The Election Stressed Me Out So Much That I Bought 9 Bras, Part One

Yes, that’s right. I bought nine bras. I spent $134.65 on said bras, which isn’t bad for nine bras, but not great as far as necessity goes. I haven’t even worn a real bra since COVID started, back in March. But something happened during the week leading up to the election.

Forgive me for not feeling optimistic, but I didn’t see this going well. Trump had already conspired with a foreign government to cheat in the election, called Nazis “very fine people,” and locked babies in cages. He conspired with another foreign government to cheat in the last election, which he won, even though he lost by 3 million votes. I wasn’t terribly confident that we’d see a fair and democratic election.

So one day in mid-October I was musing on the idea of eventually wearing real clothes, and I wondered what bra I would wear with my current wardrobe. Of the three I had available, two were molded, foam-cup Maidenforms that are nice and smooth under T-shirts, but felt a little artificial, I guess. The third one was a T.J. Maxx special— a Rene Rofé bra in a pretty, unlined lace with textured roses. All three were just too big.

I thought about how I liked the unlined lace bra the best, and how that’s the bra I’d want to wear should I ever get dressed. I thought about how that bra was the last remaining Rene Rofé lace bra in my possession, and I thought about how much I’d always loved those bras. Every time I’d ever gotten changed in a backstage dressing room wearing one, people would compliment it, and ask where they could get one themselves. Smugly, I’d confide that they were $7 at T.J. Maxx. I’d been able to find them multiple times over the years (this was 15-20 years ago) and I never pondered the day when they’d disappear.

As my weight changed frequently and my entire wardrobe did too, I discarded or donated these bras when they didn’t fit. I’d just buy new ones when I needed them again. They didn’t come in plus sizes, though, so in recent years they weren’t on my radar. But a few years ago, I found this later incarnation of the bra—the “textured roses” one—at Marshall’s, and grabbed it in a 38C, hence the one remaining relic of a time gone by.

This “textured roses” version of the bra wasn’t as good as the original, though. The original ones were made of a smoother, almost cotton-like lace, and they looked really vintage. It was those bras I was thinking of when I began my online search. Little did I know how quickly my election anxiety would propel me into a frenzied attempt to hang onto the past— to hang onto those pre-Trump years I longed for.

I started out looking for new bras, but Rene Rofé has apparently devolved from making full-coverage vintage-style bras into creating the trashiest of trashy lingerie. “Crotchless” was a term that came up often when I searched the brand, and there was one striking number that was just a giant bow for one’s lucky suitor to unwrap on Christmas morning.

I did manage to find a newer, sleazier Rene Rofé bra on Zulily, a website where you have to give them your email address to even browse the site. Since I was really guessing as to what my current size would be, I didn’t take a chance on the last remaining 36B. I didn’t know if it would fit like my old favorite style anyway.

My subsequent googling led me to some old eBay listings where the bra had once been sold. I then discovered a now-defunct Amazon listing for a style very similar to the original. This one had a little hole in the center breastbone area, but it didn’t seem to sacrifice the integrity of the bra. This later incarnation was no longer available on Zulily or Amazon or anywhere else, but I had found some keywords and a style number to search: Sweet on You, and B15279. I started digging deeper.

I found the “textured roses” bra was also sold under the brand name “Sophie B,” and that both Rene Rofé and Sophie B shared the same RN number, 72409. By scanning hundreds of photos on Poshmark, I managed to track down some bras that fit the bill. Some were my favorite style—the original vintage-like lace one—some were the “textured roses” one, some were the “Sweet On You” style with the hole, and some were other styles by Rene Rofé that I didn’t recognize but that could have been similar.

I searched eBay. I searched Mercari. I searched “lace bra” on Poshmark and scrolled through hundreds more photos, positively identifying my bra on occasion. I found out that the brand was often not listed on the tags on these bras—only the style number. I was looking out for MOB1321 or B1321 for the original, B1421 for the “textured roses,” B15279 for the “Sweet On You.” I searched all sizes, just looking for everything that was out there, resolving to figure out sizing later. And I found them— more than I ever thought I would.

I eventually ordered the original version in black from eBay in a 34B. I knew there was no way this would fit me, but I felt the need to hoard it just in case my rib cage shrank from a 38 to a 34.

I spotted a mystery bra with different lace in a 38B that barely showed an RN number of 72409 when I zoomed in on one of the photos. I ordered that one, too. It was on Poshmark, listed only as “Sexy Black lace bra,” but I felt confident that it was worth a shot.

The election results started coming in, and it went exactly as expected. All the stupid COVID deniers had gone to the polls to get infected, and those were the results we heard about first—Trump was leading in way too many states. It didn’t look good. But I knew the mail-in ballots were coming from sane, intelligent people who abided by the COVID restrictions and stayed home. The more time went by, the more Biden votes were coming in. After days of nail-biting, Matt finally refreshed his screen on the New York Times website and we saw the headline: BIDEN BEATS TRUMP.

It wasn’t as great a relief as I’d expected. I still knew there would be criminal nonsense on the Republican side, and it would be a fight to allow democracy to prevail.

Minutes later, however, I was scrolling the “lace bra 38B” results on Poshmark and I found it: the original in beige, and the tag confirmed it— B1321. I bought “Pretty Ivory Lace Bra” immediately and was thrilled.

My frantic search for this older bra, one with structure and integrity, that offered comfort and admiration, had finally yielded results. And my longing for an older time, when the presidency meant something, when we had structure and integrity in our government, when we had the comfort of knowing our fate was in the hands of an admirable individual, was also fulfilled.

Matt and I sprang for a bottle of champagne from a delivery service and toasted to Biden’s first speech as the president-elect (don’t tell my psychiatrist—you’re not supposed to drink on this many meds). We felt hope that things might actually turn around.

But soon, I received a disappointing message. The seller of the perfect bra said that it wasn’t available, and she apologized for any inconvenience.

I wept. I literally sobbed over this news. I knew it was too good to be true, and that’s much the way I felt about the election. Trump had broken the law so many times that it no longer meant anything. What was to stop him from overriding the election?