Where Are All The Clothes For Women With Breasts?

I have huge knockers. I’m not bragging, nor am I lamenting–I am simply telling facts as they happen to exist. My breasts are large.

Let’s, for a second, divorce breasts from sexuality. Let’s pretend that breasts are what they are–skin bags full of fatty tissue that leak milk when you’re pregnant and feel sore when you have your period. Let’s imagine breasts as the nutsacks of the chest: not all that sexy, just another functional body part in the reproductive system that helps us perpetuate humanity, but for the most part, just sort of hangs there.

Let’s assume now that, as a generality, excluding physical ailments and surgeries, the majority of women have breasts, and that these breasts come in many shapes and sizes. Let’s accept that a lot of these sizes can be described as “big” or “large”–in the USA, the average bra size is 34DD (although I read some reports that also suggested the average size to be 36C. Either way, America’s women are ample of bosom). Basically, we are in agreement that more than a handful of women have more than a handful of breast.

With these assumptions in mind, I have two questions for the creators of clothing:

1. Why do all clothes that accommodate big breasts look like something out of the Snooki’s House of Otherworldly Delights collection?

and

2. Why do a vast majority of clothes not accommodate larger breasts?

Just because a woman has big breasts, it does not mean she wants to flaunt them. It doesn’t not mean she wants to sexualize them. It doesn’t mean she wishes her clothing to show so much cleavage it gives the illusion her boobs are trying to high five her chin. And her desire to be modest about her breasts doesn’t mean she’s a prude or that she doesn’t want to be sexy at all. It simply means that she doesn’t want to have her tits out all the time, which I believe to be a completely acceptable sort of life choice. And if, on the other hand, she does want to flaunt them, sexualize them, show them off or introduce them to the underside of her face, then power to her. The point is, doing so should be a decision, rather than a default.

Unfortunately, when you’re shopping for clothes, the ones that are meant to fit an ample breast are generally low cut, areola skimming, or with the kind of push up cups that would make Katie Price blush. Whereas clothing for flat chested or small breasted women is often demure, classy and elegant–with drapey silks and interesting silhouettes in lovely patterns in vast supply–the big breasted are generally left to rifle through rows and rows of low cut tops in tacky, blinding shades of blood red and electric blue, embellished with gold accoutrements and diamantes. Shopping for one’s self becomes quite demoralizing when everything you think is pretty doesn’t fit your boobs, and everything that does fit your boobs looks like a wardrobe reject from a men’s magazine photoshoot.

I’m not complaining that lovely clothes exist for women with small breasts–I am complaining that the availability of fashionable, well made styles, even on the High Street, aren’t also generally available to women whose cups overfloweth, because there are a lot of us. As a big breasted woman, I would like to be able to find tops with higher necklines that fit my boobs inside them. I would like to be able to buy shirts that fit my small shoulders without busting at the seams for my breasts. I would like clothing to reflect the true state of my body, and of the average female form, which is to say, I would like women’s clothing to be made in such a way that breasts aren’t ignored or marginalized as a purely sexual feature.

I don’t want to be told, by virtue of what I can and cannot wear, how I should display my breasts to the world. When you have bigger breasts the clothes that are available to you are sending a clear message: you may only present yourself as a sexual object. Having a woman’s body, with woman parts, often means you are stripped of your autonomy–even when it comes to something so innocuously mundane as getting dressed every morning.