“Corporate, but also, really, the man is usually a man…that’s the thing,“ she said. So much for my editorial utopia of women!
As a lawyer, Hay rarely left her desk (or Blackberry), and if she happened to be sans bra, she would always put on a “forgiving blazer.” The only time she left the vice grip of her job? A once-a-year La Perla sample sale. She hasn’t been in the corporate world for eons. So has it changed? She suggested I call up her accountant, Zellerita St. Louis, a mother of three, who has been in the business since the 2000s. “I feel like it’s very subjective, and it’s to the person’s individual taste. I feel like we all know, especially in corporate America, what is presentable and what’s not presentable and when. You dress differently based upon where you’re going or who you’re meeting with.”
St. Louis also noted that bra-wearing was cultural. “I’m a first-generation American. My mother’s from Panama, and I feel like with her, everything was about appearance. She was very old-school, so I was always brought up to wear bras. It was something that was innate in me.” Continuing, she said, “I am an Afro-Latina, and as a Black woman, I think it’s even more like, ‘I got to be perceived in a certain manner, in a certain way.’ So it was very important for me to fit the image of a professional, and that included wearing bras according to society.”
Looking for another angle on the situation, I called up my former Vogue colleague Emily Farra, who is now in-house for a New York brand. Farra has always been the pinnacle of professionalism in my eyes and most certainly she wears a bra to work. “Body politics aside, it goes back to the double standard around how women are perceived and the pressure to look ‘presentable,’” she says. “In a typical office, if your hair’s a little messy, your nails are chipped, you’re noticeable not wearing a bra–it might be registered or judged, even subconsciously. Whereas a guy can wear a wrinkled shirt or pants that don’t fit and it doesn’t matter nearly as much, because we haven’t been conditioned as a species to evaluate their appearance before anything else.”
What a drag for those yearning to go braless at their cubicle! A little cleavage? A nipple? What’s the big deal!! Zillionaire Kim Kardashian, an aspiring lawyer herself, released a bra with stand-at-attention nipples last year, for goodness sake. Though, as Hay pointed out, “that makes no sense to anyone who actually works in the corporate world.”