at her Paphos home and travels islandwide to individual requests for a €20 fee. For more information visit: www.bra4me or call Sandra on 96 350659
