ShareThisDemi cup, full cup, T-shirt style, molded contour, seamless, minimizer, full-figured, strapless, training, three-part support, balconette, one-shoulder, maternity, nursing, underwire, non-underwire, racerback, sports, front-closure, full coverage, convertible, plunge, push-up, longline, halter. ...
Whew! So many bra styles -- and so many that don't fit worth a darn.
Ladies, do you suffer from dreaded "back fat," slipping straps, cup spills or collapsed cups? It's not your fault. Your support system is all wrong.
Queen Elizabeth II's longtime bra-maker and bra-fitter says that most women -- 85 percent -- aren't wearing the right size. "It's because they've gone to a shop that doesn't know how to fit them properly," June Kenton told a London newspaper after her retirement last year.
Kenton recalled dreading her first royal visit in 1960. "Can you imagine what it was like? Most people first meet the queen when she's wearing an evening dress, but not me."
The queen may have been nervous, too.
"When you take off your blouse in front of a woman, it's a little intimidating," said Yvonne Alicea, who owns Yve's Fine Lingerie in Roseville, Calif. "I tell women, 'I look at boobs all day. You don't have anything I haven't seen.' "
Alicea stocks bra sizes from 32A to 46L. (The number refers to the band that circles the body; the letter is the cup size.)
"It's not about pretty bras, although I have some gorgeous collections, it's about the fit," Alicea said.
"Women (with large breasts) come in with indentations an inch deep in their shoulders and in pain and don't know how to resolve the problem. They get migraines from the pressure. I've had women cry because they finally find some relief."
Leave it to Oprah Winfrey to tell the world something is amiss beneath our blouses.
Determined to get us out of our ill-fitting underpinnings, she hosted a "bra intervention" show in 2005, bringing in 8,000 bras and 35 professional fitters from Nordstrom to work with 240 female audience members.
The fitters discovered mothers still in unnecessary nursing bras, women who safety-pinned their raggedy bras together -- and a man who shopped on eBay for his wife's bras.
After the show aired, bra sales at Nordstrom skyrocketed 189 percent over the same period in 2004, according media reports at the time.
A properly fitting bra, the experts say, is neither too tight nor too loose, has straps that don't dig into the shoulders (the band, not the straps, should be the main means of support) and doesn't allow breast tissue to spill out of the cups. The right bra will lie smoothly and comfortably against the body.
Bras cost as much as $250 -- or $2 million if you're in the market for Victoria's Secret Bombshell Fantasy Bra introduced last Christmas. It was a sparkly little thing designed by an Italian jeweler and festooned with 3,000 diamonds, sapphires and topazes.
Winfrey's favorite bra is Le Mystere's Dream Tisha, a little more modestly priced at around $70.
Expensive bras are made with higher-quality materials, are more comfortable and will last longer than cheap ones. "It's like a Hyundai vs. a Mercedes," Alicea said. "With the Mercedes, you get better airbags, better power steering and better leather. It's the same with bras."
A wealthy corset-wearing New Yorker named Mary Phelps Jacob fashioned the first modern bra in 1913, six years after Vogue magazine introduced the term "brassiere" (French for "upper arm") in its pages.
She and her maid stitched together two silk handkerchiefs and pink ribbon for an undergarment that, unlike her bulky corset, wasn't visible beneath her delicate evening gown.
Jacob patented her "backless brassiere" and later sold the invention to Warner Brothers Corset Co. for $1,500.
U.S. bra sales (excluding sport bras) last year exceeded $4.5 billion, according to NPD Group, Inc., a market-research company in Port Washington, N.Y. Sport-bra sales totaled nearly $449 million.
The bra -- that supportive, sometimes sexy undergarment -- made news in the early 1940s when Howard Hughes designed a cantilevered version for his movie "The Outlaw," to show off the ample cleavage of movie star Jane Russell, who died recently. And in 1990, everyone was talking about the pointy-cone bra Madonna wore on her "Blond Ambition" tour.
Bra-burning has long been associated with the feminist movement, but it never happened. A group of women's libbers, protesting the 1968 Miss America Pageant as a symbol of male chauvinism, threw their bras and other things into a trash can but didn't light it. Cops were watching, and they didn't have a burn permit.
But maybe it wasn't about equal rights at all.
Maybe they were dumping bras that didn't fit.
(Contact Dixie Reid at dreid(at)sacbee.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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