There are headlines about women going brazenly bra-free every few years. These days, it’s murmurings about Gen-Z saying au revoir to pesky underwire or tossing the brassiere altogether. Can we chalk up the renewed rejection of bras to confusion around return-to-office dress codes after the great work-from-home movement of COVID? Perhaps. Though leaving the bra in the top drawer is nothing new. Back in my day in the 2010s, it was all about #freeingthenipple, with the likes of Kendall Jenner and Rihanna stepping out in something sheer. Better yet, ask your mothers or grandmothers about the late ’60s when there was a slew of “I-am-woman-hear-me-roar” bra burnings from second-wave feminists sick of restrictive cups, bands, and hooks.
So, how does the pendulous breast pendulum swing for bras in the workplace? It depends. When I worked in magazines, I was chronically braless; my double As barely making a dent in whatever flimsy cotton or slinky viscose I wore. Of course, I worked with mostly women: nary a spreadsheet, nary a straight man in sight. If a shadow of an areola poked through, well, I never heard about it.
Pre-magazines, though, I did have a job or two with unspoken dress codes. Before Vogue, I was a sweet young woman who sat at a desk, strapped into a nondescript beige bra from TJ Maxx, breasts cradled by underwire, doing business membership sales for a soft-spoken Hasidic man in Chelsea, and later translating foreign commodities news for a start-up. Never the faintest outline of a nipple. Never a whisper of flesh.
Why did I adhere to the unspoken rule of bra-wearing in a corporate setting? As I said, I’m flat as a board, and sometimes, a bra isn’t necessary. But subconsciously, I must have believed that I had to wear one. After all, everyone else around me did.
I called up Batsheva Hay, a designer known for frilltastic dresses who in a former life was a lawyer. She had an answer with no soft-ball froufrou. “The job is about being acceptable and pleasant and not noticeable. No body shapes that aren’t perfectly rounded. It’s weird that a lot of these bras are perfecting, but it’s really about deleting. You don’t want to be noticed.” Oy. Hay’s answer felt…backwards. I mean, what if the air conditioning was on full blast? Is a little bit of nipple…that bad? Hay told me to grow up: “You want to be able to do the task at hand. We work for the man. You don’t want to have anyone staring at your nipples.” I asked Hay: “You mean like ‘the man’ or ‘a man?’”
“Corporate, but also, really, the man is usually a man…that’s the thing,“ she said. So much for my editorial utopia of women!
As a lawyer, Hay rarely left her desk (or Blackberry), and if she happened to be sans bra, she would always put on a “forgiving blazer.” The only time she left the vice grip of her job? A once-a-year La Perla sample sale. She hasn’t been in the corporate world for eons. So has it changed? She suggested I call up her accountant, Zellerita St. Louis, a mother of three, who has been in the business since the 2000s. “I feel like it’s very subjective, and it’s to the person’s individual taste. I feel like we all know, especially in corporate America, what is presentable and what’s not presentable and when. You dress differently based upon where you’re going or who you’re meeting with.”
St. Louis also noted that bra-wearing was cultural. “I’m a first-generation American. My mother’s from Panama, and I feel like with her, everything was about appearance. She was very old-school, so I was always brought up to wear bras. It was something that was innate in me.” Continuing, she said, “I am an Afro-Latina, and as a Black woman, I think it’s even more like, ‘I got to be perceived in a certain manner, in a certain way.’ So it was very important for me to fit the image of a professional, and that included wearing bras according to society.”
Looking for another angle on the situation, I called up my former Vogue colleague Emily Farra, who is now in-house for a New York brand. Farra has always been the pinnacle of professionalism in my eyes and most certainly she wears a bra to work. “Body politics aside, it goes back to the double standard around how women are perceived and the pressure to look ‘presentable,’” she says. “In a typical office, if your hair’s a little messy, your nails are chipped, you’re noticeable not wearing a bra–it might be registered or judged, even subconsciously. Whereas a guy can wear a wrinkled shirt or pants that don’t fit and it doesn’t matter nearly as much, because we haven’t been conditioned as a species to evaluate their appearance before anything else.”
What a drag for those yearning to go braless at their cubicle! A little cleavage? A nipple? What’s the big deal!! Zillionaire Kim Kardashian, an aspiring lawyer herself, released a bra with stand-at-attention nipples last year, for goodness sake. Though, as Hay pointed out, “that makes no sense to anyone who actually works in the corporate world.”
Yes, the question of bras is subjective. These are your breasts! This is your chest! But we have to account for the reality of others, and titillating distractions, no matter how big or small. When in doubt, fasten your bra. You never know when the air conditioning will be going full blast.
Addressed is a column about the act of getting dressed. If you have a pressing style question, ask us! Download the Vogue app, and find our Style Advice section to submit your question.