Treasured Chests

Remember the feminist movement? When women burned bras? (I don't remember, were women supposed to be more comfortable without them?) Anyway, The feminist '70s were hard times for tits. It was difficult to tell that Annie Hall even had any. But all that was reversed when, in the '80s, Madonna came on the scene to return sexism to some of its former glory. Fans too young to remember Marilyn Monroe as anyone but the blonde who slept with a lot of Kennedys unwittingly welcomed the second coming. Madonna went from aping Marilyn in the "Material Girl" video to inventing the underwear-as-streetwear look. (Ask lingerie manufacturers who has been the single biggest influence in the brassiere sales boom of the past decade and they'll invariably cite Madonna.) She even brought back the 19th century bosom with her bustier and Merry Widow looks. And on her recent Blond Ambition tour, a deliberate bid to take things completely over the top, she enlisted bad-boy couturier Jean-Paul Gaultier to make her a Merry Widow with conical cups which she wore over her outerwear. Through all her transformations, Madonna's had one basic message, and it's not a new one: "If you've got it, flaunt it." (This dictum has, of course, been amended to read, "If you don't have it, get it.")

A mere trend becomes a major style when it hits at all levels of fashion, from the sleaziest storefront dives to the most elegant chicer-than-thou boutiques. What Madonna and The Great Historical Dialectic began, high fashion quickly carried forward. The dead giveaway that big breasts were genuinely big fashion was the sudden appearance of sizeable chests on traditionally flat runway models. A runway photograph of Paulina Porizkova in a pink Donna Karan cashmere wrap sweater set the whole thing in motion two summers ago, but Donna Karan was not the only comparatively demure couturier to give cleavage a big play. It seems the only thing designers haven't done to their clothes is include a big arrow pointing to the bustline with a sign saying, "Look at THESE!"

Thierry Mugler and Azzedine Alaia have been breast-obsessed for years, designing what a friend of mine calls "mistress clothes." Their ascendancy to even greater heights over the last couple of years is thus hardly a surprise. The same could be said for Gaultier, one of whose looks for fall is a see-through sequined blouse with a bra visible beneath. Other looks for last spring and this fall include Gianni Versace's strapless mini evening dress with the bodice cut to resemble a faceted gem, Norma Kamali's demi-cup bra and mini-skirt, and Dolce &. Gabbana's wrapped and tied top that evokes an image of breast bondage. Even Giorgio Armani's softened, tailored jackets, worn slightly slouchier than usual, were shown without a blouse and with cleavage to spare. Karl Lagerfeld, long credited with taking the prissiness out of Chanel suits since he took over the line years ago, went a tad further and showed opened jackets accented with nothing but a string of pearls. But no one translated the look more literally than Yves Saint Laurent, whose collection included a toga dress with one breast completely exposed.

Hollywood has done its part over the last few years both to create the big tits trend and to amplify it. Remember Jamie Lee Curtis's celebrated display back in 1983's Trading Places. Kim Basinger's striptease in 9½ Weeks didn't reveal all but it did conjure up memories for those who had seen her on the pages of Playboy a couple of years before. Certainly, the look that Madonna sported in Desperately Seeking Susan was one of the farthest reaching of her fashion statements, and with Dick Tracy she had design genius Milena Canonero's help in giving an elegant edge to what is basically a formfitting Jessica Rabbit look. And for "legitimizing" the fixation on breasts, no one outstrips Melanie Griffith's contribution in Working Girl. Griffith may be the only actress to receive an Oscar nomination for a role that required her to do her vacuuming topless. You can decide for yourself whether it was Tess's hard work or attractive breasts that got her to the top, but she definitely had a '90s attitude when she said, "I have a head for business and a bod for sin."

We can count on the movies to continue to exploit the new breast fashion--for the big screen it's almost too good to be true. And so, the movies will play their traditional role, spreading this trend the whole way to the suburbs of Peoria. And in the ongoing climate of celebrity mania, what anyone misses in the movie theater, they'll catch on the pages of People and Us. As I've said, the newer, bigger breasts, all dressed up in the newer, tighter, scantier fashions, are inescapable. I'm beginning to feel a little like Woody Allen in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)-- the sequence where he's chased through the countryside by a giant breast. I want to scream, "Enough, already!" and like Woody, brandish a cross to fend off this unnatural force.

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Alexis Matthews is a nom de plume for an omnipresent freelance social historian.

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