Boobs are back. Also, they never went away. This is part of Boobs Week—read the whole thing here.
If Barbie were real, she would topple over. She also would have a hard time finding a button-up shirt. Greta Gerwig’s portrayal of the doll might have grappled with the perma-flexed feet and the impossible beauty standard, but it left aside the fact that big boobs and a small frame often just don’t really fit into clothes sold in stores.
People think Sydney Sweeney’s boobs are super big—they are not—in part because women with bigger boobs are, some portion of the time, sizing up to fit their chests, obscuring their bodies and frames altogether. Or else we’re smushing into minimizer bras, which can make clothes more wearable. Sometimes, of course, breasts are just out there. Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan, a self-described “member of the perfect-breasts community,” appeared in a Skims campaign in a lime-green spaghetti-strap dress that demonstrated the other mode available to those with large chests: just go skintight. Fun! But tough for a day involving … anything where you don’t want to wear something skintight.
Whether they are straight size or extended, clothes are typically made to fit women with chests that maintain a specific proportion to the rest of their bodies. A garment is designed using a fit model, meant to represent the average customer, with the pattern scaled up or down so a brand can offer a range of sizes. But that doesn’t account for varying proportions. The typical piece of clothing in America is designed for a B cup, according to Kristen Allen, a fashion entrepreneur.
Allen, herself a 32H, realized early that she was going to have a hard time shopping for clothes. In high school, her favorite store was Guess. “I remember going there and trying on the shirts, and it was a mess, and I was just like, Oh my God, why can’t they just make this for larger-chested women?” she told me.
Left adrift by most (though not all) major clothing retailers, some women, like Allen, are taking matters into their own hands. A decade ago, as an adult, Allen started her own brand, Exclusively Kristen. Using herself as a fit model, she created a pattern for a button-up shirt that would neither pop open at the top nor leave extra fabric hanging around her midsection: a shirt that would just fit. The design achieves this with princess seams, which trace the body in a curve from the armpit, over the breast, and down to the hemline. This, Allen said, accentuates the figure, “without being inappropriate for work.”
She took her shirts to bra shops that catered to larger busts, where she’d also get feedback on how the garments fit other people so she could tweak the pattern. Those conversations revealed a clear mismatch between what we tend to think of as a “normal” breast size and what many bodies are actually like. “I would ask women who owned the bra shops, who would sell cup sizes up to M and N, ‘What is the bestselling size?’ and it was always, like, a 34H or a 34G,” she said.
Even if you are a pro at shopping, finding clothes for an ample rack can be impossible. Alice Kim, another fashion entrepreneur, spent years employed as a buyer for major brands like Victoria’s Secret and Prada, working her way up to be a vice president of merchandising at Diane von Furstenberg. “And I still can’t find clothes that fit my body off the rack that I don’t have to tailor,” she said, recalling her frustration. In 2020 she founded PerfectDD, pronounced “perfected.” (Kim said that she is a 28I—but that she often refers to her own cup size as “DD” because “that’s what people understand.”) PerfectDD’s offerings, which include button-downs, scoop-neck tees, a lace corset top, and a jumpsuit, are designed for the titular DDs to M cups. The first time she tried on a sample of PerfectDD clothing, she “literally cried,” Kim said. Not having to size up into something baggy just so the clothes fit her breasts was a huge relief. “I was like, I look my size. This is the actual size of my body.”
Earlier in her life, unable to find clothes that fit, tired of being known as the girl with big boobs, Kim had wanted a breast reduction. “Now I’m like, I wish I were even bigger,” she said.
To say that wearing clothes that fit your shape inspires confidence is kind of trite. It’s almost too lofty a way to put it. To have clothes that neither expose nor swallow you is something of a basic need, but it can be weirdly difficult to fulfill even in our era of clothing abundance. No matter what shape you are, chances are that you’re familiar with the struggle of clothes because some facet of your body, if not the entire thing, doesn’t fit the cookie-cutter shapes found in stores. The most variation we are typically offered is longer or shorter hemlines in “tall” or “petite.” (An exception: “curvy” jeans. Bless.) For all the options of what to buy—they are so very dizzying—and for all the rapid cycles of trends, it can be somewhere between tricky and exceedingly hard to find clothing that simply fits you.
Back to the subject of large breasts specifically: Leah, the author of a long-running fashion column, Off the Rack, has often gotten around the problem of ill-fitting clothes by sewing her own, or making alterations. (Leah uses just her first name for her boob writing to keep it separate from her professional life.) She has a key clothes shopping tip for the rest of us: “You definitely want to look for darts,” she said. “Multiple darts, not just, like, one little one on the side.” Button-up shirts, she said, will often have one little dart on each side, which doesn’t do all that much. “I’ll look for shirts that have darts both by the armpit and also at the waist, and also at the waist in the back.” All those darts mean that there’s extra fabric in the chest that’s been nipped and tucked elsewhere in the garment. And those darts can be deepened with a sewing machine to accommodate a larger differential between waist and chest.
What about for a more complicated garment, like a suit jacket? After all, politicians can have big breasts too. (Nancy Pelosi, for example, famously keeps hers professionally under wraps.) Yes: more darts. “Darts—lots of them,” said Caroline Andrew, a bespoke tailor in London, in an email. She explained uses princess darts (another name for princess seams), and adds chest darts under the lapel. A bespoke blazer, in which a custom pattern is created, will run you nearly $4,000, and Andrew doesn’t do made-to-measure for women, a simpler and less expensive process that involves modifying a pattern to fit a particular body. If that sounds a little extreme (bespoke or nothing!), her reason is highly understandable: “I would rather start from scratch with bespoke because all ladies’ figures are so different,” she said.
A figure doesn’t even stay the same over one woman’s lifetime, as Leah experienced when she became pregnant last year. To her surprise, she found that maternity brands didn’t seem to account for the fact that as a pregnant person’s belly swells, so does their bust. “The full-bust maternity clothing landscape STINKS,” she titled an entry in her column. “I basically gave up on dedicated maternity brands,” she writes, lamenting the prevalence of shapeless sack dresses. She did manage to make things work with faux wrap dresses—regular wrap dresses can let your boobs spill out—and other high-waisted dresses from nonmaternity brands.
For what it’s worth, even in fantasyland, busty maternity options are lacking. There is a pregnant Barbie doll, and her clothes aren’t as cute either.
