As professional milieus go, the fashion world has never been known for its adherence to taboos. Indeed, it draws much of its mystique from the three D’s: decadence, debauchery, and drugs. There is, however, one D-word that this permissive tribe’s members tend to avoid—and that word, dear readers, identifies an attribute that yours truly has possessed, and worked assiduously to hide, for her entire adult life. My name is Caroline, and I am a D-cup.
Comical as it may sound, this is a hard confession for me to make. I came of age in the early Nineties, just as the underfed waif—exemplified by a scrawny new Calvin Klein model named Kate Moss—was replacing the previous decade’s glamazons as the fashionable feminine ideal. The resulting “heroin chic” aesthetic inculcated style watchers of my generation with the belief that, as fashion publicist Kelly Cutrone recently proclaimed, “Clothes look better on thin people. The fabric just hangs better.” Complicit in promoting this view, the fashion industry has held its models to increasingly dangerous physical standards—standards for which it has come under justifiable fire. Still, the view of emaciation as elegance has continued to reign supreme, and so too has the converse equation of voluptuousness with vulgarity. Although absurd, and in my case, self- defeating, these biases have driven me to hide my chest at all costs.
The operative term here really is “costs,” by the way. Over the years I have spent a fortune on sack dresses, unstructured jackets, and oversize cardigans—anything and everything I could find to mask my buxom upper body. A pricey effort, yes, but a successful one, given that every single friend to whom I have mentioned this article has reacted with some version of “No way do you have a big chest!” Prompting me in each case to make the same sheepish confession: “It’s true. I have stealth boobs.”
So why, you may ask, have I decided to bust out of the cleavage closet now? Well, I’d like to claim that I’m doing it in support of those models who have started speaking out about being deemed “too fat” for the runway. (Just to make clear what “fat” means in the fashion world: Three of the models so labeled—Lara Stone, Coco Rocha, and Filippa Hamilton—are five feet ten and a U.S. size 4.) But as much as I admire these young women’s courage, my inspiration came from a rather more improbable source. This season two of fashion’s most influential houses, Louis Vuitton and Prada, dispelled my mammary shame by celebrating, at long last, the belle poitrine. Miuccia Prada offered a typically thoughtful variation on va-va-voom, building up the bustline of otherwise primly elegant New Look–ish frocks with rows of frothy ruffles inflating the chest and pointy, exaggerated darts outlining the nipples. At Vuitton, Marc Jacobs also referenced the Fifties sumptuous hourglass silhouette but in a mode that was more showy than suggestive. Inspired by And God Created Woman, the 1956 French drama starring Brigitte Bardot, Jacobs paired wasp-waisted circle skirts with fitted bodices so tightly corseted and unabashedly cleavage baring that the models looked poised for an haute replay of Janet Jackson’s Nipplegate. As reported in Women’s Wear Daily, Jacobs had been “thinking about tits.”
