I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks has extraordinarily large breasts. Really. Have a good look below and see if you can spot them.
What’s fascinating isn’t so much the breasts themselves – although I defy anyone of any sexual persuasion not to find them mesmerising - but the fact that they’ve been permitted to flourish on mainstream television. In recent years, breasts like these have required a password and credit card before you’d get to see them in action.
Breasts. Bosoms. Tits. Boobs. Jugs. Rack. The names may dip in and out of both fashion and taste, but you’d expect the popularity of the appendages themselves would remain more or less constant. Not so.
In fact, any female born from the mid-1970s onwards has spent the majority of her adult life in a breast wasteland, at least when it comes to satisfying the vagaries of high or popular fashion. Bizarrely, for an industry whose sole purpose is to clothe women, couture and prêt-a-porter houses in Paris, Milan, New York, London and Sydney have championed a flat and featureless desert of pigeon chests, protruding collarbones and nubby nipples for nearly 20 years.
It wasn’t always this way of course. Pre-1990s, both designers and customers were largely unperturbed by the fact that most women have two wobbling hillocks protruding from their fronts. Except for a brief moment of anti-mam madness in the 1920s when breasts were taped into submission to accommodate flapper dresses (which from my removed vantage point appear to be made of little more than a single rigid bugle bead), breasts caused little offense in fashion circles.
In the 1950s they pouted and teased from tight sweaters and blouses. In the 1960s and 1970s they were so revered that their owners rarely troubled to tether them with cumbersome undergarments. And in the 1980s it was tits-to-the-wind as big breasts burst from their Alaïa and Versace casings and jutted from the broad, thrusting torsos of the original supermodels like Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell.
Then came the shrinking, shrivelled, snivelling 1990s. Grunge and waifishness. The heroin chic of a teenaged Kate Moss. Calvin Klein androgyny. Strung-out riot grrrls whose rattling, sinewy bodies were held together with little more than a slash of red lipstick. Prada’s severe minimalism swamped the fashion landscape with boxy, futuristic shapes, often in unyielding synthetic fabrics, none of which lent themselves easily to curving around the swell of a bosom.
As the final decade of the 20th century became the first decade of the 21st, breasts showed no sign of bouncing back. “1990s skinny” had nothing on “noughties skinny” when it came to the emaciation levels of the chopstick chicks walking the runways. And mini frames mean no mams.
Then, almost without warning bosoms swung back again. This year, we’ve finally hit a breast crest. For their S/S10 collections, Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton and that previous champion of flat-frontedness, Miuccia Prada, sent girls of unparalleled boobishness down runways in Paris and Milan. Models like Lara Stone, Laetitia Casta, Miranda Kerr and Elle MacPherson bubbled out of their bustiers on the international stage for the first time in memory. And Christina’s proud prow carved a swathe through her breakable compatriots on the red carpet yesterday, like the QE2. Everywhere you look, creamy bosoms are quivering like quenelles of boob-brûlé. Woman. Wo-man. Whoooa-man.
The question, of course, is whether the fashion world’s love affair with big, beautiful breasts will continue. What am I saying? That’s not a question worth considering at all. Of course it won’t. Nothing continues in fashion. For all we know, women of style may soon be expected to sprout a third breast from the centre of their sternums in order to keep pace with trends, like some sort of fleshy Cyclops.
But for now, rack is back.
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