If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I’m partial to Prima Donna.  The awe in Iris’s voice when she introduced me to the brand has stayed with me ever since.  I could feel just by handling and wearing a Prima Donna bra that it was well-made, but Adrienne Kenny gave me the technical reasons behind this feeling when I talked to her at Curve.

She also opened my eyes to two obvious points that are just now dawning on me in other areas of my wardrobe:

  1. A good bra is like a good pair of shoes.  If you expect to spend more on well-made shoes, then you can use the same reasoning in your bra shopping.
  2. Just as you wouldn’t expect to wear one pair of shoes to every event in your life, you wouldn’t expect to wear the same bra to everything either.

For years now, I’ve been searching for the perfect single pair of shoes that I can wear to almost everything, and I’m finally beginning to accept that this just isn’t possible.  Silfath is helping me see this as well.  Do you remember the first “Inside the Closet” with Gina?  Silfath and I are now re-visiting Gina’s closet for a blog post from a stylist’s perspective.  In order to take one piece of clothing from work day to evening cocktails, Silfath will often change the shoes.  So it’s okay to have different pairs of shoes for different events, and it’s okay to have different bras for different outfits.

Now back to the technical characteristics that make Prima Donna bras a good investment for your wardrobe:

  1. They have the features I discussed last week: fabric with a strong kickback, a leotard strap back, and butted seams.
  2. The concave underwire is coated in plastic and two layers of foam before being encased in the underwire channel.  This means you might not even notice it’s there, and you won’t have any renegade underwire poking out.  Interestingly, the underwires are flexible in such a way that they stretch as you put the bra on, but they hug your breasts once you’re wearing the bra.
  3. The ring that attaches the strap to the back is oval instead of round, so there’s a tight fit that keeps your strap from slipping around.  (I’ll post a picture of this later.)
  4. The cups are made of a fabric with extremely limited elasticity that is only horizontal, not vertical (so no sagging down).  Also in seamed bras, the cups are doubled with tulle or another non-elastic fabric inside to give you more lift.  Often, that fabric will have an additional seam.  In the Madison, for example, this essentially creates a four-part cup, even though it’s described as a three-part cup.
  5. The side panel in the seamed bras goes right up to the strap to really lift you up.
  6. Finally, most bras are created using an average of 22-25 pieces.  Prima Donna uses 52 pieces to create their bras.

I also asked Adrienne the question that Simona and I had that I wrote about on February 15:  Why is there  room at the bottom of the cups in our Prima Donna seamed bras?  She answered that because all breasts are different, not every breast is going to fill the entire cup of every bra all the time.  She also noted that no one bra is perfect for every woman.  For instance, where there is some hollowness below the strap because of loss of breast elasticity, she recommends Styles 016 1816 and 016 1817 instead of the Madison.  I noticed this hollowness in a friend’s bra recently, so I’m looking forward to getting her to investigate this solution.  Because of fit nuances like this, Prima Donna won’t sell in stores that don’t offer fittings.