xUnderneath

Chapter Six
Big Business and the Bra

The runway sparkles. Lights twinkle. The gathered crowd leans forward. The Angels are coming. This isn’t a designer showcase during New York’s Fashion Week or the opening number of a hit Broadway musical. This is the annual Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.

The tall, sexy Angels get top billing alongside celebrity performers. Clad only in lingerie, the models work the runway in a riot of music and color, displaying the newest designs from one of the biggest lingerie companies in the world. Victoria’s Secret is worth more than $6 billion, and its models are among the most famous—and highest paid—in the fashion industry. Part rock concert and part star-studded party scene, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is the culmination of company founder Roy Raymond’s vision from back in the 1970s.

The Male Gaze

In 1975 feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey wrote an article called “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” She documented that most Hollywood movies are conceived with male viewers as the target audience. When women are portrayed in movies, their characterization is meant to appeal to heterosexual men. Women most often appear in films as objects of sexual desire. Plot events in the story happen to women rather than as a result of their actions. This concept, called “the male gaze,” permeates US society and is especially prevalent in advertising. The history of Victoria’s Secret is a perfect example of the male gaze in action.

In 1977 thirty-year-old Roy Raymond visited a local California department store, looking for lingerie for his wife. His trip to the store was unsuccessful, not to mention embarrassing and uncomfortable. The store experience was designed for women who were shopping for themselves. What if there was a place that catered to men? Raymond wondered. The store he and his wife opened in Palo Alto, California, that year for $80,000 was inspired by Raymond’s fantasy of beautiful women in a nineteenth-century Victorian brothel (a place where sex is exchanged for money), complete with wood paneling, silken curtains, and velvet couches. Everything about the first Victoria’s Secret store catered to the male gaze. It wasn’t about women buying functional undergarments. It was about women in lingerie as the object of men’s desire.

Victoria’s Secret was an immediate and huge success. The store raked in $500,000 the first year. By 1982 Raymond and his wife had five stores and a mail-order business that was earning $6 million a year. They sold the company to businessman Les Wexner, and under his leadership, Victoria’s Secret continued to grow. Raymond had already proved that appealing to men was good for business. Wexner built on that momentum by convincing female customers that the ideal woman would want to look sexy for her man. Women flocked to Victoria’s Secret, wanting to become the sensual object of the male gaze. By 1994 Victoria’s Secret was the largest US lingerie company, grossing $1.8 billion each year.

In 1995 Wexner drew on the standard practices of outerwear designers to hold the first Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. It brought underwear into the world of high fashion. In 1998 model Tyra Banks wore the first angel wings on the company’s lingerie fashion runway, and thus the Angels were born. In 2000 Wexner introduced another marketing gimmick to the annual fashion show—the fantasy bra. German model Gisele Bündchen showed off the first one, a jewel-encrusted bra worth $15 million. Ever since, a one-of-a-kind, multimillion-dollar bra has been featured at each show. In 2001 the fashion show was aired on television for the first time. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, Victoria’s Secret has more than one thousand stores in the United States and is rapidly spreading into Europe and Asia. Annual sales are more than $6.6 billion. Victoria’s Secret is bigger, flashier, and fleshier than ever.

In 1998 Tyra Banks modeled Victoria’s Secret angel wings for the first time in a fashion show. By the early twenty-first century, the Angels models had become so popular they began to tour the world on a regular schedule.

In 1939 the Canadian Lady Corset Company licensed the trademark name Wonderbra, but it wasn’t until 1960 that the company created a bra with unique uplift features to showcase a woman’s breasts. Because the popular look of the time was thin and androgynous, the plunge push-up Wonderbra wasn’t a big hit. But by the 1970s, women were trying to show as much cleavage as possible and the popularity of the plunge push-up Wonderbra skyrocketed. Through the decades, the company has featured famous models such as Eva Herzigova. Starring in the company’s “Hello Boys” campaign in 1994, she modeled sexy black lingerie on giant billboards. The ads are considered some of the most iconic in advertising history, and Wonderbra continues to be a top-selling brand.

In 2011 billboard advertisers voted Wonderbra’s 1994 “Hello Boys” ad as the most iconic in billboard history. The ad, though modest by today’s standards, is said to have caused accidents by diverting drivers’ attention away from traffic.

The Bra—an Engineering Marvel

In the 1970s, when Victoria’s Secret was just getting started, Dorothy Galligan was a cabaret singer who answered a call for a bra-fitting model. Bra models worked for bra designers who painstakingly and with many repetitions created new bras on actual women. Galligan quickly became the most sought-after bra-fitting model in the industry. Galligan’s 34Bs were exactly the right size and shape for the fashion of the day. For decades, all the new bras in the United States were created on her body. Larger and smaller sizes were created by proportionally increasing or decreasing bra components.

The highly engineered structures of the bra are as complex as a suspension bridge. Like the corset before it, a bra must shape and support the breasts and reduce motion. Yet unlike the corset, it must do so without damaging the rib cage, muscles, and soft tissues. Bras must be produced in a huge range of sizes to accommodate both the circumference of the rib cage and the size of the breasts themselves. Measured by weight, breasts range from 0.6 pounds (0.3 kg) to 20 pounds (9 kg). Dave Spector, cofounder with Heidi Zak of the bra company ThirdLove, says, “Most people think of bras as a sexual object [but] it’s actually a highly technical garment.” The most complex templates have up to forty component parts, from underwires to padding to adjustable straps to clasps. In the design department at Maidenform, more than fifty people in seven departments are involved in designing a typical bra.

In the twenty-first century, manufacturers rely on more than twenty-six thousand different bra patterns. Some are still based on Galligan’s measurements. Women’s bodies come in all different shapes and sizes, so it can be a challenge for women to find a bra that fits well and is comfortable. Marks & Spencer, the largest lingerie retailer in the United Kingdom, has six thousand bra fitters on staff. Armed with a measuring tape, these experts fit more than 150,000 customers a month. The key measurements are overbust (torso circumference at nipple level) and underbust (torso circumference underneath the breast). The difference between the two measurements translates to cup size. For example, a 3-inch (7.6 cm) difference between overbust and underbust is a C cup.

But what if your figure doesn’t even vaguely resemble Galligan’s? That’s a problem that Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate Heidi Zak wants to solve. She plans to revolutionize bra sizing and bra buying. She asked one hundred women of all sizes, shapes, and ages to take digital photos of their breasts with ThirdLove’s body-scanning app. It turned out not everyone was a Galligan. “Thirty-seven percent of all women fall between cup sizes,” said Zak. ThirdLove offers half sizes and a mobile phone app sizing system so that customers can order from home.

From ThirdLove to Victoria’s Secret, lingerie manufacturers of the twenty-first century produce more than six hundred million bras per year. Women wear sports bras, bralettes, push-up bras, and strapless bras in a rainbow of colors and a wide range of fabrics. On average, American women own at least six bras, and this type of garment is a huge part of the $110-billion-dollar global lingerie market.

By the time Julian Rios Cantu (below) was thirteen, his mother had survived breast cancer twice, though barely. His childhood in Monterrey, Mexico, had been marked by the intense years she spent battling the disease and recovering from a double mastectomy. He understood that her recovery would have been far easier if doctors had diagnosed her cancer earlier. Why didn’t that happen? he wondered. And was there anything he could do about it?

When Cantu was seventeen, he teamed up with three equally high-tech, savvy friends to create a bra that could detect subtle changes in breast health. The result is Eva—the auto-exploration bra. The garment contains two hundred sensors that measure the breast tissue’s texture, color, temperature, and blood flow. It’s designed to be worn one hour a week. The information collected by Eva is downloaded to a computer that compares the data to that of previous weeks, looking for changes that could indicate the growth of cancer cells.

In 2017 Cantu and his collaborators won the Global Student Entrepreneur Award for their work on Eva. They used the $20,000 prize money to found a start-up company called Higia Technologies to continue their work on early breast cancer diagnosis.

The Dark Side of Fast Fashion

Long gone are the days when a woman would care for a hand-sewn corset to ensure that it lasted ten or twenty years. Even farther gone are the days when a fashion trend would last a century.

Twenty-first-century designers are churning out new fashion lines every few months. Manufacturers rush the look of the day into production. Retailers get flashy with display and advertising. Consumers try to keep up with changing styles and end up with bursting closets.

US consumers spend more than $250 billion on fashion every year, including $12 billion on lingerie. Altogether, Americans purchase more than 150 billion new pieces of clothing annually. The result is that garments have more in common with single-use plastic water bottles than the clothes of the past, which were often restitched, upgraded, and handed down from mother to daughter or from father to son. Fashion, including undergarments, has become disposable.

Women near Chennai, India, sew lingerie at an Intimate Fashions factory. Through a partnership with the World Bank, the Pudhu Vaazhvu (New Life) project employs women from rural parts of the region. The women learn skills to earn money that helps them gain independence.

The cost of this churning industry is high—not so much in the ten or twenty dollars spent on a bra from a discount retailer but in people and the planet. Fast fashion is a product of globalization, and the garment industry is one of the dirtiest on the planet. The materials themselves often come from petroleum by-products, which are nonrenewable and involve toxic chemicals to produce fabrics. One of these materials is spandex. It is produced by mixing petrochemicals with glycol (an antifreeze), amines (an ammonia-based product), and methyl di-p-phenylene isocyanate (a benzene-based product, which is a petrochemical). Thin, stretchy spandex fibers are woven into most undergarment fabrics of the twenty-first century. Molded plastic clasps, strap adjusters, and the foam pads in breast cups are all petroleum-based products. The metal underwires in modern bras and corsets are made of steel, which requires massive amounts of energy to produce and shape. Even a natural fabric such as cotton is tough on the environment because cotton plants are water guzzlers and farmers spray them with toxic pesticides, which can then run off into nearby waterways. The dyes that color fabrics are often chemical toxins that can pollute local water sources if not disposed of properly. Fabric and clothing factories that use coal and other polluting, nonrenewable, petroleum-based energy sources release vast amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The transport of materials and finished garments across the globe by truck and ship—both fueled by petroleum-based products—is also a huge source of carbon pollution. The garment industry alone is responsible for 10 percent of global carbon emissions, making it one of the largest contributors to global warming.

There is also a huge human cost. Once all the component parts for a bra are manufactured, they are shipped to factories to be pieced together. Building a bra is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Very few aspects of construction can be done by automated machines. Most steps in bra assembly are done by factory employees bent over sewing machines. It can take up to three hours to make one bra. The only way that lingerie companies can keep the prices down is by manufacturing items in poor nations where labor costs are low. Much of the work is done by women in China, Bangladesh, India, and Vietnam. The conditions in these factories are far from ideal. For example, women are sometimes locked into poorly ventilated factories and made to work long hours without regular breaks. By one estimate, 98 percent of the women working in clothing and lingerie factories do not earn enough to live on. It’s a huge price in human labor for cheap clothes.

Because consumers in the United States and other wealthy nations don’t keep clothes for very long, the items we no longer want to wear are piling up around us. Textile waste, including the scraps left over from clothing manufacture and unwanted fashions, is a huge problem according to Tasha Lewis, a professor at Cornell University’s Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design. “We don’t necessarily have the ability to handle the disposal,” she says. “The rate of disposal is not keeping up with the availability of places to put everything that we’re getting rid of and that’s the problem.” Thrift stores and resale shops offer ways to reuse clothing, but consumers are not so keen to use secondhand bras and underwear because of hygiene concerns.

According to Pact Organic’s website, organic cotton makes up less than 1 percent of the world’s global cotton supply. Yet it requires 71 percent less water and 62 percent less energy than growing conventional cotton does.

Some designers are addressing the environmental costs of fast fashion through eco-friendly design. The lingerie company Naja uses fabrics made from recycled plastics and new fabric printing technologies that reduce the water pollution caused by traditional fabric dying. Another company, Pact Organic, uses organic cotton that has been grown with low-water techniques. Only Hearts uses nontoxic dyes. But the only way to really feel good in our skivvies, according to Frances Kozen, associate director of the Cornell Institute of Fashion and Fiber Innovation, is to buy less and keep our clothes longer.

Historically, most garment workers have been women. In the United States, these women were important members of the labor movement of the early twentieth century. Mabel Durham Fuller was an early leader. In the 1920s, she applied for jobs in garment shops in New York City that hired mostly Jewish and Italian immigrant women. As a black woman, she found it hard to get a job. Once she did, she earned two dollars less per week than her counterparts, even though she was a much better seamstress.

With the support of her coworkers, she fought for equal pay. And in 1922, she was promoted to lead sewing machine operator at the factory where she worked. Under her leadership, Fuller and her coworkers joined the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) in 1933. The union worked for equal pay, safe working conditions, and desegregation. To achieve their goals, Fuller and other union women held work strikes (stoppages), picketed discriminatory employers, organized protest marches, put on educational plays, and held fashion shows to raise awareness of workers’ rights. In 1941 a group of corset workers in Detroit, Michigan, picketed, wearing only their corsets! Fuller spent her entire life advocating for the rights of women garment workers.