RANDOM BREAST THOUGHTS

If I Had Her Boobs, I Would Totally Wear That

How your breasts affect your fashion choices

If Those Were My Boobs

How many times have you shied away from a sexy or most excellent outfit because it doesn’t look good with your particular size or shape of breasts?

You see a friend in a dress or shirt and think, “If I had her breasts, I could totally wear that.”

I have longed to wear a slip dress into the world but I don’t. My breasts are too big for that. I’d be thinking about them all night, wondering if the outfit was too thirsty.

But why? Why must I be so limited by fashion just because of the size of my breasts?

And so what if people look? That’s their problem.

And what if someone thinks, “Why is she wearing that? That does not look good on her.”

None of us can live up to fashions and society's judgment of our bodies and out breasts and our choices, so why do we even try?

We gaslight ourselves by comparisons to each other. Why do we all look at one another and think, if those were my boobs…

They’re not your boobs, so why do we do that to ourselves?

If I had those boobs, what? You could what? Fly a spaceship? Write a novel? Become a brain surgeon?

Oh, wear that dress.

You can wear that dress, even if it wasn’t made for your boobs.

Fashion Does Not Love All Women

Megastar and Activist Billy Porter's favorite designer, Christian Sirian, was the first famous designer to design fashion for actresses size 8 or larger. 8 is considered fat in Hollywood. I’m from Chicago. That’s like a size zero here.

Not all actresses in Hollywood start out as size twos but they all seem to eventually end up smaller than when they began. Now, I know why. It’s not just the extra 10 pounds on the camera. It’s because of the gorgeous clothing that is being kept from them.

Until Christian Sirian.

Clothing has not been historically designed for women of all shapes. It used to be designed for more shapely women eons ago, but so were corsets. So, you were allowed to have big boobs, but you had to suck in your waist until you suffocated. So — nice tits, but can I help you up?

Manufacturing Flexibility

I went to a wedding recently. I tried on an old favorite dress. When I was pregnant years ago, my rib cage expanded. The dress fits wrong now. I tried turning it around backward and it looked gorgeous.

I hadn’t grown breasts on my back. It just worked better that way.

Had I accepted this was a dress for done for, I would have missed out on the possibility of reinventing it for me now. By opening my mind to the potential of making fashion work for my new body, I got a whole new dress.

That’s how we should treat all fashion — flexibly. That’s what tailors and scissors are for.

In the 70s, we tied our t-shirts in the front to tighten them and feel sexier.

In the 80s, we tied our shirts in the back, for the same reason but with a different effect.

Nothing is ever finished.

Get Out of Self-Imposed Jail

Recently one of our writers Emma Holiday wrote about the tie being like the bra for men. Why do we confine ourselves when it is not working in our favor? Why do we play by rules that came way before our time, that are steeped in patriarchy?

A slip dress was not designed for my body, but so what? I want to wear one anyway.

Fashion is a work in progress. So are women. So are women’s rights to our bodies. Just because something was designed for someone else does not mean you cannot make it work for you.