Sixteen Hours a Day: The Closest Fabric to Your Body
The short answer: Count the hours. On most days a bra goes on before anything else and comes off last, which is fifteen or sixteen hours against your skin. Nothing else you own gets close to that. And it is the one garment women were taught to stay quiet about when it hurts.
We hear the sentence often, in slightly different words. “It hurts by the afternoon, but that is normal, right?” Fifteen hours of discomfort a day, every day, described as normal. That is the thing we started SHAPE to change.
Do the arithmetic once
Fifteen hours a day is a conservative figure for most women here. Dressed before the household is up, out through the day, and not changed until night.
That is more than a hundred hours a week in one garment, pressed against your ribcage and your shoulders. A shoe that hurt for one of those hours would be thrown out. A bra that hurts for ten is kept, because the alternative involves a conversation.
Why the silence is the expensive part
The discomfort is not actually the hardest part to solve. A band one size smaller and a cup one size larger fixes a great deal of it, and that takes ten minutes to establish.
What makes it persist is that nobody says anything. An orna goes over the drying bra on the line. A bra is bought in a market by size guess because asking feels worse than guessing. A mother does not tell a daughter, because nobody told her.
So the information never moves, and each woman works it out alone or does not work it out at all.
What changes in ten minutes
Two measurements. A private room with the door shut. Someone who takes the tape level around your back, looks at your shape, and brings you two or three styles instead of one.
Most women who have never been measured are in a band too large and a cup too small. The corrected version feels firm in a way that surprises them, because around eighty per cent of support comes from the band and theirs has not been doing its job.
It is free, and you never have to buy. More than 200,000 women have now found their fit with us.
The one thing we would ask
Say it out loud to one person. A sister, a friend, a daughter, a colleague. Not to us, necessarily, and not as a review. Just break the silence once, because the reason this is still a problem is that it has been carried quietly for a very long time.
Girl Talk, our community of more than 51,000 women, exists mostly because of this. It turned out that women had a great deal to say once there was somewhere to say it.
Questions women ask us
Is it normal for a bra to hurt by the evening?
It is common, and it is not something you have to accept. It usually means the band is slightly wrong, and that is fixable in ten minutes.
How long should a bra be comfortable for?
A full day. We design for fifteen hours because that is what women here actually wear.
I would rather not come into a store. Is there another way?
Yes. We can measure you on video over WhatsApp, or talk you through it without video at all.
Do I have to buy something after a fitting?
No. The fitting is free and there is no obligation. Women get measured and leave without buying every day.
Related in The Fitting Room
Free, private fittings. Walk into any SHAPE store and ask to be measured, or send us a message and we will do it on video. It takes about ten minutes, it is private, and you never have to buy. WhatsApp +880 1784 163199 · Find a store
Part of The Fitting Room by SHAPE.
