(Photo:formal dresses)Somewhere between Katie Price’s third wedding dress and last year’s Cannes film festival, cleavage as you know it died a death. The classic boob sandwich is so passe that the current issue of British Vogue has dedicated an article to its disappearance. “Whither the crumb tray?” it doesn’t quite ask.
If you too are wondering, my advice is to shift your gaze downwards a bit (not so obviously — women still hate that). It’s all still there; it’s just a little less obvious than before. Say goodbye to the cleavage and hello to the me-vage.
Julianne Moore has worn it; Kate Moss, Alicia Vikander and Sienna Miller regularly do. It girls Gigi and Bella Hadid exist in an almost permanent state of me-vage, as do models Kendall Jenner, Lara Stone and Jourdan Dunn.
So called for its daring self-reliance and natural look in the face of traditionally cantilevered underpinnings, the me-vage is a response to the elaborately hoisted credit-card slot of yore. You’ll know one by its relative flatness, an emphasis as much on the breastbone as on the breasts, and the distance not only between points A and B but also from the wearer’s chin (isosceles ideally rather than equilateral).
You may have noticed it on the red carpet or at least wondered if the A-list had burned their bras en masse before making their appearance. The answer is that they didn’t even leave the house in one.
The 2015 amfAR gala in Cannes was a watershed moment at which Stone, the Hadids and many more wore plunging, cutaway and deep V-neck dresses that emphasised the area but without any hint of the traditional pneumatics that often come with the territory.
After see-through naked dresses, crotch-high slits, sideboob and underboob, the sternum has become the red carpet’s most ubiquitous new erogenous zone.
At the Oscars, the Met Gala and the Golden Globes this year, chests were resolutely unencumbered by the sort of “hello, boys’’ wibble one might expect, despite the latter being famous for a certain nominative determinism as far as globes that are golden are concerned.
Cate Blanchett, Brie Larson, Saoirse Ronan, Jennifer Lawrence, Julianne Moore, Charlize Theron, Olivia Wilde and Margot Robbie might all have been in low-cut gowns but there was nothing on show that could possibly be described as quivering.
Of course, celebrities and models aren’t known for having much in the way of wobbly bits, but the absence of the sort of booby look that once might have inspired men to refer to “jugs” is also to do with a change in taste and attitudes.
In a post-Jordan, post-Jodie Marsh wearing two belts as a top, post-Posh Spice having her implants removed world that is saturated with porn and the aesthetic that comes with it, having boobs the size, shape and colour of glazed Christmas hams is de trop. Even men find them embarrassing now (in public). Hence the death of the cleavage.
Six months ago, I wrote about the return of the 70s bosom, a shift towards a low-slung teardrop-shaped silhouette and away from the grapefruit halves of the silicone-happy noughties. Jane Birkin, Francoise Hardy and Julie Christie are the new boob icons among the cognoscenti: a ski slope to the nipple and fuller at the bottom.
The lingerie market reflects it. The popularity of the T-shirt bra and the artificially moulded robo-boob look it gives is on the wane and the minimally padded balconette, which supports without adding Wonderbra-style lift, is taking over. Underwires in bras used to be short and point the breasts up and in; now they’re longer, to hold them where they naturally (and comfortably) sit and separate them slightly.
Net-a-Porter reports that soft-cup bras, rather than moulded shells, make up half of its lingerie sales, while Selfridges’ bestseller is a non-underwired cotton triangle cup by Calvin Klein.
Those in the know will recognise this as the “Instagram bra’’, a 1990s style that last year garnered more than a million likes for me-vage maven Jenner. It is a favourite among Instagrammers who like to take selfies from above to show off their own. (Blogger Lorna Luxe, who has 389,000 followers, is a master of the art.) Recently established and newly fashionable lingerie brands such as Beija Flor, Palindrome, Anine Bing, Lonely and Baserange all do a brisk trade in the sort of sheer and unstructured bralettes that give a textbook me-vage look.
Of course, many of these styles go up only to a C-cup and most of the women buying them are in their 20s. “They’re great for Instagram but not for cartwheels,” a fitter told me recently.
Those who can do without underwires go to American Apparel; those who can’t shop at Bodas.
The true pros go without: for the ultimate in natural me-vage witness Bella Hadid’s red satin Alexandre Vauthier dress in Cannes this year. It’s the sort of look that nobody with children or over the age of 30 could pull off — and it isn’t because they’re too long in the tooth.
Still, it beats the ignominy of chicken fillets and the dreaded canape-shelf scenario.Read more at:cocktail dresses