Why women are going braless at work

By | February 11, 2020

Call it next-level business casual: Young women are ditching bras in the workplace.

“If my male co-workers don’t have to wear a bra, then neither do I,” Dayna Kathan, a new cast member on the Bravo show “Vanderpump Rules,” tells The Post.

Dayna Kathan
Dayna KathanChris Haston/Bravo

On a recent episode of the reality series, which follows servers and staff at the Los Angeles restaurant SUR, the 29-year-old raised eyebrows when she described bras as “breast prisons.”

“I remember coming home from my corporate job, and the second I got home I would unclasp my bra, like putting a key in the jail cell lock,” says Kathan, who would wear a size 34B.

Although she doesn’t think “bras are evil,” as she clarified in an Instagram post, Kathan hasn’t worn the undergarment since she was 26.

That includes at SUR, where her waitress uniform is — in a fellow SUR-ver’s words — a “thin,” “see-through” black body-con dress with the restaurant’s name splashed across the chest in gold.

Although Kathan’s colleagues seemed scandalized, NYC career coach Judith Gerberg says letting it all hang out at work is increasingly normal for women around Kathan’s age.

“Millennial women are much more self-confident than women used to be,” says Gerberg, who’s based in Midtown. She cites increasingly lax workplace dress codes as a driver of the trend, noting that even the famously formal Goldman Sachs has loosened up in recent years.

“Just like men aren’t wearing ties as part of their uniform, some women are forgoing bras,” Gerberg says.

Among those renegades is Bushwick resident Olivia Grizzle — a 25-year-old graphic designer who almost never bothers with underwire. Her bra-burning epiphany took place freshman year of college, when she went to a party without her usual 34B Victoria’s Secret pushup.

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“Everyone kept saying how much better I looked without the bra — like, ‘Your boobs look great!’ ” says Grizzle.

Olivia Grizzle
Olivia GrizzleTamara Beckwith/NY Post

Granted, that’s not exactly the goal in the workplace. But Grizzle tries to keep things covered up in the office with cardigans, turtlenecks and Theory blouses.

“I always have a scarf at my desk that I can put around myself” in case it gets cold, she says. Occasionally, she’ll “see people glance down” — but no one has ever verbally expressed discomfort.

The same goes for Allison Powell, a 24-year-old fashion buyer living in Hell’s Kitchen. She stopped wearing her 34B bra over the summer, and although she’s “the only one” on her team who routinely goes braless, she says nobody gives her shade for it.

“Because I work in the fashion industry, I feel like my expression in my outfit isn’t questioned as much as it would be in some offices,” she says.

But not all braless broads are so lucky — especially those who don’t reside in New York, where bralessness is protected by human-rights laws, which ban employers from “applying grooming or appearance standards that impose different requirements for people based on gender.”

“I can’t breathe in underwire. I feel ridiculous,” says health care professional Gabrielle Perry, 27. The epidemiology expert, who lives in New Orleans and is a size 40DDD, stopped wearing support to work in 2014. Still, she says she makes an effort to dress modestly, in button-downs and pencil skirts — but not conservatively enough for one former colleague, who told her she “dressed too sexy” for her line of work.

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Gabrielle Perry
Gabrielle PerryGabrielle Perry

“No clinic I’ve ever worked at or patient I’ve ever seen has said, ‘I’m so sick, and have all of these questions, but can you cover up your titties first?’” says Perry, who picks up her work staples from Target, 11 Honoré and ASOS.

Gerberg is surprised that Perry’s co-worker was bold enough to bring up her bralessness to her face.

In a post-#MeToo workplace, “most people would no longer, even if they noticed it, feel that they had any [right] to say something about it,” says Gerberg.

Still, that doesn’t mean they won’t silently judge you. If you’re considering going braless, make sure you read the room, she says. If you’re going to be interviewing at a start-up in Williamsburg where everybody wears jeans, you’re certainly going to dress more informally than if you were looking for a job at a white-shoe law firm.

The most important thing, she says, is to actually do your job well — and if an ill-fitting contraption is distracting you from that, well, best to just unclasp.

“Everything was cinched in, pinched and rubbing my shoulders,” says Powell, reflecting on her wrapped-up days at the office. “I don’t know how I did it for so long.”

Living | New York Post