Heading home to visit my family in a small town in Ireland, I was far from anywhere I could procure a Miu Miu anything. But as in all good small towns, there is a long-established, old-fashioned lingerie shop where I managed to find a decent approximation. I had not been in this store since I was a teenager, grappling with a slew of opposing demands which were barely legible. The space between frigid and promiscuous was minuscule; thin was good, it was commonly agreed, but it was bad to have no breasts. If you were not slim, breasts could act as a sort of apology for your failing. I was not especially slender, and had small breasts, and after one preteen experiment with bra-stuffing I resigned myself to generally ignoring them.
Wearing a bullet bra now, in my mid-30s, I was astonished by how well suited a garment it is for women with breasts like mine, which are neither one thing nor the other. Not quite a 45-degree angle, but nonetheless a definite shift upward, crucially, in a way that doesn’t suggest the attempt to mimic a younger woman’s body. I felt sexy, put-together, and, as the name lends itself, well protected.
“You look like my mother,” my own mother said as I adjusted my sweater.
“I know!” I said admiringly.
In a sense, all trends to do with body parts are inevitably incoherent on an individual level simply because of the enormous variance in our body types. We have the breasts we have, whether they are in style or not. While I’ve long since shed any sense of internal disappointment generated in my teenage years, there was something undeniably exciting about wearing the Mugler shirt, something that announced my breasts with intention, humble as they are. “The whole story of the house has been about celebrating the human form and reexploring shapes,” the managing director of Mugler, Adrian Corsin, told me.
Later that same evening as the Bushwick party, I tried the Mugler shirt with a red vinyl skirt; the high waist came to a point just below my ribs, lest the faux piercings not be attention-seeking enough. I was surprised by how defined and pronounced the shape of my body was. It was nice to see; when I am anything above a universally accepted state of slimness I have a tendency to retreat into men’s shirts and loose slacks. There’s nothing wrong with comfort or utility, but it was cheering to remind myself I’m still in there. I thought about how a piece of clothing like this could indeed help women who want to celebrate the breasts they love and are proud of, but also us women who had half forgotten they had breasts at all.
