MEASURING UP
REJECTED AUGUST 2006

On select Sunday evenings, Brooke Cenicola, a manager of the lingerie shop Linda's, sends around energetic emails with subject headers like “It's Time Again for Bra School” and “What? . . . Bra School?”   Cenicola is putting out the call for models for her weekly school held at Linda's Soho location (motto: "Love Hurts, Your Bra Shouldn't"), a spacious duplex packed with lingerie and swimwear from the likes of Rosa Cha, Moschino, and Cosabella. Cenicola began the school to train Linda's sales staff in the discriminating and subtle art of bra fitting.

“Being a bra model at bra school is the equivalent of being a hair model at beauty school,” Brooke writes in one of her emails. “You will be treated just like a customer on a regular day except that we will take time for instruction and explanation.” At first, Cenicola admits she had to “beg girls to come” but now is turning away twenty women a week.

On a Wednesday evening on West Broadway just north of Prince, the spacious interior of Linda's was the only store on the block lit up. A sign in the window declared proudly “We have bras from 32AA to 38G!” Like in the tale of the three bears and Goldilocks, the models who waited on the sidewalk were of ascending sizes. They included a tall, flat-chested woman in a black T-shirt and purple Elvis Costello glasses, a medium-breasted woman in jeans and boots, and a particularly well-endowed woman in Birkenstocks and a shapeless flowered top. If the models were the bears, then Goldilocks was played by Cenicola, a perky woman in her late 20s with not golden curls but stylishly bobbed brown hair. Cenicola greeted her guests in a white Lacoste shirt, beige skirt and high-heeled sandals. “Come in, please, the first session is just ending,” said Cenicola.

The models were ushered into the dressing room and each found herself stationed behind a red curtain in one of the three stalls. Each model was assigned her own salesgirl—all three petite, young women with eager, confiding, sisterly manners toward their considerably older charges. Soon the models stood shirtless, ready for their fittings. The medium-sized model stood in a stretched out Maidenform bra, the large-breasted woman in a giant nude panty-hose colored brassiere with large cylindrical cups that drooped with the weight of her bosom, the small-breasted woman in nothing but her purple glasses and jeans. The salesgirls took out yellow seamstress's tape measures and began measuring the models. “She's between sizes!” called out one salesgirl.

Cenicola worked the room evaluating her salegirls' work—commenting on the snugness of the back clasp, the tautness of the shoulder straps, the insistence or uncertainty of the contained flesh in their assigned cups. Every so often in her rounds, Cenicola expertly turned her evaluation into a mini-seminar. She would shove the red curtain aside, and snap, “Now girls, listen up!” The salesgirls plopped on the floor cross-legged and gazed up at Cenicola, and the room took on the aura of a well-managed bordello. One of the shirtless bra-clad models was brought forward to illustrate a fine point of construction or fitting.

Cenicola warned against “quadro boob,” an effect caused by large breasts squeezed by an ill-fitting brassiere; and “Pac-Man boob,” which some strapless bras can cause when the cup construction is too roomy on top, so that the cup collapses—i.e., “eats”—the top of the breast. Of a particular Elle McPherson bra that Cenicola found has a “strange fit,” she instructed the girls to try a cup size smaller than normal. She schooled the salesgirls—and the models themselves—in how to properly adjust breasts when donning a bra, and in the difference between “molded” cups (layered cup construction but without added material) and “padded” cups (additional material added to the cups in certain spots).

At one point in the fittings, the Birkinstocked woman found herself maneuvered into a complicated, gargantuan paisley apparatus. After all the straps were adjusted and tightened and she was pushed and pulled into place, the model slipped on a trial T-shirt and it was revealed why there was a need for bra school. Her breasts were wholly transformed: no longer heavy and uncomfortable-looking, they appeared sprightly, lively, and well-formed. As she admired her slimmer, sleeker self in the mirror, the model smiled for the first time that evening.

The small-chested woman smiled too when, after several duds that only exacerbated her perceived deficit, she was fitted in a subtlety padded bra of a color a shade lighter than her glasses. Cenicola nodded her approval. “It gives her better proportions.” This tall, slim woman's face, attractive to begin with, lit up as she turned to the room and said in a wry, good-humored way, “Look, Ma, I've got breasts.”

Soon after, the medium-sized model stood in a frilly white bra with purple bows from a line called Lormar Intimates. Cenicola came over, pulling and pushing desultorily. “The front is cute, but this puckering. . . . It's the bra,” she quickly reassured the model, “It's not your fault.” (This emerged as a clear house rule—only the bra, never the customer, was to blame.) The sales girls chimed in, whining about sides that “never fit” and that tend to “gap and pinch.” “That's it,” said Cenicola suddenly. A shrewd cast fell over her pleasant features. “I am not going to order any more of this line.” A satisfied and serious silence settled on the room.

As Cenicola rang up the models—each received a free bra as well as the option to purchase several additional ones at a discount—she talked about the satisfactions of her job. “Years ago, when I first started, I thought it would be just another retail job, but I began to learn how we are the only place that does what we do, how some women have never been properly fitted. When they put on a bra that actually fits, well, I have had them actually weep. I know I am really helping women here.”

Cenicola bleeped the tags of two bras with her scanner and asked the medium-sized model how she had heard about bra school.

“My brother's girlfriend recommended me,” she said.

Cenicola asked “What's her name?”

“L—,”  

“A dancer, right?”

“No, an actress.”

“Oh, was she like a D?” asked one of the salesgirls. The model hesitated, perhaps searching her memory.

Cenicola's brow furrowed and she punched at her computer. She consulted the screen. “Oh, yes, a 32C, I remember now.”

– Sari Wilson