A friend posted today that she was taking her 14 year old daughter to Bravissimo for a fitting. It got me thinking. So this is not a post about emigrating, but a post about self esteem, models and bra sizes.
I believe that, if one visited a random selection of secondary schools around the country (UK or North America) and took the measurements of a random selection of teenage girls, one could:
(a) get oneself arrested, and;
(b) prove that very few of them is, or is likely to be, a AA cup by the time she is 20 years old.
So the question is, why will my daughter and all the girls of her age be subjected to the same untruths that have affected me all my life? I have spent my life believing that true beauty and elegance cannot be achieved with anything larger than a C cup, because all those lovely clothes modelled on catwalks and in magazine throughout the world are designed to hang beautifully on the flat-chested.
Dear teenage girls of the world, this is not true, and it has taken me nearly an entire lifetime to learn to believe that it is not my fault. The physical shape of women has changed since the war-raised generation before us. You will change the world and finally persuade the fashion world to start designing clothes that will make the full-busted, ample-hipped woman of the 21st Century look good and feel good about themselves. You will convince them that they can give us a product that makes us feel wonderful about ourselves, instead of profiting from our disappointment and low self esteem.
And if the established pillars of the fashion industry won’t change, I know a group of beautiful, smart, wonderful girls who will change it for them.
