I designed this tank for women my mother's size. (And mine.)

The first thing my mother did when she walked through our front door, every evening of my childhood, was unhook her bra under her blouse and pull it out through the sleeve. She would exhale as the band came off. I used to watch her do it from the kitchen table and think it was something all mothers did.

My mother is a 34G. My grandmother was a 36H. I am a 32F on a good month. The three of us have never stopped laughing about the inherited problem of the chest, and we have never stopped being quietly angry that nothing in forty years of our combined bra-wearing has solved it.

I started designing this tank in 2021 because I realised that nobody who was designing for women our size had actually asked us what we wanted.

Why nothing in my mother's drawer was built for her.

Walk through any mall and look at the bra section. The display mannequin is a B-cup. The construction grammar on the shelf — the thin band, the single-ply cup, the quarter-inch strap — is the grammar of a bra designed for a B-cup chest and then scaled up with more elastic until the engineering stops working.

At a G cup, the elastic band has to be twice as tight to hold the same amount of weight. At a G cup, a quarter-inch strap digs a trench in the trapezius inside ninety days. At a G cup, a conventional underwire creates enough leverage on the ribcage to leave a bruise.

None of this is because larger-busted women are unreasonable to engineer for. All of it is because the design grammar on the shelf was never ours.

Three years, thirty-two prototypes, one tank.

The answer, after thirty-two prototypes, is a tank — not a bra. The whole garment holds the chest. The shaped cups are stitched into the lining of a modal-cotton body, which distributes the weight across the full upper torso instead of two strap-and-band pressure points. The straps anchor; they do not bear.

This matters more at a DD than at a B. A 2-inch strap on a B cup is cosmetic. A 2-inch strap on a G cup is the entire support system. If the strap is bearing the full weight, you get the trench. If the garment is bearing the weight, the strap just has to hold the fabric in place.

What a tank built for us does differently.

At the end of the day, when you take it off, there is no red groove where the strap was. There is no horizontal pink line across your mid-back where the band was. There is no indentation where the wire pressed against the sternum. There is, honestly, almost no mark that you were wearing a garment at all.

You can sleep in it. You can wash it hot. You can wear it under a t-shirt and not see cup gape, which has been the thing most of my mother's friends told me they wanted most, and the thing nobody has been able to give them.

I am writing this letter because I believe we are tired of the industry's assumption that we are the problem to be reinforced instead of the customer to be designed for.