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The only really solid bras are underwire bras. The underwire serves to provide a lower foundation to the cup, ironclad, if you will, from which the breast is persuaded not to escape and to assume the contour of the underwire. The orientation of the underwire ranges from high tips where they meet, to high tips at the distal ends. Variations exist across the spectrum from very low central tips combined with high distal tips, to the opposite, and to very short wires with both tips low (as in certain Edith Lances designs). Recent years have seen the introduction of the unwire bra, which uses something other than steel for the wires, in an effort to make the wire more flexible and comfortable for the wearer. Although I have never personally tried one of these bras, I suspect that they may be some sort of halfway ground between the soft cup and the wired cup. Regardless, I think the underwire was an incredible invention, and I am personally unimpressed with soft cups, and I have tried a few (such as perhaps the epitome of this design, the Exquisite Form Ful-ly brassiere) with the result that I always find them lacking in all departments (looks, feel, breast gathering and presenting power etc.).

My first really successful bra was a decollete design from Sears about 1972.

Now this was a bra! Decollete designs typically incorporate similar elevation tips on both ends, usually about medium height, with the meeting of the tips fairly close together, and the shoulder straps affixed to the distal ends. The cups are normally formed with a half-lower cup, with or without a pad, and a frilly trim for the upper cup. The upper cups in such bras are not intended to be very substantial, as they are essentially an unsupported structural member, serving, in well endowed cases, to impart a little control to the above-the-cup swelling produced by the underwire and lower half-cup structure. Structurally, lift is imparted by the shoulder straps, which attached to the distal ends of the wires, allow for fairly wide necklines as the straps cross the shoulders near the outer end on both sides.

Drawbacks to the wide placement of the straps is that they can easily fall off your shoulders more often than more centrally affixed straps tend to do. The upsides to this placement are the exquisite sensual feel of the wide straps lifting your bosom from the side and ends which produces an opposite torque on both wires, essentially lifting you classically up and in, which in designs that use lower tip center ends, can produce dramatic cleavage. In most cases this produces a wonderful above-the-cup swelling and rounding of the breasts which is immensely staisfying both to see and feel. Essentially, this is also known as a shelf design, as in putting your breasts on a shelf ala Fredericks of Hollywood ads. Half-cup designs are also described as leaving your breasts free but fully supported due to this emphasis on the lower half cup and underwire as ostensibly the only means of support.

The 1972 Sears bra contained a sewn-in pad in the lower cup, and as this was more or less my first bra, it was an A cup, and the pads did their duty well in displacing what little natural breast mass I had at that early age and the lace overcup, particularly the upper cup decoration, did its intended job of lying flat against the minimal swell the lower cups created.

Regardless of what style bra you may choose as favorite, there will always be a special status reserved for this, the most feminine of brassieres, the decollete bra, in my mind. These astonishingly feminine bras provide incredible capture and uplift. They do not, as a rule, create anything more than a rounded swelling, very feminine of course, but by no means can they generate the projection of, say, a bullet bra, or any of its derivatives. It remains, the sexiest bra to wear, and to see, ever. A marvelous marriage of physics and style, or form and function with tactile sensation thrown in as an addictive plus.

These pictures are some of the best recent illustrations of bras in the style of the Lady Marlene 592.

Many years later, perhaps the very last of the really good decollete bras was produced by the Lady Marlene company. I bought several from Fredericks in the late 80s and they go by the Lady Marlene style number of 592. The 592 was very similar to the Sears bra of more than a decade before, except that it was not a padded bra. Whatever you put in the cups had to do, and with a half-cup design, this could not include any foreign materials. It had to be you and only you. This was the first bra I ever considered dangerous. And it was very dangerous! This bra had the power to change you, permanently, and you were instantly aware of its powers as soon as you put it on for the first time, and every time thereafter. It literally allowed you to gather up a lot of yourself into its cups. It then literally propelled that up and in in such a deliciously feminine way that you knew at your core level that it could deviously change you in two ways: this was bra training for real in that your bosom would be irreversibly altered by exposures to its hungry cups the more and longer you wore it, and secondly that you could not even begin to think about taking it off. A double edged underwire if ever I saw one.

With that little bit of personal trivia lesson number 1 concludes with the flatly stated preference for underwires, regardless of any other consideration; a bra is not a bra without an underwire. End of story. However, as later lessons will prove, even though the decollete bra is almost other worldly, there are other bras, not necessarily better or worse (this is a lateral shift to another bra dimension) that provide equal if not greater satisfactions. We will go there......but later.

Turn the page to Lesson 1 Pictures. There are 24 medium sized thumbnail pictures of decolette style underwire bras on this page -- it may take a while to load.

Turn the page to Lesson 2

Go back to the Bra Manifesto Introduction

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