After Years of Going Braless, One Vogue Writer Reconsiders the Push-Up
I haven’t worn a push-up bra since high school. But here I am, a decade later, wearing one at my desk. I have been tasked with test-driving all kinds of bras, from the comfortably wireless to the daintily lace-trimmed to that magical boob-picker-upper: the push-up. The contraption, padded like a stiff memory foam pillow, has the gravity-defying ability to lift and squeeze my breasts together as if I were going to eat breakfast off of them. The bra makes me feel like I’m in an embarrassing straightjacket, and that maybe I could poke an eye out with these things. Things. In other words, my body feels foreign; my chest now belongs in an ’80s-era Penthouse hanging in some 14-year-old boy’s room.
Wearing the push-up bra became sort of a running joke in the office. My boobs were annoyingly perkified, severely enthusiastic, and forever looking upward as if God would come down and bless them himself. And be gone that gaping canyon in between them! I now had cleavage like I was cosplaying a buxom Western saloon floozy or a dirndl-wearing German beer hall babe. At one point, I showed my coworker my new pushed-up breasts, and she gasped, not because I bared my body in a corporate setting, a flagrant HR violation, but because they reminded her of something. “I had those!” she said. “High school boobs!”
High school boobs. Just saying that phrase brings back growing pains. And it will forever be associated with the push-up bra—so much so that just wearing this porntastic, top-drawer piece gives me a tinge of PTSD. High school boobs were aspirational breasts. Popular tits. Cool girl knockers. They were everything I was not. Instead, I was (and still am) perpetually flat-chested, which was something I was bullied mercilessly for in middle school and high school. To counter it, I wore padded push-up bras with the straps hanging out of Hollister tank tops to let everyone know that, yes, I had boobs. I was a woman! The world wasn’t flat and neither was I, and I’d do anything to prove it. I’d stuff these bras. I’d put socks inside of the inserts, and when I got smarter (or more desperate), I’d double up on inserts. I was bullied for that too!
Eventually, I stopped wearing bras altogether, as if I were quitting smoking cold turkey. In my mid-20s, after I had slowly learned to embrace the smallness of my boobs, I woke up one day and realized that I didn’t want—or need—to wear a bra. I like my chest to feel the fresh, breezy air and car exhaust of New York City. I like them out and in the open—joyously free. Plus, tossing my bra was a proverbial “jokes on you” to the testosterone-jacked idiots I went to school with. I looked great! I felt great! I looked better without a bra than I ever did wearing that suffocating, body-binding thingamajig.
When I got home after my push-up bra experiment, I chucked it. I thought about burning it like a ’60s-era feminist, not because I believed so strongly in rebelling against the patriarchy—yada yada—but because I hated the cartoonish ice-cream scoop aesthetic of it. Maybe I’d tuck it away in my drawer and bring it out for next Halloween for when I really do cosplay as a buxom Western saloon floozy! My mother, a perpetually braless icon in her own right, offered some practical advice and said that she read on a Facebook post that I could use the cup as a makeshift medical mask. Great.
I was about to swear off bra wearing for good when the market editor passed off two bras to me to test out: one with wire and another sans wire. Too scarred from the wire of the push-up bra, which I did indeed try, I gravitated toward the wireless incarnation. The bra was a butter-soft piece of fabric that wasn’t meant to violently lift my breasts, but rather to cradle them like a newborn baby. A bralette. I wore the bra all day, and in fact, I actually forgot I was wearing it. At night, I even fell asleep in it. It was a dream for me, and my boobs.
Here, the best 11 comfortable, deliciously soft bras to buy now.
