by Willem Meiners
WE cannot ignore it in these days of WFH, the post-pandemic ongoing trend of working from home, a topic of debate in tens of millions of living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms: the fate of the bra. The beha in Dutch, or as my daughters have been calling it since the 1980s, the boob box, the tietenkast. Delicate subject, yes, so this comes with apologies, but the before-and-after numbers do not lie: the new post-pandemic habits are causing a new dress behavior among women. The venerable Wall Street Journal even wondered the other day, Will working from home kill the bra forever?
The Dutch have quite a bit to hold up. They were one of the very first serious bra producers, thanks to husband and wife Hunkemöller and Lexis. I do not know the suffering around finding and wearing the perfect bra from my own firsthand experience, obviously, but I very much do from firsthand observation. Both the daughters and my wife have been complaining, bitching if you want, year after year that they can’t seem to find the right bra. That’s why the newspaper’s question made sense: if a woman does not need to leave the house, let alone can’t leave it, is it not tempting to just leave them off, those bras?
YES, says Elisabeth “Libby” Haan in New York. Since memory, Haan families mainly hail from the Dutch province of Groningen, and Elsje and her twin sister Amanda are no exception. She started the Who Shirt Company with t-shirts and cashmere sweaters, with a built-in minimal chest support, a shelf bra. Designed by Mrs Haan herself after two mastectomies and reconstructions that made wearing bras with metal underpinnings too painful. Now, with millions of women working from home because of the virus, her shirts are selling like hot cakes. It is, she says, “the perfect top for now, because it allows you to be braless but still presentable. You can have a Zoom meeting in it.”
The bra as a garment is relatively young, only a century old, the successor to the nineteenth-century corset. Breast supporters, the first patent applications called them, then in French brassieres, later shortened to bra. Thanks to the second world war there is much less iron wiring in them, because metal was then rationed in order to benefit the arms industry. But less or not, and with or without fashionable colors and combinations, for many the bra remains a mini-harness, and an obligation, a ludicrous invention, as Germaine Greer once declared.
THE BRA won’t die, but Victoria’s Secret is closing 250 stores. Hunkemöller in Hilversum has thrown out all expansion plans for Holland and Europe. Women go for flexibility and comfort, and forced working from home gives them options. More often sports bras, comfort bras, soft materials. Because as long as it looks good on Zoom, it is good enough.
* Willem Meiners is the editor of De Daily Dutchman
