It’s official. The summer of 2008 is all about cleavage. There hasn’t been a heat wave, flood or hurricane, Big Brother is boring, Glastonbury didn’t rock any boats and England weren’t at Euro 2008. So, the nation has filled the hole left by the absence of a single galvanising event with an awful lot of tit talk.

We gasped in awe at Helen Mirren’s magnificent, sixtysomething bikini-clad bosom, emerging from the sea like the proud bow of a ship – she has now graduated from national treasure to national treasure chest. We were scandalised by Sienna Miller flaunting bare-naked bee-stings while on holiday with her married boyfriend. And we worried that Jordan’s ever-morphing mammaries would get in the way of her Olympic dressage dream.

Nothing lifts and separates Brits more than breasts and how they are dressed. Big or little, it’s how you wear them that counts. For some, cleavage is a good thing. (Kelly Brook has made a career out of hers.) How else do you explain the popularity of the new boob jab?

This year’s most talked about plastic-surgery procedure involves injecting breasts with the filler Macrolane. Less invasive than a boob job, it will plump up those puppies by an extra cup size, costs about £3,000 and lasts for up to 18 months.

For others, however, mammaries mean trouble. Royal Ascot banned cleavage and visible bra straps in a bid to raise the tone of the event. Even the downturn in sales at Marks & Spencer’s was blamed, by ageing shareholders at the AGM, on too many cleavage- revealing dresses. The company’s boss, Stuart Rose, was attacked by the pressure group Busts 4 Justice after it emerged that the store charged £2 extra for bras with a cup size over DD. The group now has nearly 6,500 members, all agitating for equal treatment of large-breasted women. “It’s bigger than M&S. It’s about the whole high street. We are a market force, and they should respect us,” says Beckie Williams, the 25-year-old founder of the pressure group. “In the past, large-breasted women have accepted poor service and bad design. There’s enough of us now to demand more. We should be treated better.”

She’s right: thanks to boob jobs, boob jabs and the general increasing size of women, there have never been more big breasts. (The average UK bust size has risen from 34B to 36C in less than a decade.) So the question of display has never been more pressing.
[...more...]
- Source: Claudia Croft, The Sunday Times, Aug. 3, 2008