jjimm, your wife might like these - being launched in the UK later this month (backless and strapless for big-breasted women).
Cool, they look pretty good.
Or tops at all. Ladies, what gives?
It may have been. She was not in a lead role, so I imagine it was what wardrobe had avaiable and not a customized fit. She hated it.
Ouch. I’m torn. On the one hand, those look really cool and they would let me wear all those neat little halter tops and even camis with no wide bra strap showing, so yay! OTOH, they don’t provide any sort of support where the breast actually attaches to the chest wall - those microtears you get with no bra will not be minimized at all. OTOOH, I’ll have nice round beachball implant looking saggy knockers.
I’m sure I’ll try 'em, though, if they become available in the US. Heck, I might even pay for shipping from the UK, if the product itself isn’t too expensive. (Eek, the retail price is $70. I’ll wait until jjim’s wife tries it and lets us know how well it works.)
They do sound good, but looking at the pictures, I’m wondering how they actually look under your clothes (they seem to have somewhat of a torpedo boob effect), and what kind of jiggling you’d have (guys might love jiggle, but I try to avoid it). And like you said, WhyNot, no support from the chest wall at all.
Damn, that explains an awful lot of face-slappings.
The bra isn’t for transferring the load, at least in my case (mind you, I’m not large); it’s to keep things out of the way. My tits are sort of wide at the base, so when they’re not being kept firmly in place by a bra they’re in the way.
Have you taken a look at the bustiers and bodices offered by most lingerie firms? They’re designed for anything but comfort! I’ve worn a custom-made bodice and while it did interesting things to my girls, in order to do so it had to be real tight. “Can you breathe?” “Hm… yes.” “OK, then you need retightening.” A common newbie mistake was to refuse the retightening and then, after a while, the twins would be trying to escape their bounds (or escaping them) and the bodice would chafe everywhere.
Oh, of course we could breathe, but you learned to emphasize the shoulder-breathe rather than belly-breathe.
To prevent droop, you need to transfer the load due to gravity. As others have noted, this is a bigger factor on larger breasts.
I’ve had a gander or three at catalogues 
but never managed a close inspection.
Those ones seem to be designed for easy removal or for historical costumes.
That probably affected your flexibility, right? I wonder if you could still transfer the load downwards while maintaining flexibility?
Perhaps a supplementary question: bras are a recent invention; are there any records of women complaining about breast weight or breast droop from before the era of the bra?
Huh. I’ve worn corsets, and to fit right they had to be snug, but not tight.
In the Western world, women have worn corsets since the mid-fiftteenth century, before the time of general literacy. I don’t think there are any earlier recorded complaints about sagging. I could be wrong, but I can’t think of any offhand. Paging Miss Purl!
And so much for singing then.
How well does the human spine work in compression?
I wonder if you could run a cable from the upper back down to the waist to neutralize the boobie moment* and thusly prevent back pain.
*torque
Nobody complained about droop because everyone died before they turned 40. Partial
Oooh, I’ve never been paged before. I guess if my name conjurs up imagery of corsetry and boobies, that’s how it’s gonna have to be. It could be much, much worse.
I’m not aware of any women in history complaining about sagging bustlines, apart from complaints about changing fashions. For a couple centuries before the 1400s, women wore self-supporting bodices. You can achieve a very perky breast shape with these – there’s really no other way to describe it. It’s the Wonderbra of 14th and 15th century clothing.
Prior to that, women’s clothing really didn’t emphasize the bust. It was very loose and flowing compared to following centuries. (In the example I linked, I could wear the same size gown as the model, and I’m much larger than she is.) Bustlines in contemporary art also appear lower than following decades – instead of the high perkiness of the late 14th century, you get a very low and full, natural shape. If breasts were sagging, then that’s what you got, because everybody’s were. In fact, men’s and women’s clothing was pretty much interchangeable for a long time, apart from hem and sleeve length.
Aside from fashion, many women did die in their twenties and earlier, whether from complications in childbirth or disease. If you reached menopause, then you had to have a lot of power to be noticed. Many women of menopausal age today complain that they’ve become neuter or ignored in public, and that was true centuries ago. In a world that largely marginalized young, desirable women, older women basically disappear, apart from mentions as hags and specters (undesirables). (Well, and nuns, but that sort of removes the sexually desirable part; nuns’ habits really didn’t emphasize the bust.) So the women most likely to be commented on in a way that mentions their breasts aren’t anymore when they die or become old. Older women really weren’t described in that fashion.
Breast size really hasn’t, um, exploded since modern times (20th century) anyway. Corsetry tends to accentuate the positive and turn the negative positive – molehills to mountains and mountains to molehills. If you look at extant garments, bust sizes tend to be much smaller across the board. In Patterns of Fashion, a book that gives examples of extant garments from about 1560-1620, the largest bodice has a bust size of about 38", and that’s from a woman who died in her 40s after giving birth to many children. Photographic evidence from the 19th century shows that women with large busts . . . had large busts, sometimes supported and sometimes not. The ones that aren’t supported sag. In general, women in the past just had smaller breasts and didn’t live long enough to get to that floppy pancake stage.
To sum up, I don’t know of any complaints regarding sagging breasts prior to corsetry (or the 20th century, really). But the evidence doesn’t really point towards women having 1) the ability to complain (early death, illiteracy) or 2) the reason to complain (fashion, attitudes towards bodies). For male commenters, women with sagging breasts weren’t noticed. The women whose breasts are praised are the young, nekkid ones.
So, in conclusion, it’s not really in the evidence to say whether or not women were disheartened by saggy boobs.
Oh, and about corsets, to support they really only need to be four inches smaller than you measurements, and three inches of that four will be taken up by the gap in lacing. A garment really only needs to be snug right under the bust to support – you might not get the prettiest breast shape, but it will help take some of the strain.
jjimm, I’ve always been convinced that bras are designed by men who hate women.
When i was young, I wore size 4-6 pants, and size 14 tops. My bra size was 32 DDD (yeah, yeah, I could sit up with a little help.)
Finding infrastructure for summer or formal clothing was a constant frustration. I had drawers full of torture scaffolds.
So, if you can design something that tames the girls while still being comfy, there will be a market for it. Good luck.
Now days, I wear sports bras. They’re little more than a hammock for the uniboob.
…and nobody was going to write down what chicks said about their jiggly bits anyway…
Miss Purl,
Your post epitomizes one of my favorite there is no topic too petty or too obscure for someone to be an expert on it, or something resembling an expert. And to be able to present that knowledge, with a few well chosen links in a way which appears to balance expert, researched knowledge with a pinch of common sense so that your anwer is what I would have guessed had I bothered to do any research is a gift.
Note: It’s not like your answer would have been bad had it not sounded like common sense to me–it’s just that it’s always nicer when someone’s informed opinion agrees with my uneducated guess, than when it doesn’t.
Interestingly enough, the exact opposite occurs with men. Gravity is our greatest ally.
Don’t want to sound too much like a dude here, but are chronically unsupported boobs more physically irritating/painful than those traditionally bra’d? Or is bra’ing simply a means of gaining control and/or enhancing appearance?
As a keen admirer of large breasties I would never knock you. I wouldn’t hang around your knees either altho’ I may lurk in your garden just hoping for a glimpse
This thread lacks pics, lots of pics