bra

Over the past couple of months, I've made an attempt to familiarize myself with all of Tutti Rouge's bra offerings. There are many reviews coming up, but I wanted to post a summary just to start off with to help my readers get some mental categories started on what may or may not work for them. For the most part, I've found that it's necessary to size up in the band and cup from your normal size to fit in Tutti Rouge, so I wear a 32HH in Tutti Rouge as compared with a 30HH in other brands. However, it seems (from preliminary information from those who have tried these bras) that the bands suddenly get larger around 34 and start running normally. This means that true 32 bands may be sized out, oddly enough. Exceptions are noted. Tutti Rouge's original collection contained the following shapes: 1. The Liliana, a half-padded semi-plunge balconette shape. Though too shallow to work for some people, it is a miracle bra for anyone who is looking for a really minimized sha...

The long-awaited Freya Marvel finally arrived on my doorstep today. Ever since I saw this bra previewed on Stanikomania many months ago, I knew it was going to be great. Despite Freya's nervousness about the design, I wasn't nervous. I could see that this was a first step at bringing the innovation and genius of Freya Swim constructions into their bra collection. Well, I was right. It's great. You may all go back to your homes now, there is nothing more to see. Just kidding--here is the bra: You may notice that this bra is slightly different from the bra that was marketed: In this photo, the purple mesh at the top of the cups is transparent. In real life, it's sitting on top of the cups themselves. Some companies' product photos reflect this change, others don't. I like it better with the transparent mesh, but that's okay, Freya. It's a minor detail. What really matters is the most important photo, the side view! YUP, THOUGHT SO! This bra gets a solid go...

A couple of clever readers have suggested that I do some sort of round-up of the best bras available and I thought it was a really great idea. I think it will be helpful for anyone who isn’t sure where to start with properly fitted bras or new knowledge of their shape, or for anyone struggling to build a basic collection. I’m trying to cover all the bases here. Let me know what I missed! I’ve distinguished in some categories between bras that give a ‘purple shape’ and bras that give a ‘green shape’. I’ve also tried to distinguish between bras for full-on-top boobs and full-on-bottom boobs wherever relevant. Bras I’ve honored for shapes other than my own are based on the experiences of bloggers, forum members, and friends with different shapes than mine. Bras lost points for things like crappy band construction and problems that plague almost everyone. (That’s why you don’t see the Cleo Lucy on here, even though it’s a personal favorite—the band is at a stupidly high angle and the...

The Fantasie Esme’s claim to fame is its ‘center-pull straps’—essentially, the location of the straps has been modified so they are closer together in the back. This is useful for women with narrow shoulders who find straps usually slide off. It’s also a nice alternative to having straps sit in the exact same place every day. The Esme is also part of a small group of molded Fantasie bras which are, in my opinion, rather underrated and under-reviewed. So when I got a chance to try the Esme in a store, I snapped a couple photos so I could review it. Like the Fantasie Smoothing (4520), the Esme is MOLDED but NOT PADDED. The concept of this confused me before I had tried it, but it essentially just means that the fabric itself has been molded into a seamless shape. A molded AND padded bra would have foam as well as fabric molded into the shape; however, although they’re often synonymous, padding doesn’t need to be part of a molded bra. I tried the Esme in a 30H. I’d say it runs fairly...