First they came for cleavage and I did not speak out, perhaps because I’d never really had any. When in 2016 Vogue declared it “over”, it seemed entirely right and progressively modern that the credit-card slot of old had had its day.
Then they came for underwires and I still did not speak out, because who hasn’t spent all day thinking about sliding off their bra through one sleeve as soon as they arrive home? Millennial Savonarolas had been burning their balconettes along with the rest of their vanities even before the pandemic, but it wasn’t until lockdown that I went fully “soft” and swapped my boulder-holders for the sort of banana hammock last worn pre GCSEs. It was bliss.
But when they came for the bra itself, I thought — hang on a minute: hang loose? Access all areolas? No, thanks.
As fashion editor of The Times, I am used to unconstrained bosoms swinging along the catwalk and nobody in attendance blinking an eye. More often than not they are the micro-mammaries of size-zero models. Likewise, the red-carpet oopsies of pancake-chested celebrities—these were always tabloid fodder rather than trendsetting moments. Kate Moss was famous for rocking a Friday-night fried egg, but it didn’t follow that the rest of us would.
Yet women younger than me seem to have shed their bras entirely, and not just for nights out or among the A/B cups. I am noticing baps at brunch, melons in the grocery aisle, unexpected items in the bagging area. Under T-shirts, blouses, in crop tops and even sheer dresses, the Instagram generation has taken the platform’s “free the nipple” campaign offline and onto the streets. I want to applaud, but it reminds me of that episode of Miranda when she turns over in bed and her own pair clap loudly.
The look is quite Boogie Nights—or Margot Robbie in Once upon a Time… in Hollywood and Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza, to update it for Gen Z. Let’s call it the Seventies ski jump: a low-slung and natural shape that has become the fashionable template not only for the way bras support us now but also a free-range option for those who have come of age without being taken into a cubicle to endure the fitter’s brisk measuring tape. And as in that decade, many of the women I see without bras are also sporting giant tufts of underarm hair—proof perhaps that this isn’t a fashion trend so much as a lifestyle choice. Solidarity in that case. But oh, their poor backs!
The Instagram generation has taken the platform’s “free the nipple” campaign offline and onto the streets.
Trends come and go, hemlines rise and fall—and so, it seems, do boobs. Their shape and spirit level is as much a product of the Zeitgeist as the clothes that (sometimes don’t quite) cover them. Right now, we are in the era of wearing one’s breasts at the height nature intended, rather than hoisting them into something people can talk to instead of your face.
Selfridges reported that sales of non-wired bras were up 90 percent in 2022 on the previous year. The It girl soft-bra brand of choice, Commando, said it doubled sales of its buttery bralettes during the pandemic and saw no drop-off in interest. One Harley Street surgeon told me their clinic swapped round implants for the teardrop variety due to the change in tastes among female clients.
Cosmetic enhancements aside, all this breast practice feels like progress since my student days of gel-filled chicken-fillet bras—so cold to put on in winter they became my generation’s breaking the ice off the taps to have a wash. Such was the cultural dominance of the lads’ mag rounded Robo-boob during my youth that I barely even knew what a real pair looked like—or that my own were fine as they were.
Recently, however, bras have found a third way. Last October, Kim Kardashian’s $72 “nipple push-up” bra sold out within days of going on sale at her shapewear brand Skims—one of those previously at the forefront of popularizing loose-hanging, non-wired styles. What it offered, beyond the two molded nubs of lightweight foam in the center of each cup, was the reassuring hold and shape of a T-shirt bra, but without the alien-like smoothing effect. Now that we are hybrid workers, our underwear must be too. At least our real—often wonky, sometimes alert and sometimes not—nipples have been given a bit of time off.
Now, though, with temperatures dropped and the trend becoming even more, ahem, prominent, almost everywhere you look there are women displaying brilliantly normcore boobs. Just do so subtly, or you’ll be canceled.
Harriet Walker is the fashion editor at The Times of London
