Not Their Mother’s Bras

Who says there’s no good news anymore?

FIRST there was economic inflation. Then there was grade inflation. Now comes cup inflation.

While clothes designers have whittled down dress sizes so that even a musclebound woman can wiggle into a size 2, brassiere makers are defying fashion convention by selling bras with bigger cup sizes. These days, many women — to their shock or glee — are finding that DD is becoming the new C.

At Wacoal America, one of the largest bra makers in the country, 36DD is on track to replace 36D as its most popular size in 2009. (Three years ago it was 36C.) Bare Necessities, an online lingerie retailer, said 34DD was its No. 10 best-selling size last year, up from No. 17 in 2002. And this fall Elle Macpherson Intimates will introduce its first collection for fuller-busted women, offering cup sizes from D to G.

“It’s the ascendancy of the DDs,” said Noah Wrubel, the chief executive of Bare Necessities. “The bras that women are wearing these days are not their mothers’ bras.”

Theories abound as to why women’s cups seem to be (forgive the pun) spilling over. Some ascribe the difference to a confluence of health and beauty trends that have accelerated over time. A 2007 study of adult women by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that the prevalence of obesity — someone having a body mass index of 30 or more — has increased 2.1 percent since 2004, to 35.3 percent. Breast augmentation, too, is still a popular procedure, despite the recession. And age and hormones play havoc with baby boomers’ bust sizes, as well. But most manufacturers and lingerie shop owners say the phenomenon is due to the fact that more women are being fitted correctly. They call it the Oprah effect. Since 2005, when Oprah Winfrey devoted a show to how to buy the right size bra, the number of women seeking bra fittings has soared.

Of course if they were wearing their mother’s bras they would look like the bra-wearing babe above, which is, in my humble opinion, the way a gal should look in a bra.

Or if you want a more specific example try Jane Russell.  Now Jane knew how to wear a bra.

Anyway, this is good news. For me anyway.

Christ Has Risen

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that – pierced – died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real line
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

~ John Updike