It was near pandemonium at the recent Eberjey sample sale in downtown Manhattan, what with all the racks of lacy, flimsy little nothings twirling on their rickety plastic mini-hangers as stampeding bargain hunters dove in and swept them up in multiples.
Eberjey, a loungewear-lifestyle company in Miami, has a reputation for these little nothings. They go by the name bralettes, and they’re everywhere this summer, showing up under roomy jackets and see-through tops, or peeking out from under dresses with midriff cutouts, or even on their own. All but the sheerest are meant to be seen.
Mainly defined by not having underwires, the bralette is that anomaly: an easygoing bra, leaving the breasts, whether perky, upturned, down-turned, wayward, jiggling, floppy or sagging, in their natural shape. Uplift? Cleavage? Not much.
Instead, the bralette offers what for many women is the rarest of bra pleasures: comfort. It doesn’t pinch or dig into the skin. For many converts, wearing one feels like nothing at all. Not to mention, most varieties fold pretty much flat (great for travel).
But maybe most important in 2019, letting the breasts be gives the bralette those social media bona fides: body positivity, inclusivity, authenticity. (One more reason Victoria’s Secret and its va va voom push-up bras are on the wane.)
“It was #MeToo that catapulted the bralette movement into what it is today,” said Araks Yeramyan, an independent lingerie and resort wear designer in New York.
Libby Cole, 36, a graphic designer in Detroit, said, “Women are now dressing for themselves and other women — not for the male gaze.” She shops for her bralettes at Supernatural, a local lingerie boutique specializing in independent labels, whose owner, Carlie Quezada, regards the bralette as “a statement of modern femininity.”
CreditDanielle Frankel Studio
For the rehearsal dinner for her late-June wedding to Karl Glusman in Paris, Zoë Kravitz wore an all-white Danielle Frankel ensemble consisting of a Chantilly lace bralette and biker shorts, clearly evident under a transparent net mini-dress.
Bella Hadid has been seen in a bralette and matching trousers, an utterly new take on the power suit. Margot Robbie, Awkwafina, Sophie Turner, Maisie Williams, Naomi Watts, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, Charlize Theron, Jennifer Lopez and the Kardashians have also been conspicuous bralette wearers.
Teenagers have discovered them, too. Lia Richter, who will be a junior at the Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y., in the fall, and her friends base their outfits around their bralettes. One with showy straps may be paired with a narrow-shoulder top; a chartreuse number may go beneath an apricot tank with plunging armholes. It’s all done strategically. None of this is happenstance.
“Just about everyone wears them, irrespective of age — older, younger, bankers, lawyers,” said Yolaida Duran, the owner of Alla Prima Fine Lingerie in San Francisco. She said she sometimes sells bralettes to three generations in the same family.
“They’re a marked departure from those heavy-duty Brünnhilde foam bras that have dominated the market for so long,” said Gale Epstein, a founder and the design director of Hanky Panky, a lingerie company in New York. Ms. Epstein was early with bralettes, sewing her first one out of embroidered handkerchiefs in 1977, and thus starting her business.
“They’re innocent and insouciant,” said Elizabeth Cannon, a downtown Manhattan couturier who designs costumes for the Tricia Brown Dance Company. “Where the functionality of the modern bra is to put those girls in their place, the bralette is up for fun, or adventure or whatever. There is freedom in its non-restriction.”
Unlike T-shirt bras, with their high, rounded shape, bralettes create a soft, gentle, lower-slung silhouette that’s emerging as a new style norm.
“Their bounce factor can be pretty provocative, too,” Ms. Epstein said.
Is this garment even underwear? “For over a hundred years, fashion called the shots for lingerie designs,” said Ellen Lewis, a longtime industry expert, who writes and publishes lingeriebriefs.com, an online trade and consumer magazine. “Today we’re seeing a reversal — it’s the bralette, specifically, that’s now driving fashion.”
Two New York lingerie bastions, Town Shop, uptown, and Orchard Corset, downtown, feature racks of colorful bralettes right at their entrances. “We have a ton of them — at least three racks,” said Danny Koch, the fourth-generation owner of Town Shop. “They’re such an important part of our business, we just hang them out.”
T-shirt bras still account for over half of all bra sales in the United States today, according to Ms. Lewis. But these seamless, molded-cup bras are often met with disdain among bralette loyalists, like Antonia Gehnrich, a Cooper Union student. She occasionally switches to an unlined underwire bra.
But as for anything molded? “Never,” she said, rapidly shaking her head. “Who wants breasts that look like tennis balls?” Like a growing number of women today, Ms. Gehnrich regards the bralette’s soft, gentle curve as a new style norm.
A Brief History
“We start seeing the lightly structured bralette look in the mid-to-late 1960s going into the ’70s,” said Cora Harrington, the founder and editor in chief of The Lingerie Addict blog. Ms. Harrington points to 1967 as the year an important forerunner to today’s bralettes appeared: the No Bra, designed by Rudi Gernreich (of monokini fame) as his response to the Ban the Bra movement.
By the late ’70s, wire-free bras were emerging both at Hanky Panky and at Hanro, in Switzerland. Cosabella in Italy and Eres in France followed in the ’80s, as did Eberjey in the ’90s.
“These five companies set the pace for contemporary bralettes,” Ms. Lewis said. Their designs were seen as casual feminist alternatives to the more constrictive undergarments that preceded them. Many women slept in their bralettes.
In the mid-’90s, sports bras started showing up uncovered in gyms. Perhaps that was when the eye began adjusting, preparing for today’s bare midriff on the streets. “In that way, athleisure made the bralette acceptable,” said Susan Sokolowski, the director of the Sports Product Design Graduate Program at the University of Oregon, who has worked for Nike.
In the new millennium, as ornate crocheted bralettes (some from Etsy) appeared at Coachella and the other music festivals, spare, often color-saturated bralettes became key items in upstart lines like Pansy in Northern California, Richer Poorer in Southern California, La Fille d’O in Belgium, Marieyat in Britain, Negative Underwear and Araks in New York, Baserange in Denmark and France, Fortnight in Canada, Lonely in New Zealand, Wearpact in Colorado and Clo Intimo in Colombia.
“The whole intention was to undo the effects of an entire industry teaching women what our breasts should look like,” said Laura Schoorl, the owner and designer of Pansy. For that reason, many independent brands display their styles on nonprofessional models of many sizes and shapes.
In 2014 Aerie, a teen lifestyle offshoot of American Eagle Outfitters that has been strong on bralettes from the start, quickly became a “pioneer in diversity marketing through its body-positive, no-airbrushing campaigns,” said Lorna Hennelly, a beauty and fashion analyst at Euromonitor, the consumer trends research firm.
One goal of Aerie’s ad campaigns and approachable social media, featuring women of many sizes, is “empowering women across the country to be their real selves,” said Jennifer Foyle, the company’s global brand president.
Free People, Urban Outfitters and American Apparel followed with their own sought-after bralettes. Now everyone, from ultra-high-end luxury brands to budget-priced lines, is offering them.
Everlane, a company devoted to “radical transparency” regarding its production process, sells a sole, completely basic cotton-elastane bralette. The erotically inclined Agent Provocateur has a semitransparent bralette bandeau. Rihanna features bralettes in her Savage X Fenty collection. Ditto Emily Ratajkowski in her Inamorata line and Jason Wu in his new body-wear and lingerie line.
Unlike standard bras with their confusing alphanumeric sizing, bralettes typically range from an inexact XS to XL. “Their fabric and their less structured silhouettes allow for a flexible fit,” said Maddie Flanigan, a lingerie designer in Philadelphia who sells her ready-made and D.I.Y. designs at madalynne.com. Ms. Flanigan, who formerly designed bralettes for Urban Outfitters, also teaches bra-making workshops.
Plus-size is a fairly new bralette category. Cs and Ds are now being accommodated. “But girls who are F and G cups want them, too, just like their friends,” said Laura Fitzpatrick, the owner of Oh Baby Lingerie in Portland, Ore.
Ms. Lewis agreed. “Larger-breasted women want the same privilege that everyone else has,” she said. Christiane Braun, the head of project management and design at Hanro, believes “women with large cup sizes often find a bralette “to be more comfortable or at least wear it at home after work.”
Cosabella not only offers its own line of bralettes that go up to 3X (approximately a triple D), but also has collaborated with Eloquii, a luxury plus-size e-tailer, on a collection with soft, delicate compression lace. “It almost gives a hidden lift to the bust,” said Yesenia Torres, the design director of Eloquii.
Others have added plus sizes as well, or have them in the planning stages.
Nipple reveal can be a problem with bralettes, especially the unadorned stretch jersey styles that have followings among teenagers and millennials. “Younger women are very critical and want to prevent the nipples from showing,” said Ms. Braun of Hanro. This has long been true in the United States — and now, she added, it’s happening in Europe too.
To address this, Hanky Panky provides little removable nipple covers for some of its styles and is one of a growing number of companies now offering bralettes with (gasp) overall light cup padding, often removable.
Bralettes are bound to evolve further, what with “the technology-driven intimate apparel industry always looking for innovations or new uses for proven materials,” Ms. Lewis said. Consider the stretchy, bendable 3-D-printed selvage developed by the Swiss brand Wolford as a sturdy underwire alternative that gives its new 3W bras an uplift boost.
Another advance is the use of a bra-lining material — sheer, fine-gauge, breathable power mesh — as the sole fabric for a number of bralettes. It feels almost nonexistent against the skin.
Industry experts and observers praise the power mesh from Liebaert, a textile firm in Belgium. La Fille d’O, Araks, Negative Underwear, Chantelle and Lejaby, among others, use this fabric. “Women are always amazed when they try it,” said Marissa Vosper, a founder of Negative Underwear, whose power mesh Sieve bralette is a continual sellout, at $55.
La Fille d’O in particular has a track record with its use of power mesh. One style, called Found Out, extends upward into a crew neck and downward with a wide but unobtrusive stabilizing band. It almost seems to cleave to the skin, like a tattoo. “La Fille raises the question of ‘what is a bra?’” said Ms. Quezada, the Supernatural proprietor in Michigan.
It is one women are continuing to answer.
