Just when I think I've written everything there is to know about bra cups, dresses, and how larger busted people can make this work for them, I find out there's things I just haven't written down... anywhere. 

A lady in a bra sewing group/forum asked about putting cups from her fitted bra pattern into a formal dress that she's wearing to a wedding. Lots of people either sew bras, or sew garments, but not many (that give advice in these groups/forums) do both.  Hopefully this will shed some light on the situation for my sewists and also for our clients who think tape 😳 is their only alternative. [I do NOT recommend that, at all... especially over a certain bra size because it's next to impossible to get the shape correct, let alone what it will do to your skin later. Don't do it!]

Not all dresses come with enough structure to sew a bra (or bra cups) into the dress. My favorite analogy: If you're going to hang a shelf on the wall and you plan to put a TV and stereo components on that shelf that weighs 50-75 pounds, then you're probably going to put the screws for your brackets into the studs, not just the sheet rock. If you have a small decorative shelf and you're going to put a lightweight figurine on the shelf, you might be able to get away with putting the bracket straight into the sheetrock, or putting in drywall anchors. 

The same is true of dresses, bras and bra cups, and getting your anatomy to be supported by them. The more of the dress that is "cut away" for the sake of sexiness, the less structure you have to hold the weight of your chest into an appropriate location in the dress. Generally, I don't recommend these styles for larger busted people, but we have some tricks up our sleeve for those situations too. [Another post for another time.]

I found this fantastic image from reddit and it's a gorgeous inner corselette to provide the necessary structure. Essentially it's a corset sewn into a dress to hold the dress up. src

Here's another image with a similar inner corset built into the dress. src

You might be thinking... "I don't want to have a whole dang corset added to my dress... that seems a bit ridiculous." For most dresses, you won't need quite this much structure added. Here's a dress we had a while back, and you can see that it has boning in similar locations as the corset dresses above, so we didn't need to add boning to this dress. 

In this particular dress, we were able to simply stitch the bra at the side seams because of the boning and underwire the bra had and how well the circumference of the dress supported the bra once it was attached at the sides. Most dresses, we also stitch the top of the bra cup to the princess seam boning to help hold things up. 

If a dress doesn't have boning in it, but it is lined, then we don't build a whole extra corset layer, we simply install boning in all the locations you see in the green dress or in the photo below:

[UPDATE: I am not sure where I found this photo on the internet, but here's an excellent example of a structure layer that will be added to a garment. For my sewing friends that make dresses from scratch, you can cut out an extra lining layer of a dress and sandwich it between the layer that touches your skin and the fashion fabric on the outside.]

Sometimes the dress can be super stretchy and the boning and bra cups aren't enough to keep the bust from slithering down behind/below the bra. In those cases, we  take a measurement of the ribcage at it's smallest point and sew a non-stretch ribbon to each piece of boning, so that it will hook behind the zipper, like the green dress above. 

Hopefully that's helpful to my sewing friends for how to build a bra into a dress, and for my potential clients, this is why I ask you to bring a bra, even when the dress is backless, because this is what we do to the front and the lining.

I often get asked about the price of alterations versus the price of the dress, but the reality is, you can't buy a dress that has all the elements in it at the price point at which they sell bridesmaid dresses.  The dresses pictured above are by high end designers and most likely cost thousands of dollars. If you buy a dress for $150 and we put $350 dollars worth of work into it (depending on all the other elements that may need fixing) you end up with a tailored, custom fit dress with high end couture elements worth thousands of dollars, for a total of $500. I can't even buy the fabrics to make it for that price (typically).

Thanks for reading, I will update with more photos the next time I need to install one of these ribbons, so you can see what I mean. 

Topics in this post: #ResourcesForOurBrides, #AlterFormalwear, #FoundationalGarments

Kristen sews because clothes don't come shaped like humans and people often think their bodies are the problem, which is a problem.

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