Au Naturelle

Going braless in France is all about comfort, not sex appeal

Content Warning:

This article is about Breasts. Boobs. Bosoms. Ta-tas. There might even be a mention of nipples. You get the idea. If it makes you feel weird or uncomfortable to read about this particular part of the female anatomy, then I am sorry for you, and I encourage you to move on to a nice recipe blog. Don’t act like I didn’t warn you.

All my journalistic instincts, combined with four years of walking around France looking at everybody, have led to the conclusion that more French women go braless than US women.

Summertime has definitely been the best season to explore this theory because no one is hiding their chest beneath a winter coat or – this being France – a scarf the size of a duvet. I’ve also been to the beach a bit lately and can say with some authority that the corollary to bralessness – toplessness – also seems to be a healthy trend.

I wish I had a second opinion to back me up on this, but every time I ask Don about it he swears he hasn’t noticed.

Here’s the deal, though: In spite of what you might think, bralessness in France is not necessarily a sexy thing. How do I know? I can just tell. You know when someone is wearing – or not wearing – something to draw attention to themselves as sexually desirable. This often involves a slouchy, off-the-shoulder top they have to keep fiddling with, a mini skirt, and slinky high-heeled shoes pretending to be made out of leather.

That is not what French bralessness is like.

A braless French woman on her way to work is not trying to be any more erotic than the guy using the urinal I have to pass on my way to the stall in a restaurant bathroom. She’s not purposely drawing attention to her boobs. She’s not weaponizing her nipples to attract the male gaze. She just isn’t wearing a bra, kind of like her BCBG male colleague who chose not to wear socks with those loafers.

My impression is that French women don’t feel the need to push-up, squish down, pad, shape or stick a wire under their boobs. In fact, they don’t seem to be paying that much attention to them at all. Their breasts could just as well be their neck or wrist, looking fine with or without a gold chain wrapped around it.

What makes this a bit of a struggle for me to comprehend is that I was raised in a country obsessed with monitoring and legislating everybody’s private parts. Remember that huge conniption over Janet Jackson’s nipple-slip “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime Show?

Conversely, this woman is the symbol of France:

A braless Liberty Leading the People, by Eugène Delacroix

As much as I’d like to just toss my braless theories out here, wrap them up with a few clever boob puns, then carry on with my day, I’m an old-timey reporter who needs to find some solid facts to back stuff up.

Here’s all I could come up with:

A 2020 study found that 18 percent of French women under 25 never wear a bra. It’s important to note that these statistics were gathered after months of Covid confinement, during which the women surely discovered the comfort of padding around their apartments with their boobs unencumbered. Before the pandemic, only 4 percent of those under 25 years old were braless.

Nearly twice as many French women of all ages said they have ditched a bra at least once in their lives.

It’s worth taking a closer look at that study, if only for the fabulous graphics:

The “No Bra” Boom: An enduring trend or a passing fad?” is a 2020 study conducted by the IFOP survey group.

I didn’t find any investigations comparing the percentage of braless French to American women, but I did find a 2023 analysis showing that most American women (61 percent), wear a bra most days. As you’d expect, older women tended to wear one more often than younger women.

Vogue magazine also addressed the topic of the so-called #FreeTheNipple movement. (This was in 2017, so hashtagging stuff in headlines was cool back then.) One person they interviewed was a French journalist named Sabina Socol, who they described – apparently without cringing – as “curvaceous.” Socol said she grew up without attaching any sexuality or taboo to going braless.

“I never liked wearing bras; I always felt suffocated in them,” Socol told Vogue. “Even as a woman with breasts, I do what I want with my body. Every human has nipples. There shouldn’t be any shame [in showing them], but if you want to hide them, that’s okay, too, as long as the choice is yours.”

Aside from her belief that visible nipples are nothing to be ashamed of, Socol was primarily motivated by how uncomfortable bras are. Poll results I found backed that up: The majority of French women cited comfort as the main reason for foregoing a bra. That response was nearly identical for American women.

Seventeen percent of French women, however, said they go braless to free themselves from “the norms imposed on female bodies and breasts.” That might be a bit tougher to do than simply unhooking a brassiere. I’m thinking, for example, of combatting the pervasive image of the thin, sexy French woman walking around in lacy underwear while smoking a cigarette and singing, “Je t’aime... moi non plus.” It also strikes me as weird how Americans adopted a complete misrepresentation of a common French exclamation of irritation or disbelief (Oh, la la!) and turned it into a throaty utterance with a, “What a sexy negligee” vibe (Oooh, la la!).

We have French kissing, French maid costumes, French mistresses, the enduring stereotype of the philandering French husband. And let’s not forget the ultimate MeToo poster boy, Pepé Le Pew.

When you dig down into the statistics, however, you learn that only 10 percent of French women said they go braless to seem sexier. So back off Pepé.