Have no fear, Wonderbra is here.
The current superheroine of the lingerie galaxy has flown into Gotham and is poised to save American women from the evil forces of . . . gravity.
Once available only across the Atlantic, the Wonderbra -- which has pushed up, padded out and created cleavage for even waif model Kate Moss -- debuted in New York this week with promises of nationwide availability in August. But already, other companies' versions of the bra are flying out of stores across the country in a testament to the enduring belief that less can indeed be more.
At Saks Fifth Avenue, you can, if you're lucky, get a "Super-Uplift." At Victoria's Secret, they sell the "Miracle Bra." Another manufacturer plans to start selling "Magic Bra" next month. They're all, to varying degrees, versions of the Wonderbra that has sold at the rate of 20,000 a week in Great Britain.
"I've ordered one myself," says Lola Abt, general manager of the Saks in Owings Mills, where more than 200 women -- and men, presumbly in gift-buying mode -- have either bought or ordered a $39.50 Gossard Super-Uplift. "It certainly gives you that extra cleavage. It makes a woman feel good."
Ah, the retro push-up bra finds a place in the babe-feminism era. As one newspaper columnist declared of her Super-Uplifted self: "I am not defined by my breasts. I am empowered by them."
What makes the Wonderbra and its ilk different from the same old push-ups that have long played on the same old insecurities? lot of engineering, but at least as much hype -- the Wonderbra, for example, arrived in New York on Monday via armored trucks, a motorcade of limousines and models displaying their wares.
The bras are indeed highly constructed -- the Wonderbra boasts 54 different components, the Super-Uplift, 46. The deeply plunging cups have removable pads -- called "cookies" in the trade -- tucked into the sides, the supporting underwires don't come up quite so high in the center as other bras, and the straps are angled outward.
The effect is to push whatever you have up front and center. Previously, push-up bras generally just pushed northward, rather than north, east and west, to create the cups-runneth-over effect at the center of all that pressure.
"It's not just only the uplift but also the push-in," Herman Greiner, vice president of merchandising for a competing company, Lilyette, says of the Wonderbra. "It's more or less like pressing your breasts together with your hands, but this is done mechanically."
Still, the 30-year veteran of the bra biz says, what's new about the Wonderbra is not so much engineering as salesmanship.
"It's certainly nothing radically different," Mr. Greiner says. "It's just a very smart marketing approach that keeps the drums beating."
Indeed, the Wonderbra has been around for 30 years -- a period in which more natural-looking, unpadded and seamless styles were developed and proved popular. After years of selling at a respectable rate of 250,000 a year, word began circulating among models and other fashion-savvy types about the bra that a 1992 British Vogue article called "a wonderful piece of engineering." Soon, the buzz was such that 1.5 million Wonderbras were sold in 1992 alone.
Ironically, the Wonderbra message was delivered to the United States by Ms. Moss, the British model who is so hyperthin she's nearly concave and who advertises Calvin Klein's more androgynous underwear of briefs and tanks. "I've got a couple of those Gossard Wonderbras. They are so brilliant, I swear, even I get cleavage with them," Ms. Moss said in an interview in the January issue of Vanity Fair magazine. (It is another model, though -- the cat-eyed Eva Herzigova, who serves as the official Wonderbra mannequin -- in the black Wonderbra looming on a 2,800-square-foot billboard over New York's Times Square.)
The Moss endorsement set the quest in motion in America: Soon, the New York Times was in pursuit, with its writer Emily Prager test-driving her A cups in a Wonderbra and reporting, yes, men ogled.
In the midst of the frenzy, there was also some behind-the-scenes wrangling over the Wonderbra franchise. In fact, the history of Wonderbra manufacturing is about as complicated as its construction.
The bra was designed in 1964 by one Louise Poirier, herself none too overly endowed, a designer for Canadelle, a Canadian lingerie company. In the food chain that is modern retailing, Canadelle is now part of Playtex, which in turn is part of Sara Lee (yes, the cheesecake company).
Canadelle licensed Gossard, a London-based company, to make the Wonderbra, which it did to relative obscurity for years. But, just as Wonderbra was becoming all the rage, Gossard's license to make it expired, at the end of last year. Sara Lee, in a no-brainer of a business decision, took the rights back, and now its subsidiary, Playtex, makes what it calls "the one and only Wonderbra."
But Gossard didn't take this lying down and came up with the Super-Uplift in January, selling a million of them in three months and triggering a boisterous battle of the bras. Cheeky slogans and dueling, distracting billboards have been the weapons. Gossard: "Say goodbye to your feet." Playtex: "Look me in the eyes and tell me that you love me."
Gossard also beat Playtex to the U.S. market with a March 15 debut at Saks in New York. In one week, Saks sold $100,000 worth of the bras.
"The day after it launched in New York, we started getting phone calls," says Ms. Abt of the Owings Mills Saks. "We just got our first shipment last week, and we're sold out."
The store is receiving shipments every several days, many of which are already spoken for by callers who have reserved their size. But Saks hopes to catch up with back orders soon.
"We haven't even had the chance to display them yet," says Paige Yablon, manager of the lingerie department. The box alone is a pretty good display, showing a model with a Cindy Crawford-like mole wearing the bra and getting its message across in four languages: "The Ultimate Cleavage." "L'ultime Decollete." "Das Verfuhrerische Dekollete." "La Scollatura Piu Attuale." (Actually, to increase your measurements, you merely need to move to the Continent -- a U.S. 34B is a 75B in European sizing, and a 90B in French.)
Ms. Yablon believes part of the new rush to the push-up bra is due to the bad press that surgical breast enhancement has had in recent years.
"It's much safer and cheaper than implants," she says. "It's the alternative."
At $39.50, the Super-Uplift is pricier than the $26 Wonderbra (and it also has the less felicitous name, sounding more like hair mousse or a hydraulic jack). But it has the advantage of being more readily available at this point.
The Wonderbra currently is sold only in New York at Macy's, A&S; and Lord & Taylor. Sara Lee plans a "national roll-out" in August.
By then, numerous varieties of push-ups will be pushing for market share. Victoria's Secret, the mall and catalog purveyor of lacy confections, has sold more than a million "Miracle Bras" since they were introduced in July. It, too, has the removable "cookie" padding at the sides, but its straps differ in that they stretch, whereas the Wonderbra's are more rigid. That, and the fact that its back is the standard, with one piece hooking into another piece, make it different from the Wonderbra and the Super-Uplift with a strappier "gateback" design that seems to encourage standing up straighter and thus giving what's up front better display.
Other manufacturers are jumping in as well.
"Definitely we want to be a player, we want a piece of this business," says Greta Shugrue, marketing director of the New York-based Vanity Fair Mills, which on June 25 will launch its "It Must Be Magic Bra." (It wasn't able to get the official rights to call it simply "Magic Bra," although that's how it generally refers to it.) Ms. Shugrue says the company already has push-up bras with removable "cookies," but the new one, which will retail for $32, angles them differently and adds "architectural" features for "superior shaping."
Industry officials say just about every company is planning a Wonderbra-style bra. It's caused palpable excitement in a business in which sales have remained fairly flat over recent years. Bras do about $2.6 billion of business a year, according to the Intimate Apparel Council, and push-ups are about 10 percent of that market. In Great Britain, the push-up percentage went from 10 percent to about 25 percent of the market as a result of the Wonderbra and Super-Uplift.
Whether this latest development in bra culture becomes more than a one-time lark for most women remains to be seen. After being prodded into the Marilyn Monroe, bullet-bra shape of the '50s, the no-bra look of the '70s and the underwired and lacy Victoria's Secret style of the '80s, could padded and pushed-up be the way to approach the millennium?
"I think it's like everything in fashion; everything is thesis and antithesis," says Ms. Shugrue. "I think retail in general has been in a big slump. People haven't been responding to the waif, grunge look, so what's back now is glamour -- waved hair, lace, curves. I don't think this is going to be a workday kind of garment, it's more of a fun fashion accessory that women will use after hours to experience a silhouette they've never had before."