19 hours ago
It's time to grab your bullet bra and face the world like a fashionable Joan of Arc
You can divine a lot about a modern epoch by the dominant fashion in brassieres. If the early 2020s were all about max comfort, with a surge in sports bras and soft bralettes and anything with zero underwires, the decade's second half may be more structured – to the point of mild aggression. Pop chanteuse Dua Lipa has just been photographed for the front cover of July's Vogue wearing a blush silk Miu Miu bullet bra designed by Miuccia Prada – but not much else.
When Prada first put the garment on the catwalk last autumn teamed with candy-coloured knitwear, she asked afterwards: 'Do we need femininity in this difficult moment to lift us up?' Which seemed like the wrong question. This bra trend surely isn't about soft, kitten-like women and never has been in my lifetime.
Dua Lipa's gym-toned arms and abs are more akin to resistance fighter than trad wife, whisking us back to 1990 when an athletic Madonna wore that John Galliano bullet corset for her Blond Ambition Tour. These are bullet-upholstered nipple-guards wielded as teasing warnings to the male of the species, reminding us the most lethal bullet bras in popular culture were sported by the machine-gun-breasted fembots in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Since Powers was intended to be a satirical version of James Bond, the fembots were possibly a knowing send-up of Ian Fleming's ceaseless commentary on bosoms in his James Bond novels: 'her hard breasts, each with its pointed stigma of desire', for random example, or 'her fine breasts out-thrown and unashamed under the taut silk'.
Let's not forget that the first bullet bra was manufactured in 1941, designed by Perma-Lift – and surely no coincidence that lingerie named for ammunition should appear shortly before the USA entered the Second World War, subsequently being worn by 1940s pin-ups like Lana Turner.
I've always seen highly structured underpinnings as the fashion lover's equivalent of Joan of Arc 's armour: the bones and metal wires make you feel far less soft and vulnerable and make you stand upright. There's a reason that cantilevered breasts are sometimes nicknamed bazookas, after rocket launchers, and why Lara Croft, gaming's most dangerous heroine, has the kind of precision-engineered shapewear that suggests frequent visits to Rigby & Peller (where the fitters can famously guess your bra size just by looking at your embonpoint).
The fact is we are living in dangerous times, with the Middle East teetering on the brink of major conflict and Ukraine struggling valiantly to hold back Russian forces. If we don't gird our loins and chests now, when will we? The braless 'let it all hang out' hippie look was perfect for the 'make love, not war' 1960s and 1970s and also for the heroin-chic decadence of the grungy late 1990s. But it's not very 'now' – and never suited anyone over a D-cup.
Which is why I've spent the weekend trying to dig out my own Maitresse bullet bra, made by Pangbourne-based, vintage-look lingerie company What Katie Did, whose gorgeous satin brassieres cost a small fraction of the Miu Miu version and will have you facing World War Three with – if not equanimity – a certain sense of fatalistic glamour. If the famous 1994 billboard of supermodel Eva Herzigova in a Wonderbra said 'Hello Boys', the bullet bra reinvented for 2025 says 'Farewell Foes'.
