How To Care For Your Clothes, Part 3: Wear The Right Underwear

Hear me out! No, this is not a post about how you have to wear thongs and padded bras to look like a better, sexier version of you. If you wanted that, you'd be lurking around the grocery checkout, letting Cosmo badger you into a fog of self-doubt. But since future posts will cover how to separate the keepers in your closet from the tossers and how to work with a good tailor to frugally turn tossers into keepers, it's important your base layer is working as it should. If it is not, you're going to look like you're wearing someone else's poorly fitting clothes, and no amount of tailoring will fix it. It may cost a little as an initial outlay, but you will be more comfortable, will be able to wear more of your clothes, and you won't have to cry bitter tears over a tailoring bill.

3(a) The Girls, a/k/a Bras
I will break the ice by telling you a somewhat embarrassing story about myself. Hi, my name is feminist finance, and I wore the wrong size bra for about 15 years. I bought bras based on the size I thought I probably ought to be. My breasts weren't small, but I didn't think they were especially big, either. I am not quite sure who or what I was comparing myself to, but I have a sneaking suspicion it was, oh, boob-fetishizing culture at large. So, not so big and not so small: a B-cup sounded about right based on that description. So that's what I wore from the start of high school until the very recent past.

Ding, ding, ding, guesswork and habit is the wrong way to buy a bra. My idea of what I looked like, and consequently what size bra I should be wearing, didn't match reality. I knew what body dysmorphia was, mostly I'd heard it in the context of women with eating disorders, who can be painfully, even fatally thin yet still worry that those around them will see them as obese. But dysmorphic thinking can take a lot of different, less extreme forms, and the form it took for me was thinking that because I didn't look like a Hooter's poster girl that I could not possibly be larger than a B-cup. That is also the form it apparently takes for a lot of the women who appear on Tim Gunn's Guide to Style (I'm such a sucker for Tim Gunn ), who says that in all the episodes of filming that show, he has never worked with a woman who was wearing a correctly sized bra. It's not necessarily about body hate or even mild body dislike, but it is always about unreality.

And so my embarrassing story is that Tim Gunn and his reality TV makeover show has changed my life. It wasn't enough of a prompt that I always had to wear a sweater over my button-down shirts because they would gap and pucker across my chest. I thought that was just an occupational hazard of buying cheaply made stuff. It wasn't enough that I could sometimes see the outline of my bra through my sweaters where my breasts were spilling out over the top of the cup. I thought maybe my sweaters had shrunk. No, it took Tim Gunn and his parade of regular women on TV in their underwear getting fitted in bra shops across Manhattan AND a gently worded suggestion from Shiner that perhaps those particular segments might have something to do with how I was always complaining about said button-down shirts and sweaters before I decided that just for shits and giggles I would swing by my friendly neighborhood department store lingerie department. It was there that I learned that I have probably not been a B-cup since early in puberty. Me and my properly supported 34-D's can now quite happily wear the exact same button-down shirts that used to make me swear and foam at the mouth.

So yeah. I spent $40 on two nude colored bras that have allowed me to wear at least a couple hundred bucks worth of sunk costs in shirts and sweaters. (Er, actually I spent a lot more than that, but the two $20 bras would have served me just fine if they hadn't been having a sale, and I wanted to buy drop dead sexy wedding lingerie, and I had a bit of a spending tantrum, feeling like I was cosmically owed for a decade and a half of ill-fitting underthings... oh, the best laid plans of mice and (wo)men...) And I am so much more comfortable! I didn't realize I was especially uncomfortable before, I just thought that's how bras were supposed to fit, sort of poking and chafing and constricting around the ribs. Au contraire. Usually my first thought when my alarm goes off in the morning is OMFG it's dark and cold, I hate everything. I am not lying when I tell you that when my alarm went off the morning after I went bra shopping, literally my first thought was how freaking excited I was to wear one of my new, life-changingly comfortable bras.

It's worth mentioning that aside from keeping you from inadvertently flashing people through your puckered shirtfront buttons and keeping people from being able to see the outline of your underwear through your clothes, a properly fitted bra can also help alleviate the back and shoulder pain, poor posture, and welting that can come along with wearing the wrong size bra.

My advice is this: if you have even the tiniest doubt in your mind that you might not be wearing the right size bra, or if you've never had a real bra fitting, or if you've recently gained or lost weigh, gotten pregnant, had a baby, started or stopped nursing, or gone on or off or switched hormonal birth control methods, please get fitted by someone who knows what she's doing. All these things can cause your bra size to fluctuate. Go to a lingerie store or department, find a staff person who looks like they're been there longer than six months, and tell them you need a bra fitting. If you're feeling modest, don't worry, even they've already seen London and France, it's perfectly fine to ask them to leave the dressing room while you change, and then have them come back in to evaluate the fit. They'll be looking for whether the band is too loose or too tight (most of the support for the breasts comes from the band that runs around the ribcage), whether the cups are too large (gaping between the breast and the top of the cup) or too small (your cups runneth over, creating double-boob), and will make sure that the straps can be tightened enough. Once you know your proper size and how the right fit feels, you don't need to splash out at a specialty store, Marshalls will do ya just fine.

Just do it. Do it as a favor to me. I have heard the gospel, and verily I say unto you, it lives in the Nordstrom lingerie department.

3(b) Knickers
I don't have so many strong opinions about knickers as I do about bras, except that I pretty much cringe anytime I hear anyone call them panties. Underwear, knickers, undies, whatever, but never panties--what are those? Pants for girls? I have some of those, thanks, and they come to my shoes.

But I will tell you this, if they bunch or squash or dig, they are the wrong size. Read that again, and carefully: you are not the wrong size, they are the wrong size. Or the wrong cut. Don't torment yourself with fabric up your bits just to be happy with the number written on the tag. And if a standard bikini cut digs across your bum or at your hip, may I suggest the strangely named (all things considered) boy short? I used to think the thong was the only path to VPL freedom, but that, as it turns out, is a vicious, ass-flossing lie.