FASHIONS don’t just come and go in clothes. They change in boobs, too.
Love Island star Anna Vakili has revealed she is furious with herself for giving in to the trend for having giant breasts seven years ago, taking her from a B cup to an E.
She told The Sun: “Pre-surgery, my boobs were actually perfect. But I was easily influenced and made a stupid mistake.
“From the clips I saw of myself on Love Island, my boobs looked too big on screen. They were popping out.”
So how have boob styles changed and why?
From bullet-bras to bee-stings and the craze for giant breast implants, Fabulous charts the shifting trends, decade by decade.
As women needed to step in and join the war effort, corsets were now finally ditched in favour of separate bras, which made it easy to do heavy work.
At first these were made in a spiral which made them so cone-shaped they were known as ‘bullet’ bras.
In 1943, eccentric tycoon and film-maker Howard Hughes also invented the underwire bra to make movie star Jayne Russell’s breasts more prominent in “The Outlaw.”
With so many soldiers away from home, postcards and calendars of pin-up girls dressed only in underwear to boost morale also became common.
Now breasts were portrayed as a desirable asset, women compared their chests more and were more likely to try to conform to the ‘ideal’ they saw in pictures: full, high and pointy.
The launch of Playboy as mass market magazine for ‘gentleman’ featuring topless pin-up style pictures of Marilyn Monroe in 1953 put women’s breasts in view like never before.
Now that nude sexualised pictures of females had entered the mainstream, women become more self-conscious about their bra size, leading to the invention of ‘falsies’, pads stuffed down the bra to make boobs look bigger.
Plunging neck-lines, as worn by Hollywood stars, were too risqué for most women.
So instead the style was to wear tight round-necked jumpers over conical-shaped bras, accentuated with tight belts and pencil skirts, leading to the term ‘sweater girl.’
Before this decade, doctors had experimented with injecting everything from animal fat to paraffin into women’s breasts to see if it would permanently make them bigger, with disastrous results.
But it was not until 1962, when two Texan surgeons gave Timmie Jean Lindsay, 30, the first silicon implant to boost her size from a B to C cup, that the modern boob job was born.
But no sooner had the surgery been shown to be successful, than there was a sudden turn-around in the view of what the perfect breast should look like.
With all eyes on England as the birthplace of the Beatles, the arrival of 16-year-old model Twiggy, dubbed “The Face of 1966’, created a taste for a more boyish silhouette, which was also championed by the most influential dress designer of the decade, Mary Quant.
By now, rising numbers of women were taking the contraceptive pill, especially after the 1974 decision that it could be given to unmarried females too.
The effect wasn’t only to allow women more control over their sex lives but also to increase the size of their busts.
Experts say high doses of the synthetic oestrogen they contained, which stimulated the milk ducts in the breasts to expand, contributed to the average bust size in Britain rising from 34B to 34C, according to researchers at Portsmouth University.
It was an increase also reflected in the pages of The Sun, which published its first Page Three on November 17, 1970.
At the same time, pointed, structured bras, like the Playtex Cross Your Heart bra, which promised to ‘lift and separate’, were also seen as a symbol of male control, with feminists urging women to burn them.
It led to models often showcasing smaller, more pert breasts, particularly in fashion magazines, where taller, angular body types were most in vogue.
Better nutrition and more food choice meant the average woman’s breast size had now soared to a 34D.
And in the decade of: ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it’, implants made a return to mimic the full-rounded ‘bouncy’ breasts of TV stars like Pamela Anderson in Baywatch.
At the time surgeons were inserting the implants via a small incision under the areola and then inserting a tear-shaped silicone bag containing a plastic gel or saline that was moulded into shape.
However scares about the gel leaking out meant they were soon to be replaced with more pliable saline versions.
Because these did not keep their shape as well, they were made in a circular shape, which made them sit higher in the chest and more obvious.
Kate Moss burst onto the modelling scene at the age of 19 in 1993, in a see-through dress showing her smaller A cup breasts and heralding a new era of ‘waif’ chic.
But while being flat-chested was de-rigueur for the fashion pack, at the other end of the scale, the growing trend for boob jobs that started in the US in the Eighties was now hitting the UK.
However for those who still couldn’t afford the £4500 surgery, there was the WonderBra.
In 1994, model Eva Herzigova was said to literally stop traffic with posters of her looking down at her compressed boobs in one of the garments, under the headline: ‘Hello Boys.’
The same year Liz Hurley also brought the nation to a standstill by wearing a cleavage-revealing Versace safety pin dress.
In this era, consultant plastic surgeon Fulvio Urso-Baiarda of Berkshire’s Eterno 360 Clinic says having a breast enhancement was still very much a ‘status symbol’. “It was important that it was obvious you’d had one.”
The trend for round firm implants to be placed under the muscle, as well as over, also meant they could look very high and circular, especially on thinner women.
Mr Urso-Baiarda added: “The growing trend for round implants to be placed OVER the muscle, as well as under, in order to avoid compressing them, also meant they could look very high and circular, especially on thinner women, like Victoria Beckham.
As Katie Price started having the repeat operations which took her breasts from a 32B to a 32FF, women were starting to fall for the idea that getting bigger boobs was an easy option.
In 2006, experts estimated there were around 20,000 breast augmentations performed, a huge rise of a third in one year alone, according to The Times.
The operation was also normalised by cosmetic surgery reality TV shows like ‘Extreme Makeover’ which showed dramatic transformations.
By now , it wasn’t just implants that accounted for the average size of the British boob now rising to a buxom DD, according to Dr Nicola Brown of the University of Portsmouth.
By now the average woman was now two stone heavier than a century earlier and one in three women were overweight.
According to Dr Brown: “Breasts are primarily made up of fatty tissue, so it’s logical to think that, if a woman’s fat levels are increased overall, her breast size will increase.”
However by the end of the decade, it seemed the breast implant bubble was beginning to burst.
Figures from the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, who said the number of breast augmentations dropped 20 per cent in 2017 alone.
Celebs like Victoria Beckham were also talking openly about how they’d removed their larger implants which she now jokily referred to as her ‘bazookas’.
The result was that by the end of the decade, surgeon Fluvio Urso-Baiarda says his patients were asking for a more natural look.
He said: “Breast implants were no longer cool per se.
“Instead of showing me pictures of women they wanted to look like, women told me they wanted to look like themselves, but without the padded bra they usually lived in.”
By the start of this decade, This Morning’s Holly Willoughby was voted the women with most enviable boobs in a poll by Ultimo beauty, because they are so natural and in proportion to her body,
Meanwhile Kate Price’s, once widely admired for her assets, was judged to have the worst.
Indeed, gone are the days when ‘Bigger was always considered better,’ says consultant plastic surgeon Fulvio Urso-Baiarda.
He says: “We’re now hitting a generation of women who have had breast implants, maybe had them replaced once or twice, and now feel it’s time to do away with them but still want to look great.
“This has led to new treatments like the vegan boob job, so named because your own fat, usually from an area like your thighs, to give perkiness and volume.
“The combination of a slimmer tummy or thighs, fuller breasts and natural perkiness is one that’s hard not to love”.
We shared how a student with natural 34J boobs crowdfunds for reduction op because her breasts knock over pints.
And woman with 40I boobs that hit her in the face during sex claims her life has been transformed after reduction surgery.
