Size Me Up

Size Me Up

by Marlies Dekkers

People often compare women to beautiful flowers, I prefer to use trees. Don’t get me wrong, flowers are lovely! It’s just that trees come in a much greater variety of shapes and sizes; exactly like women themselves. One of my core beliefs –and perhaps my main motivation to design lingerie- is this: Every Woman Is Beautiful.

Tall, lanky bodies, voluptuous figures, sporty shapes; whatever you see in the mirror when you take off your clothes: you are perfect and gorgeous. Would you think an olive tree is too stubby, or a willow too tall? Of course not! My sister and I for example, we are too very different trees. I wear a 32D bra she a 32A. Not only was it fun and interesting to grow up with someone with such different bodyshape, it also proved to be incredibly useful when we started working together.

When you design a bra, you traditionally start out making the first model in a B cup. (a 34B or a 32B bra size) If you’re happy with that prototype, you can start making different cup sizes. But my sister and I found out that simply making that standard bra smaller or bigger doesn’t work (my sister was a member of my design team for a long time). A design that was perfect in a B cup, looked quite different from the original on my sister in an A cup, but it often didn’t work on me in a D cup either! Either the bra wouldn’t fit perfectly anymore or part of the design would get lost. What to do?

There was the crazy option to make different prototypes for each design and produce several versions of it. But that would be way too much work and way too expensive, right? In other words: impossible! Well, I thought about why I had started designing lingerie: to make every woman feel beautiful. That means making bras that feel and look amazing in every cup size; be it a dainty 30AA bra, a 32C bra or a formidable 40DD bra. So I decided to take a huge (financial) risk and make the impossible possible.

So now, when you’ve set your mind one of my designs, say the Space Odyssey or Dame de Paris Push Up, you can look stunning in an A, B, or C cup, but also in a D cup and larger. ‘I am as beautiful, as sensual, as desirable as I believe myself to be’, it says on the mirrors in my stores. And you know what? A perfect fitting bra sure helps.

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