Buying undergarments is a mixed experience. Bras, I mean. It’s great because you’re getting a new thing – a new thing that’ll make you feel better in your clothes, less likely to droop in future and not as prone to giving yourself a black eye when running down a hill to catch a bus.
But it’s not so great because you have to actually go and buy them. I literally shudder at the thought. Men think they’re the only ones who feel out of place in lingerie departments, but let me reassure you, gentleblokes, those places are designed by Satan himself and his minions on earth – nuns. I’m sure of it.
Decent lingerie departments are always as far from sea-level as possible. By “decent”, I mean both in the sense of adequacy and modesty: rubbish lingerie shops tend to be at street level and with large, full-window frontage to the outside world that means you might as well broadcast pictures of your highly flammable, 1950s hooker wear on the internet. You don’t want that. You want cotton, lycra, sizes and choice. This will never be found lower than floor 5 of a department store.
You have to go on a Mordor-style quest to reach the good shops. When you do eventually get there, disorientated and dizzy from lack of oxygen, the layout is pure evil: nothing is where it’s supposed to be and it’s all lit with the most disgusting, unflattering light that should come with one of those epilepsy warnings, but pertaining to taste. Then, there are the bras. Hundreds and hundreds of bafflingly lit, misfiled bras…
First, you must unscramble the code -what style do you want? What’s the point of a half-cup and why do full cups look like they could have been deployed in WWII when jumping out of a plane? Do you want underwired? DO YOU WANT UNDERWIRED?! FOCUS! It’s best to have decided on- at the very least – the colour you want about 6 weeks before wandering into one of these establishments on your own.
Of course, you won’t be on your own for long. If you start to look tired or bewildered (you will), you will shortly be pounced on by someone older, stockier and most importantly, cross. They whisk you off with exactly the kind of bras you didn’t want. into a teeny cubicle with a curtain that has never, ever pulled all the way across, affording any kind of modesty. But modesty is a long way from your mind as you hand your breasts over to someone who was last happy in 1975; her only pleasure now is in other people’s misery. In those cubicles, no-one can hear you scream.
She begins by roughly spinning you around and measuring you, calmly but clearly deriding the bra you came in in. Now you are down, she can kick you. And she will. You have never, ever worn the right size (despite being measured, here, by her, last year) and that’s why your life is in such a mess. You start to cry, but there’s nowhere to dry your eyes; bras don’t soak up much moisture and you would never chance the curtain. It’s probably been there since the last time yer woman was happy. We have established that this was 1975.
Next, she cups your breasts in an unnecessary manner and guesstimates their weight to the gram, circumference, favourite film – you’re not sure. You’re past caring. Your humiliation is complete. Broken, you buy the bra she picked for you (and one you like which you hope will fit) and get out as quickly as possible before she actually starts breathing fire.
At least, that’s what used to happen. I believe I have broken the cycle. Yesterday, I bought bras on the internet. I’ve done it before and it went so well that I’ve done it again. No curtain, no freezing cold tape and unhappy hands, no humiliation – all in the privacy and comfort of my own home. I was able to browse for an hour for what I wanted with no-one to pounce out and chastise me. I was able to search by size in advance – no pointless rifling through a rack that had never held the bra for me in the first place. False hope – surely the worst kind of falsie.
I’m sorry if this trend will lead to that lady and her kind being put out of a job, but I’ve given them all I can give. I am an internet bra buyer! As they like to say on the walls of those grim cubicles: no returns.
