1 April 2025 |
As the pendulum swings away from extreme hourglass silhouettes, a new wave of breast-reduction surgeries is serving as an unexpected means of fulfillment.
High fashion is the stuff of glamorous impossibility, with economic constraints alongside anatomical ones. Across the spring collections—sheer knit dresses at Gabriela Hearst, styled with only boots and briefs; Miu Miu’s one-piece bodysuits, each with a ribcage-baring cutout; ladylike blazers at Valentino, ribbon-tied at the navel to reveal a bare sternum—it was clear that the amply bosomed are often out of luck. “My earliest memories of fashion start with me drawing looks on cardboard, cutting them out, and making ‘fashion shows,’” Demna wrote in a note
shared with the press before the Balenciaga show, where models mirrored the paper dolls of his childhood: wafer-thin, dressed in their underpinnings. The lace demi- cup bras on view undoubtedly radiated more subversive energy than his boyhood designs, dreamed up at his grandmother’s table in Soviet Georgia. But a two- dimensional quality remained.
It’s both an age-old situation and of the moment. The new class of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, led by Ozempic, has whittled down celebrities in a hurry. The normalization of body modification, once epitomized by Kardashian-esque curves, is now seeing a counter shift, particularly across the chest. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), there has been a 64 percent increase in elective breast-reduction procedures since 2019. Deflation has arrived.
“Not only are we getting a ton more breast reductions, but the size that people want to be has changed,” says Melissa Doft, MD, a double board-certified plastic surgeon in Manhattan.“I’m getting a lot more ‘as small as possible’ B cups than ever before.” There are cases, she points out, where a reduction is deemed medically necessary; symptoms like back pain and postural issues persist as insurance companies determine eligibility for coverage by factoring in body surface area and the weight of excised breast tissue. “Then there are some people who just really want to be smaller,” Doft says, describing a cohort of patients under 30 and another in the ballpark of menopause. The goal, she says, is a “more lifted, thin silhouette, where their breasts are not defining them.”
The latest ASPS report points to a preference for a“ballet bust”—a stereotype that explains why dancers like Misty Copeland have, at times, struggled with rigid body standards. In a 2014 Self essay, published a year before her appointment as American Ballet Theatre’s first Black principal ballerina, Copeland flashes back to age 19, when she began taking the Pill to jump-start menstruation and saw her breasts swell practically overnight. “Usually, ballerinas share costumes since we have similar builds,” she writes. “But now the leotards had to be altered for me—with a sheer material added to cover my cleavage.” Such amplitude can be a psychological weight, not to mention “distracting,” as one ballerina recounted being told by a male director in a recent Dance Magazine interview. It can also be cumbersome for athletes, professional or otherwise: extra baggage some are happy to toss overboard.
Photograph courtesy of Francesco Zerilli/Zerillimedia/Science Photo Library
“I have sports titties now! Want to see?” the fashion photographer and avid surfer Cass Bird says over FaceTime on a recent winter afternoon, flashing two perfectly shaped handfuls, the faint anchor-shaped scars of a three-month- old operation still visible. Bird jokes that her breasts have been a “party trick” but also a physical load. “If I were to dance, I would move and then my boobs would follow. I want to be in rhythm, the whole body at once and not half a beat delayed.” Last fall, Bird found herself in Marfa, Texas, visiting with two friends who had both had reductions. Weeks later, she had her own with the Austin-based plastic surgeon Chuma Chike-Obi, MD. “I met three pairs of his work, and I was like, ‘Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely,’” Bird says. If the swollen aftermath gave her pause, it was fleeting. Now, when she’s paddling out to surf, her breasts no longer pile on the board. Blazers and button- downs don’t strain to close. “Removing two and a half pounds of titty makes me feel 15 pounds lighter.”
Such testimonials—frank, hopeful, mediated through screens—are undoubt- edly part of the breast-reduction wave. Before-and-after videos make the rounds on TikTok and YouTube, showing drai- nage tubes and stitches alongside the athleisure-clad results. “It’s about agency—taking control of something for yourself,” says Meredith Jones, PhD, a professor of gender and cultural studies at Brunel, University of London, whose podcast, The Beauty Chronicles, traces personal aesthetics through pop culture. Since the mid-1990s, cosmetic surgery has been an ongoing fascination for Jones, from medical tourism to the ever-evolving Kardashian silhouette. “We are really moving into a world of cosmetic surgery that’s much more like fast fashion, where there’s always something new,” she says— though the lightning-speed trend cycle is liable to outpace the healing times of surgery. “What you’ve got, almost as soon as you’ve got it, is out of fashion.”
Having been in private practice for more than 12 years in New York, Doft has seen these cycles come and go. “The big lips are out. The butt augmentation, out. The big breast implants, out,” she says, describing the surgical equivalent of being stuck with last season’s outdated jeans. But this moment feels different. “When so many of these young girls come in, their shoulders are curved, they’re wearing big blousy tops, their arms are folded,” she continues. “I saw a [post-op] patient the other day wearing this deep-neck, teeny sweater that was tight on her and she was just so happy.”
Personal transformation makes for good content, but the new feeling radiating through many of these narratives,especially the ones that make it onto social media, is weightless and centered and content, which in and of itself is empowering. “I always say, oversharing is underrated,” Bird says. “And I know, when other people are really generous with their experience, I feel held in that space.”
Taken from 10 Magazine USA Issue 04 – MUSIC, TALENT, CREATIVE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
