Ok. In order to understand why the measuring and fitting process changed (and why "bra sizes' seem to have changed in your mind), you have to understand the system that was in place *before* it all changed (ie. the system in use in both in the UK and the USA). This was the so-called “plus four” system. And to understand why the “plus four” system was created in the first place, you have to understand the design and manufacturing process of bras - and, more importantly, what it’s like to wear one. This might take a while, and I don't expect you to understand it all - or agree with it, because you seem to have already made your mind up, based on bogus knowledge or entrenched views.
For decades (roughly from the 1950s onwards), bras were mass-manufactured with absolutely no standards based on the shape, fit or design - other than generational iterative changes in design techniques and the manufacturing process. No wide-ranging research was conducted into the incalculable variances of female body shapes, heights, weights or body frames - not to mention absolutely zero research being carried out into breast sizes, shapes and form - let alone how these two interconnect to create millions of potential combinations of body shape/size and boobs shape/size. This is because there are rarely two women who are alike in both aspects (ie. body shape/size and boob shape/size).
Averaging doesn’t help either, because all averaging tells you is that x number of women are roughly the same height/body mass, but it doesn’t take into account the differences in the shape and size of the two breasts on those individual “average” bodies. The combinations would each so unique as to be impossible to determine - although, it’s likely there would be some convergence - but not a lot. You’d quickly discover that you have an entire population of women who are average height of 5’4” and average weight of 170lb. But their boobs are all going to be different - so the averaging of boob sizes across that given average height and weight is going to vary wildly. And that’s just across the average weight and height. You have variances in boob sizes across each average height-weight category; short, overweight women with small boobs; short, overweight women with moderate sized boobs; short overweight women with big boobs. Then you have tall slim women with small boobs or big boobs, tall overweight women with small boobs, or big boobs - and on and on and on. It’s an almost endless series of potential combinations, unlike any other aspect of sizing clothing or accessory for another body part (eg. feet, legs, arms etc).
So, let’s say you’re a textiles manufacturer, and you have to decide how you’re going to design and manufacture your bras for the mass market. How do you do it?
Do you try and accommodate every possible combination of body frame (ie. back band) and every possible combination of boob size? No. Because that would be insane. You’d be as well setting up a bespoke bra tailoring service and dealing with each customer who comes in to shop for bras on an individual basis. Niche, expensive and not profitable at scale.
Do you create a modular bra that allows women to pick a band size that fits, then swap out the cups that fit their boobs? No, that would never work either - it's too complicated and too expensive and too fussy and error-prone (although, it's a decent idea in principle).
Do you create a wide range of bras in different cups and different back bands that covers as many possible body shapes and types as you can possibly think of? No. Because to do so would require an extensive production line process that takes into account lots of different sizes of each component for each potential size of bra. I don’t know if you’re aware, but bras are exceptionally complex garments. A typical bra design contains between 20-48 individual physical components, including over 12 pieces of fabric, two underwires, numerous threads, metal or plastic closures, elastic, lace, clasps, sliders, rings, bows and often other decorative components. It can take up to six months to design and prototype a bra with up to 50 people working on it, then the production process has to be streamlined so that the bras can be made to specification quickly, in volume and packaged/sold to the mass market. If you attempted to make every possible fit and size of bra, you’d expend all of your energy and time trying to cover every possibility, only to sell many of them in fairly small numbers. It's just not practicable or profitable.
What you do is you settle on a moderate range of bras that more-or-less fit women within certain ranges of back band and cup size across a given group - and you categorise all these bras accordingly, based on a band size and a cup size, and you make them in batches with volumes weighted towards the highest averages in each group. You decide that the bra will roughly fit to the circumference of their torso (underbust), and the cup size will be approximately the size around the fullest part of their boobs (overbust) - and it seems a logical conclusion that these two things could be combined to create a standardised system of bra size. ie. if you’re 38” in total across your overbust, it doesn’t matter what your underbust and overbust are measured and sized separately, because the overall size of the bra should roughly fit) However, because you might find that one woman is 34” around her underbust but 38” around her overbust, and another woman is 32” around underbustand 36” around her overbust - or worse, 33” around her back and 37” around her boobs, you need to find a way of standardising the measuring system or your bras are going to be all over the place and hugely expensive to produce - which is where the "plus four" system came in.
The plus four system began in the 1950s when bras were mostly made from silk and satin - and did not stretch; the extra 4 inches extra allowed for breathing room (something which is now completely redundant as all bras now have elastic and stretch in them). The cup sizing system actually originated from the 1930s, but wasn’t particularly science-based, other than rough comparisons to everyday objects such as egg cups and bowls.
When the plus four system was settled on, it allowed manufacturers to roughly estimate a given bra size and cup size but figuring out the difference between the overbust and underbust measurements to produce a range of bras accordingly.
As part of this process, to derive band size, 4 inches were added to an even underbust measurement and fiveinches were added to an odd chest circumference measurement. Cup size was calculated by measuring the overbust, and the difference between bust size and the band size then dictated cup size.
So, for example if a woman measured her underbust (below her boobs - but oddly, sometimes above her boobs) and it came out as 30”, she then added four to that figure to reach a “band size” of 36 (she would add five if it was an odd number).
She then measured across the fullest part of her bust (the overbust) and, let's say the number she obtained was 38”. So, to determine her cup size, she would subtract the band size from the overbust size and the difference between the two measurements would determine her cup size - in this case 2. Upon consulting the bra size chart, this pointed to a cup size of C. Or, a 36C bra. See below.
The chart went something like this when the difference was calculated:
<1 = AA cup
0 = A cup
1 = B cup
2 = C cup
3 = D cup
4 = DD cup
You’ll notice that the numbers are even, because bras were offered in "even" numbered sizes due to standardising the manufacturing process for efficiency and profit (see above).
It’s also worth noting how arbitrary and unscientific this process is; it doesn’t take into account odd numbered measurements, and requires the addition of four or five to the number because of a historical issue with using silk in the manufacturing of bras. The combination of letter and number literally means nothing - it doesn’t correspond to a physical measurement or metric, it’s just a designation on a chart. It might as well be a symbol or a colour. (Red smiley, green banana, yellow tree).
It’s wasn’t an ideal solution, because it’s not an exact science. For example, the woman buying one of your bras might be slim built and tall with big boobs - and the closest bra she can find is, say, a 36C, like above. But she’s not actually 36” underbust - she’s 32” underbust, but she had to add four - and she’s not quite 38” overbust. She’s more like 37.5” overbust, so the difference calculated isn’t accurate, which makes the final chart reference innacurate. So, her 36C bra doesn’t really fit her all that well - and the "36" doesn’t actually mean anything in real terms, and her band size and her cup size hasn’t actually been determined - it was literally plucked out of thin air by applying a bizarre equation to the process and consulting a chart created by an executive at a bra company (probably a man). But, it’s the closest size she can find - and, from a bra manufacturer’s perspective, it’s simpler to make bras in those sizes in large quantities, rather than trying to make lots of different variances of every possible bra size.
However, let’s take it further and do a real-life example: me. In the 1980s, I measured myself using this system and ordered bras from a mail order catalogue in the UK. Here’s what I ended up with:
Underbust: 32”
Add four: 36
Overbust measurement: 40”
Difference (36-40) = 8
But, wait... hold on. I go look at the chart and there is no "8". The closest I can get is 4 = DD. So, I'm a 36DD.
So, I order a 36DD bra - and it arrives, and it’s uncomfortable. The cups are way too tight, and the band is a bit loose. So I send it back and order a 38DD. With the 38DD, the cups are slightly more loose, but the band is way too loose now. So I send that one back and go back to the 36DD. And that’s the bra I wear for most of my adult life - a 36DD, because some chart said that was my bra size, and it sort-of fits, and I just get used to it - even though it kills me most days. Like most women, I simply wore whatever bra was closest to the measurements I determined, and whatever they corresponded to on the chart. Or, I tried a few bras on in a department store until I found something that mostly worked (which was an embarrasing and agnosing process). It was invariably a 36D or a 36DD - it wasn’t ideal, but this is how it was. I tried various techniques to make my bras more comfortable; moving in to the inner hooks, using the straps to pull my boobs up, sometimes even taking the bras apart, cutting them up and re-stitching them - but it was never ideal. This is what the mass manufacturing process did, and this is what women endured for decades.
So, what you ended up with is most of the “average” women who were in the market for a bra landing somewhere in the middle of this averaging range, usually around 34C-36D - because that’s all that was available to them, based on the insane measuring system and the available manufacturing process. Put simply: cups didn’t go above DD, and bands rarely went above 38. This was the same in the US and the UK for decades.
Then, around the late 80s, early 90s, some manufacturers started realising that their chart system wasn’t accommodating the increasing average boob sizes of women, so they added a few more letters and made the bras a little bit bigger. We got DDD in the USA, and E and F in the UK. However, things didn’t change much - because most women kept on wearing the size they thought they were, and manufacturers kept making the bras the same way they had for years. Bigger bras were more expensive too, because there’s more material in them, and they required changes in the manufacturing process to accommodate quirky sizes. Not all companies made them, some came and went. Often, the only way you could get a bigger bra was to go for a "granny bra" made by Playtex or Triumph - an old-fashioned support bra that came in bigger bands and cup sizes, like XXL, or XXXL.
Around this time is when your “big bust” models start appearing on the scene - eg. Samantha Fox in the UK during the 80s, and various other Page Three models with big-ish boobs, citing their bra sizes as “32C” and “34D” or, sometimes, if they looked really big, “36DD”. And then, DD became synonymous with “big boobs”. I had a 36DD bra, so I was Miss big tits. This was no different in the USA with the explosion of enhanced models - and throughout the 90s, with models like Linsey Mackenzie and all the other models I’ve become familiar with here on the BEA over the years. Around the 80s and 90s we start to see the emergence of "fantasy" bra sizes with women like Tina Small and Lolo Ferrari, then Jordan and Pamela Anderson - where there’s no real way of knowing what bra size they are, because their bras were custom-made and didn’t conform to known designs or come from the established “bra chart” determined by the plus four method. Bra letters like H, J, JJ start to emerge beyond F, FF and G (which were being used by natural models like Danni Ashe in the mid-90s, even though there were no standard sizing metrics in place yet). We also start to see numbers being thrown around like 42HHH and letters like P O and L and impossible numbers and other combinations of letters which were purely for marketing purposes and had no basis in fact. Most of these models would often wear store-bought, ill-fitting bras, or they would splash out on custom-made bras. Often, the bras they would wear in photos shoots would be crafted by costume designers, purely for the shoots.
Around the mid-90s, bra manufacturers also started modernising and opening up their ranges to bigger sizes - such as G, GG, H, HH, J, JJ. I know this, because I tried a few. We had the Wonderbra revolution, the Superbra revolution - and, in general, while average boob sizes didn’t necessarily get “bigger”, bras were being manufactured and sold by taking into account that there were “sizes” bigger than DD, and that boobs were things that could be measured in physical dimensions and classified more closely to their real-world sizes. Despite all this, there were no regulations governing bra measurements (although, in the 1970s, the European Market insisted on some basic guidelines around what and how boobs should be measured for a bra), and we had no global standard that unified companies. And why would there be? Bras are effectively an accessory made by competing entities. Of course, every company wants to be the market leader - and market leaders started to emerge.
Around this time (late 90s/early 2000s), we also start to see more articles about women wearing the wrong bra size. And, to this day, the majority of women are largely still wearing the wrong bra size - all because of an outdated measurement system that is not based on physical dimensions or variances in body shape. A recent article on the New York Times reports on a study that suggests 70-100% of women are wearing the wrong size. A staggering statistic. But hold on a sec - it isn't actually true. Why? BECAUSE THERE IS NO STANDARD FOR MEASURING AND FITTING BRAS. Women can't possibly be wearing the wrong size of bra if they don't know what their size is and no-one makes bras to set standards. However, the converse of this is actually true: if there is no standard sizing for bras, the chances are you're not wearing the *correct* bra for your bodyshape. ie. you are not FITTED correctly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/style/lingerie-are-8-out-of-10-women-really-wearing-the-wrong-bra-size-a-bra-myth-busted.htmlThen, along comes the “contemporary fitting method” - but not before the “war on plus four” - which was started by the Busts4Justice group around 2008 in the UK, when they railed against the British high street retailer Marks & Spencer with a grassroots campaign when the company started charging more for bras in the D+ range - all because there was more material costs in the manufacturing process, and larger bras sold in fewer numbers (they only sold in fewer numbers because women were wearing the wrong size all along and tended to purchase smaller sizes below D).
THIS is when bra sizing and fitting underwent a sea change - it literally had nothing to do with nude modelling, big-boobed models or some feeble attempt to make women sound like they had massive boobs by increasing the letters on their bra size. The Bust4Justice campaign in the UK was successful in turning around the M&S decision, and bras are now sold on an equitable basis, irrespective of their size (mostly).
Following this, new brands started to emerge for bigger-boobed women; Curvy Kate and Flirtelle were already on the market, as was Bravissimo, and the leading manufacturers started to introduce DD+ ranges; Lepel, Fantasie, Charnos, Triumph, Freya, Primadonna - and so on. Now, the market is awash with lots of different big bra manufacturers, and Polish brands are expanding (pardon the pun) globally.
And that’s when the new method of fitting and sizing started to spread (mostly in the UK, Europe and Russia - the USA is still stubbornly hanging on to the plus four method). It involves a combination of measuring, fitting, and sampling bras from different manufacturers before settling on your *fit*. And, most importantly, it’s based on physical dimensions, body shape, boob shape and form - in addition to comfort.
You start by taking some basic measurements (underbust and overbust) and working from there - only, this time, the inches correspond (approximately) to the physical dimensions of the bra; a 32” underbust would generally wear a 32 back bra (but not always); an underbust and overbust difference of 4” would roughly correspond to a D cup (but not always), hence, an underbust measurement of 32” and and overbust measurement of 40” would lead me to a 32FF bra (the difference is approximately made up by 8” of cup material - but it’s not always exact) - whereas a plus four measuring method would lead me to a 36DD bra.
I will NEVER wear a 36DD bra ever again - it's far too loose on the back band and far too tight in the cups.
However, in the US, they still use an addition/subtraction method to clue in the bra size, which is bewildering - because it can’t be done by measuring alone. You HAVE to try bras on, you HAVE to test if the back band is doing the support work, that it’s resting horizontal across the back, that the centre gore is snug against the sternum, that the boobs are encased in the cups and not spilling over, that the straps are not too tight - and numerous other things. I’ve measured friends and estimated their size with a tape, only to find they need to shift to a ‘sister’ size (one friend measured as a 34J but needs to wear a 36HH). I can go into much more detail about fitting - if you really want me to. I’d actually enjoy it.
The sizing systems are broadly the same in the USA; a US 32C is more or less the same as a UK 32C, but it starts to diverge slightly after DD - but there’s not a huge amount of variance.
So this leads us to a comparison with Tiffany, and brings us back to the point of this thread.
In the photo I’ve posted here there are four images:
1 Tiffany. I have no way of knowing what size of bra she is actually wearing in this photo - but as I said before, many websites listed her size as 32G/32FF. I’ve estimated her *actual* size (based on shape, height etc) as being 32K.
The photo in the middle is a woman wearing a 32K.
The third photo is a woman wearing a 32FF.
Now, PLEASE try to tell me that after all of this, you STILL think she's a 32FF and that modern bra sizing and fitting is "bullshit".