Shape-Shifting Bras and an Industry Getting a Boost

From shape-shifting bras to ones that flatter all skin tones, a new wave of ultra-niche startups is challenging the idea of a one-size-fits-all bra.

When Amanda Marie Harris’ boyfriend gifted her a white Free People dress, her heart dropped. It was gorgeous, with delicate lace sleeves and a plunging neckline. But as a 34DD cup, there was no way for her to wear it. She couldn’t hide her bra straps, and stickies wouldn’t provide enough support. Sometimes she’d take the dress out and drape it over her, fingering the sheer material enviously. “I had all these dresses with plunging necklines that I wasn’t confident enough to wear,” she recalls.

Mainstream lingerie companies like Victoria’s Secret offered her no solutions. Harris had the glimmer of an idea, but it seemed out of reach — how could she compete with them? Then she realized that emerging bra startups were challenging the status quo. Companies like ThirdLove (launched in 2013 with a focus on half-cup sizes) and True & Co (launched in 2012) have led the way. Now, their early success — ThirdLove is currently valued at $750 million — is spawning a wave of new ultra-niche bra startups that target specific problems women face.

What President Donald Trump’s shutdown capitulation means going forward.

The most important part of the cave is to not look like you’re caving.

In the Rose Garden on Friday, President Donald Trump announced an agreement to end the 35-day partial government shutdown, which he swiftly signed late Friday. The “deal” was, in effect, acceptance of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s terms: reopen the government, then start negotiations about border security. It’s almost identical to what the Senate passed unanimously in December before the revolt from conservative commentators that caused Trump to reverse course and demand $5.7 billion for a wall at the Mexican border.

A wind gust briefly lifted Trump’s notes off the podium, not that he needed them. The teleprompter read simply “[Talk About Human Trafficking],” according to a pool report, leading to Trump’s unscripted jag about women bound and gagged in cars, “narco-terrorists” crossing the border with ease and human trafficking rising “because of the internet.” The hope, it appeared, was to draw the usual TV outrage coverage and media “fact checks” generating more attention for his tough rhetoric on immigrants. Trump hoped that his base heard his lengthy defense of walls and his insistence that he would shut the government down again or declare a national emergency to build the wall if Congress doesn’t deliver something better by February 15.

It doesn’t appear to have worked.

Mary Lynn Bracht’s unique perspective brings the dark legacy of South Korea’s “comfort women” to light.

As author Mary Lynn Bracht recites the opening lines from her critically acclaimed debut novel, White Chrysanthemum, in the basement of the Curzon arthouse cinema, we’re transported half a world away from London’s Soho neighborhood. “It is nearly dawn, and the semi-darkness casts strange shadows along the footpath. Hana distracts her mind so that she doesn’t imagine creatures reaching for her ankles.”

It’s a discomforting read about an issue — forced prostitution of “comfort women” during World War II — that roils East Asia to this day, and it emerges from an unlikely source: a Texas-born writer who once aspired to be a soldier herself.

The novel explores the harrowing history of comfort women — the tens of thousands of women subjected to forced prostitution by the imperial Japanese army between 1932 and 1945. In response to mass rapes by Japanese troops, Emperor Hirohito, according to historians, ordered the expansion of comfort stations, a euphemism for military brothels, with the idea it would reduce those atrocities while servicing the soldiers’ sexual appetites.