An Oxygen Lift Bra can’t make that claim. What it can and does do is telegraph to its wearer and all who know her how much she desires big breasts, how much she thinks they matter, and how inadequate she feels not having them. In a padded bra, a night of passion devolves into a series of tactical maneuvers. I’ve never felt comfortable in a padded bra because it seems like the worst kind of lie: one that’s sure to be discovered.
Seeing padded bras as humiliating, however, places me in the minority. I ask around and learn that many women put fiberfill in the same category as hair gel, mascara, and lipstick. It’s not about false advertising, these women tell me. Ifs about fitting in. One friend says she doesn’t wear her padded bras to start relationships. She wears them to love herself.
Jennie Nash, a 37-year-old writer who lives in Torrance with her husband and two daughters, writes about this idea in her recent book, The Victoria’s Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming, and Other Lessons I Learned from Breast Cancer. Her relationship to her breasts, she says, has changed since her mastectomy and reconstruction. When she dresses up now, for example, she wears sexier clothes. Partly because she feels more grown-up and partly because she is celebrating what it is to be alive.
Nash laughs when I reveal that I am preparing to don a padded bra that will take me up three cup sizes. Then she offers advice. “You have to put on a whole new sense of your body,” she says. “Your costume gives you a new place to be, but you have to put on a new head when you put on those big breasts. We create and assume a sense of who we are.”
MARY ELLEN FIELDS IS MY BOSOM WRANGLER. THAT’S what she calls herself, only half jokingly. The manager of Bill Hargate Costumes in Hollywood, Fields is a master seamstress who often collaborates with Jeff Kurland. Fields made Julia Roberts’s clothes for Erin Brockovich and created the underpinnings that made Sigourney Weaver’s chest otherworldly in the 1999 sci-fi comedy Galaxy Quest.
When I first arrive for my fitting, Fields is sewing lobster epaulets onto a Disneyland costume. As we wait for Kurland, she shows me 41 fur-trimmed Santa suits that are about to be shipped to a pageant in Missouri. She is wearing jeans, a white T-shirt, and a measuring tape around her neck. Kurland shows up in overalls. I’m the only one who’s not wearing a shirt.
I try to approach the experience like I would a massage. We’re all professionals here, I repeat to myself. But the label fits Kurland and Fields much better than it does me. About every three minutes, two contradictory questions pop into my head. One is, Can I pull this off? The other is, What if I never want to take these things off?.
“Bend over. In and up,” Fields says when I get the first of the bras on. She grabs one of her own breasts to show me how she wants me to arrange myself. “We’re trying to point you as far forward as we can.”
They don’t call it costume construction for nothing. “You’d never make it through a metal detector right now,” Fields says. She is using oversize safety pins to attach several push-up pads to the inside of a 34B Wonderbra–while I’m wearing it. Once that’s done we add another layer of foam to the outside, which we cover with a 36D gel support Felina bra with built-in fluid pockets. To this we affix silicone Enhancers, squishy, breast-shaped linings designed to increase cup size. Finally, we stretch a 36D sheer cup bra over the whole package. Fields promises that after she sews all this together–a process that will take more than nine hours–there will be one set of straps, not three.
I have never had the faintest hint of cleavage. But now I do. My breasts don’t exactly touch–Fields is no magician. But with her help, and the applied pressure of all that synthetic material, they are near enough to say hi. Imagine a fluted bud vase. There’s just enough room between my breasts for a slender one of those. Which is vastly less room than there’s ever been before.
