Everyday wear

Why Every Built-In Bra Tank She Tried Ended Up In The Pajama Drawer

It is not the bra. It is the four inches below it.

There is a movement most women over fifty make without thinking about it. You come in from the day, you put your bag down, and before you have said hello to anyone your hands go behind your back.

Your mother did it. You do it. Nobody ever really questions it, because the alternative has always been worse.

So when tank tops with the bra built in started showing up, a lot of women bought one. And then a lot of women quietly stopped wearing it.

The part nobody tells you

Read the one and two star reviews on almost any built-in bra tank and the same sentence appears, over and over, in slightly different words.

That last one is the whole problem in one sentence.

Most of these garments are made the cheap way. The cup gets a lining. The rest of the tank does not. So the bra part works, and everything below it is thin enough that you put a real bra on underneath and wear the tank over the top.

Which is exactly the thing you were trying to stop doing.

Two grooves in your shoulders is not a fit problem

It is worth being precise about this, because "get a better fitting bra" is advice almost every woman over fifty has already tried, at a fitting, with a tape measure, more than once.

Pressure is force divided by area. That is not an opinion about your body. It is arithmetic.

A conventional bra strap is commonly around ten to twelve millimeters wide where it crosses the top of your shoulder. The strap on this tank is forty to fifty millimeters. Carry the same load on four times the contact area and the pressure at any one point drops to roughly a quarter.

That is why the mark is there at the end of the day, and it is why a wider strap is not a comfort feature. It is a different physical arrangement.

The same logic applies underneath. An underwire is rigid, so it touches you along a narrow line rather than across an area, and force concentrates along that line. A hook and eye closure adds three small hard points against your spine. A conventional band carries most of the load on a strip of elastic a couple of centimeters tall.

What is actually inside this one

1. 1
   A molded cup, not a shelf

   The inner front is heat molded into two three dimensional cups with a real apex. Not a flat strip of elastic across the chest. A shelf presses. A cup holds.

2. 2
   A pad that is sewn in

   One shaped foam pad is stitched permanently inside each cup. No pocket, no slot, nothing to fish out of the washing machine and nothing to put back in the wrong way round.

3. 3
   A knitted underbust band

   Three to four centimeters deep, knitted into the garment rather than sewn on as elastic. It spreads the load across a taller surface instead of concentrating it on a narrow strip.

4. 4
   Silicone grip strips

   Thin raised silicone on the inside, one arc under each cup and one along the lower band edge. Silicone has a far higher grip against skin than smooth nylon does, which is the reason the band stays where you put it instead of traveling up during the day.

The fabric is 68 percent nylon and 32 percent spandex, knitted in the round. No side seams. Nothing rigid anywhere in it: no wire, no hook, no clasp, no slider, no boning.

How it compares to what you are doing now

Do not take our word for it. Test it in ten minutes.

This is a category full of claims, and you have already been disappointed by at least one of them. So here is the protocol we would use. It takes about ten minutes and you can do all of it at your own kitchen table.

• The window test. Hold the tank flat against a bright window and put your hand behind the fabric. Do it to the tank you already own first, then to this one. This is the test that separates a top from an undershirt, and it is the one you should run before anything else.
• The reach test. Put it on and reach behind your back the way you do at six o'clock. There is nothing there. Most women do this three or four times in the first week out of pure habit.
• The sleeve test. Put a short sleeved shirt over the top and lift your arm. Because the strap sits exactly where a bra strap sits and is wider than one, there is nothing to peek out.
• The wash test. Wash it and look at the cups. The pads are stitched in, so they should come out of the machine the same shape they went in.

What size am I in this

This is the question that stops most orders, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a centimeter chart you need a tape measure to use.

The knit has four way stretch, so it works across a range rather than at one point. If you are between two, take the larger one. Every woman who wrote "order up" in a review of something like this was right.

The questions people actually ask

The bottom line

If you have already bought one of these and it turned into a pajama top, the reason was almost certainly not the bra. It was the fabric below the bra.

Check the strap width. Check the band. Check whether the cup is a cup or a strip of elastic. And hold the thing up to a window before you decide.

Then reach behind your back at six o'clock and find nothing there.