Sometimes it feels like everyone has a “first bra” story. For what’s supposed to be a milestone, there really isn’t a uniform response to the experience. In this week’s But Make It Fashion roundtable, we asked our team: How did you come to own your first bra, and what was it like to get it? How’d you feel about it? What did it mean to you?
Erin Sullivan, Writer
Look, let me just start by saying that going to an Irish Catholic grade school where the phrase “Erin Go Bragh” was on the table WASN’T IDEAL. Just roasted in so many unique ways on a regular basis. I’m not sure if it was a blessing or a curse that I was a late bloomer either!
But my first bra was a sports bra surely made from the thinest piece of material possible, as it was holding up nothing. The first time I got my period my mom just handed me a box of tampons and said there were “instructions inside” with zero mention of it again for the rest of my or her life, so I’m sure the reason I don’t remember asking for/receiving a bra is because I blocked out the trauma of engaging in another conversation about my body.
Heather Hogan, Managing Editor
I got my first bra at Belk (which is the South’s version of Macy’s) when I was 11 years old. It was by a brand named Bugaboo and it looked like a sports bra and I was livid the entire time we were shopping for it. I had to have a bra because all the other girls were wearing bras and I was starting to get boobs, too.
I loved being a girl and I also loved other girls and I had been fascinated with women’s bodies since I first saw Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. What upset me so much was the way my mother and the other women at church talked about “womanhood” and “blossoming” like they were some kind of sacred secrets – except that they also told all of mine and my friends’ business to each other and everyone else. Like when we started shaving, when we got our periods, etc. There was no privacy at all in the process of hitting puberty and sure enough, as soon as I got home with my two Bugaboo bras, my grandmother was calling to say, “Did you go shopping today? What’d you geeeeet?” Blah! It still grosses me out! No one talked to me about what it actually meant to get boobs and a bra. My main worry was that I wasn’t going to be able to play sports anymore, or that boys were going to stop playing with me and want to start kissing me. Getting a bra felt like the end of something I cherished, but couldn’t name. (I did like those bras, though. They were really soft and a very lovely shade of Heather blue.)
A.E. Osworth, Contributing Writer
I don’t remember my first bra because I blocked it out. Even just writing that one sentence, it became magically imperative for me to go check Twitter and my email and, like, get up and walk around my living room because my brain didn’t want to reach out and touch the hot stove that is this memory. I remember the suddenness of it — like one night I had a normal kid chest when I looked down at myself in the bath and the next night I had HUGE TITS. It was a sudden change and I didn’t care for it one bit, but at the same time, I wanted to. Most of my friends who were girls at the time remain girls now, and they were pumped about it or at least indifferent. I don’t remember anyone lamenting the need for a bra, really. So I tried to be just as excited, or at least just as indifferent. I have always wanted to be an adult, so I latched onto it as a sign of being a grown-up. In that way, I could be excited or at least perform excitement, and I could put off the reckoning of hating my chest until finally, at twenty-nine years old, I couldn’t anymore. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d just let myself hate bras. Maybe I would have been able to put my finger on a trans masculine identity much quicker. But, I suppose, everyone arrives where they need to be exactly when they need to be there.
Stef Schwartz, Vapid Fluff Editor
I come from a long line of Jewish women with huge racks; it’s just a tradition in my family apparently. When I was ten, my mom took me out for a whole girls’ afternoon. We went to see My Girl 2 and then she surprised me by taking me to the mall for my first training bra. I was already a poorly dressed, spacy nerd with very few friends. The other girls in my class picked up that I was wearing a bra RIGHT AWAY and teased me for it mercilessly. My entire middle school experience was spent hunching over in the back of classrooms or hiding while changing for gym because other girls accused me of stuffing my bra or otherwise picked on me for developing early (YES PLEASE PAY *MORE* ATTENTION TO MY AWKWARD ADOLESCENT BODY!!!), and as a result I grew up with prrretty intense body dysmorphia. As an adult, I continue to find this aspect of my body mostly inconvenient.
Rachel Kincaid, Managing Editor
I remember it being white, cotton and lightly padded; no underwire, just ungainly triangles. I hated it so much! I was violently opposed to everything related to puberty — menstruating, bras, the whole thing — and I was so mad the first time my mom told me I had to put on a bra before we left the house for where we were going. I was, I think, about ten. I resented wearing something uncomfortable and restricting that no one else could even see (I still don’t wear underwire bras for the same reason), and I think was resentful because I was aware that I had to do this in part to cater to men (or boys, really, at the time) (but also men!! gross!), or to obey norms of dress formed around their perceptions. It would be uncouth and mean unwanted attention if I was visibly not wearing a bra, so I had to put it on, just to accommodate the reality that men would look at me. I hated it! Still do! I just wanted to not have to think about my body and wear whatever was comfortable, and thanks to bras I could do neither.
Alexis Smithers, Writer
I can’t remember my absolute first bra because I’ve never had bigger breasts like the rest of my family. Well, or so I thought until recently. For most of my life I believed I was an A-cup and that meant I never needed to wear bras. Then I got measured at Victoria’s Secret and they were like, “you know you’re a D-cup right?” If that isn’t a succinct explanation of my gender/body dysphoria I don’t know what is.
Anyway, I think my first bra probably came from my grandmother because I wasn’t wearing one and she and my grandfather took us to school. My parents went to work very early and were just probably thankful we got out of the house in time, but my grandma was like, “You can’t go out of the house looking any kind of way.” Wait, no, on second thought, my mom was definitely part of the story at some point. Maybe it was on a Saturday at my grandma’s house and my mom closed the bedroom door with her and my grandma in it. Then they had me try on bras because I couldn’t just keep walking around without them. That sounds more like them, to be honest.
Siobhan Ball, Contributing Writer
Unfortunately I hit puberty running and needed a bra by the time I was eight. Not a training bra confidence booster, but a full on B-cup. I’d also recently changed schools and my classmates were… not kind about the fact that I had what were, for an eight-year-old, giant tits. In an attempt to make me feel better about this, my mother and grandmother took me to Marks and Spencers for a proper bra fitting. But since I loathed clothes shopping, it just felt like further insult. My early bras were soft white cotton, pretty much what you’d expect for a small child. I mostly found them an annoyance, but it was more annoying to go without.
Archie Bongiovanni, Cartoonist
I was forced into it by my mother who was like, “you need a training bra” and I was like “NO, I DON’T.” I am full stubborn taurus and hate change and that included my “changing body.” I can’t really remember most of what went down (dissociate much?) other than we definitely went to Sears. My mom had me try on multiple bras with a poor sales associate who had to deal with a very frustrated and cranky mother and a flat-chested kid who had broken out in stress-hives.
I was a bobble-head of a child. I was stubborn, but ultimately I’d just float along with whatever was handed to me. I got some pale purple and pink training bras and got yelled at every time I didn’t wear them. I can’t help but wonder what it would’ve been like if there was some sort of bra-alternative that had been given to me at the time. Like, why didn’t my mom offer a sports bra as an option to me? And why was I so clueless I couldn’t figure that out myself? There was no internet, so I didn’t even know binders existed. I can’t actually think too hard back to myself at that time because I was just so uncomfortable. I just remember it all fuzzy and itchy. Thinking about little me in a pink training bra makes me feel just as angry and frustrated and stuck today as I did back then.
Riese Bernard, Editor-in-Chief
One time, in middle school, we were playing outside and it was raining. I was wearing a white shirt with a little landscape on it — a gift from my Dad, from when he was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro — and the rain made my shirt wet and therefore see-through. I got teased ’cause I didn’t have a bra on. The reason I didn’t have a bra on was because I did not have boobs. I still only barely do! But, then as now, it is considered important to neutralize your nipples regardless of how much flesh does or does not surround them.
I don’t remember what my first bra looked like in detail, but I imagine it was like a sports-bra-style bralette, probably white, probably from JC Penny. As soon as I got used to the idea in general, I started wearing Joe Boxer bralettes with matching underpants, which they sold at our local K-Mart. Then, my junior year of high school, my gay best friend told me I should wear grown-up bras (you know, the kind with cups) instead of neon orange/green Joe Boxer bras that matched my neon orange/green Joe Boxer underpants! So I got some Calvin Klein bras at Hudson’s. At that point I was a legit A-cup, but it wasn’t until I went on the pill and became a B-cup that the CK bras I’d bought the year before actually fit. Now I’m back on the AA tip, so you know, life is really a journey.
KaeLyn Rich, Writer
My first bra was a classic white training bra. Training for what, you ask? For WOMANHOOD and all its slut-shaming glory. It was the summer between 4th and 5th grade and we were at a department store at the mall. I don’t remember which store, but it was like Macy’s or Sears or JC Penney or something like that. My mom just randomly asked if I wanted to look at training bras. Honestly, I was thrilled (and a little embarrassed because MOM!). I don’t know if I had anything even resembling breasts, but I knew that wearing a bra was a status symbol among the girls in my grade.
That white cotton training bra with a front closure meant I was on my way to being someone that could maybe be like-liked one day. As a tomboy with huge insecurities about my body and my clothing and the way I looked in general, I couldn’t wait to “develop” because the patriarchy is a mind-fuck. This one girl in my grade already had huge boobs and all the boys gave her “attention.” In retrospect, I imagine the constant sexual harassment was very unwanted and really kind of awful, but I wanted to be her and have everyone looking at me. Somewhere down in me, that’s what I wanted, as an 11-year-old child, but this is totally normal cool cool.
I actually got my period the next year and started to develop the huge boobies I have today. Amazingly, neither the training bra nor my actual boobs magically solved my very typical and very sad self-image issues.
Carmen Phillips, Associate Editor
It was less about my first bra as much as it was about my first bras. Multiple. When I was 10-years-old, I went from an A-cup to a D-cup in just a year. Within six additional months, I was wearing a triple-D. I’ve blocked out most of that time period as a blur of tears and breakdowns in my living room while my mom desperately tried to find something I’d wear. The thing about growing so rapidly was that my chest constantly hurt, physically hurt, all the time, as my skin stretched and marred (I have stretch marks criss-crossing my breasts to this day). The other thing thing about growing that fast was playing the game of not being noticed.
The summer after 5th grade, I was at a sleepover with my best friend since diapers. She was two years older than me and had not quite yet grown beyond a training bra, something that she had a lot of feelings about.  When we played Truth-or-Dare she asked if I stuffed my bra. I told her the truth, No. She called me a liar! My choices were to either pull my shirt over my head and prove her wrong, or accept my punishment. I cried and begged to go home. Starting the next school year, some boys in my English class mercilessly made fun of a girl named Bianca because her breasts jiggled when she ran down the hallway. She had the largest boobs in class. My saving grace was having only the second largest.
My mom found minimizer bras? They weren’t quite sports bras, but they kind of pushed your boobs against yourself so that they would appear smaller under t-shirts. I remember them as mostly ugly and coming in what felt like “old people colors.” Still, they got the job done. I exclusively wore minimizers between middle school and most of college. They kept me hidden away at a time when that was all I wanted.
Vanessa Friedman, Community Editor
Have you heard of the brand Elita? I first learned about it when I was in elementary school. I haven’t thought about it in years, but writing it makes me sit up straight, makes me nervous, makes me excited, makes me remember. Elita encompasses so many things: popularity, anxiety, body hate, longing. Elita meant nothing to me for the first nine years of my life, until it meant everything.
See, here’s the thing: I got boobs when I was nine. Or honestly maybe even eight? I don’t know, I just know one day I was going about my business begging my mom for a sequined silver dress (I’ve always been me, you know?) and the next day she surprised me by purchasing that very dress I so badly desired. I put it on and stared at myself in the mirror and felt beautiful. Then I turned around and my little brother said, not unkindly, “wow, you have BOOBS.” I didn’t feel beautiful anymore and I stopped feeling beautiful for a long, long time.
Anyway the takeaway of that story should be: I had boobs before I wanted boobs, and I didn’t know what to do with them, and all the other girls in my grade did not have boobs yet, but they did have this other thing that they did not need that I needed very badly: an Elita.
Let me start again.
Elita is an underwear brand. It’s not particularly monumental in any way and I haven’t encountered it as an adult. I hope it’s not problematic. I literally haven’t thought about it in years. But in 4th grade Carly Cohen came to school one day and showed me her Elita, which was basically a very plain and very unnecessary black sports bra. It changed my whole life. I needed one. No like, I needed one. I needed it because Carly Cohen had it and I needed everything Carly Cohen had, and also like, listen, I fucking had boobs already. A-cups for sure, maybe a little bigger, I don’t know. I really needed a bra! I probably could’ve done with an actual bra with underwire, fuck my whole life. But I didn’t want just a bra. I wanted An Elita Like Carly Cohen. I wanted to feel beautiful again, I think. I think I thought an Elita would do the trick.
Elita is pronounced “uh-lee-duh.” Or at least, that’s how all the girls at my private Jewish day school, who did not have boobs but did have Elitas, pronounced it. I went home and told my mother, a recent South African immigrant who had trouble understanding the Canadian accent her daughter had acquired at the best of times, that I needed an Uh-Lee-Duh. A what? I rolled my eyes, spelled it out for her. Well, I tried to anyway. “ALEEDA,” I scratched on the pink notepad that lived next to the phone. Duh, mom.
My mother is the most patient, most dedicated woman when it comes to helping her kids. She becomes furious if I have a problem she cannot solve. (This isn’t ever stressful at all, LOL.) Her love language is gift giving. She really wanted to find me an ALEEDA. She searched everywhere. Online shopping didn’t really exist yet and, even if it did, my mother doesn’t believe in it (yes, still). She went to mall after mall, trying to decipher the scrawl her angry boob-having nine-year-old daughter had written on the pink piece of paper. I think she wanted to help me feel beautiful again.
Finally my mom talked to Carly Cohen’s mom and discovered that an ALEEDA was an Elita. She bought me two, one white and one black, and they did nothing to press my chest flat the way all the other girls looked in their sports bras, but for a little while, I was almost happy in my body again. Almost.
