An uplifting experience: ‘Bra lady’ would retire, but women keep calling

Illa Brawdy can see you across the aisle at the grocery store and know you’re wearing the wrong brassiere.

Illa can watch you walk across the parking lot and know your underwire jabs you, your back aches from the weight, your straps dig into your shoulders and leave them red and raw at the end of the day. Illa knows you rip off your bra as soon as you can — sometimes in the car on the way home.

Illa knows you won’t find the bra you need at Walmart, at Victoria’s Secret, at a mall department store. Illa knows you’ve been wearing the wrong size for years, maybe decades.

You may not even know that yourself; many women don’t. But, after nearly 50 years, Illa knows.

An unexpected career

To the women who come to Illa Brawdy, her knack for fitting them with a bra is a gift.

To Illa, it’s a skill honed over five decades of a career she never expected to have.

Until she was in her 30s, Illa worked as a legal secretary, “and I loved it,” she said. In 1968, she and husband Don, an insurance claims manager and adjuster, moved to Tennessee so he could manage an office. She worked briefly at the University of Tennessee, then quickly found a job in a law office.

That’s what she was doing when a friend in Alabama called her about custom-fitted bras. She’d just gotten one and wanted Illa to get fitted, too. The company measured Illa as a 30K and sent her a sample. It was perfect.

“This was like a miracle,” she said. “Whoever heard of a K cup?”

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of companies made and sold custom-fit bras. It was common for their representatives, trained by the companies, to host “bra parties” during which they could measure women for bras that would fit them exactly. Illa became a consultant, hosting parties in the morning while her three children were in school and in the evenings when Don could watch the children.

Initially, she was intimidated by the intimacy of bra fitting, and by the number of bras the company sent her to sell. The women’s reactions cured her of that.

“They’d say, ‘I always thought I was flat-chested,’ but this bra brought them forward and put them where they belonged,” she said. “So they loved the way they looked in them.”

The gift of a good fit

Illa soon left the secretary business behind. She and Don converted the two-car garage under their then-home on Brown Gap Road in Halls into a shop, with a waiting room, office, dressing room and stockroom for her inventory. She did parties. She kept regular shop hours. She learned to fit women for mastectomy forms and got a Medicare provider number so Medicare could bill her. She even stocked some other items: lingerie, girdles, gowns.

For the first few decades, it was all about the custom-fit companies. Illa had her favorites: Colesce Couture, which made Cameo and Jeunique bras with a cup that unhooked at the top and a wide support band. Tender Loving Care, founded by two brothers. Jane Ette, an Arizona company that made full-coverage bras.

But over the years, custom-fit bras fell out of fashion, and they became less and less available. Illa’s favorite company, Alexandria, Tennessee-based Norvell, went out of business in 2008; its founder, who began sewing bras at her kitchen table when she was 27 years old, died last year.

For the past decade or so, Illa has ordered bras from larger cities — Elila being one of her favorite brands — or from Europe, for those who want something more luxurious.

But she fits customers just as carefully.

“If it doesn’t fit you, you can’t have it, because I guarantee my fit,” Illa said.

By special-ordering, she can fit from bands to those 54 inches around, from an A cup to N, “as in ‘No, no, Nanette!’ ” Illa said with a smile.

She has stories: Women who come in thinking they’re an A cup, thinking they’re flat-chested because they’ve never been properly fitted. Women who need a cup size in the middle of the alphabet — J, K, L — but have worn too-small DDs for their entire adult lives because that’s the largest size they could find. Women whose cups bunch with extra fabric because they can’t find the right-size cup with the right-size band in the store.

When she puts them in a bra that fits, and their posture improves, and their bra doesn’t hurt, sometimes they just gape at the mirror. Sometimes they jump up and down in excitement. Sometimes, they cry.

“They’ve never had a bra that fit,” Illa said.

And, she said, they finally feel pretty. They’d resigned themselves to sturdy, beige, workhorse bras. Suddenly, there are patterns and colors and lace available — in their sizes.

Most become repeat customers. Many bring her their daughters — or their mothers.

Illa even fit her own mother, in her later years — a woman who spent Illa’s childhood wearing a binder to flatten and disguise her breasts, because having them noticeable was “immoral.”

“She’d never realized what a bra could do for her,” Illa said. “My mother wore a 42J.”

Women should be refitted if they gain or lose weight; during pregnancy; after giving birth; and as they begin to age and lose tone and density in their breasts, Illa said.

She’s now fit women of almost every size. She hasn’t yet fit a man in the process of transitioning to a woman, “that I know of,” but her deep-held religious convictions and devotion to her church wouldn’t keep her from doing so.

“I’m not here to judge people,” she said. “I’m here to help people.”

A dying art, but still in demand

Illa first tried retiring in the late 1990s. She trained a mother-daughter team, who then opened their own shop, and sold them a lot of her inventory.

But after a few years, they closed.

So she restocked and stayed open.

Neither of her two daughters was interested — “This isn’t their cup of tea,” Illa said — and a granddaughter who thought about carrying on the tradition opted for another profession.

Other bra shops opened, then closed. Illa’s customers kept coming — some from as far away as Kentucky and Alabama.

Finally, four years ago — eight years after Don had retired and started bugging Illa to do likewise — the Brawdys downsized to a smaller house with no shop. Illa stopped stocking inventory and turned in her Medicare provider number. She told her customers she was retiring. She kept only a few bras, in hard-to-find sizes.

She stopped advertising in the newspaper. She didn’t list herself in the Yellow Pages.

And, still, the phone rang.

“They said, ‘But I’ve never gone to anybody else!’ ” Illa said. “And I said, ‘Well, come on.’ ”

At 82 years old, Illa is “semiretired,” she said. She sees customers by appointment only, and in a small sitting room in her home, not a shop. She orders items on demand rather than stocking them. She still does fittings for David’s Bridal, but on her schedule. She allows plenty of time to take her husband, 85, to various medical appointments, to travel with him to church conventions, to enjoy her family and life.

“If I want to go to the mountains one day, I just take off,” she said. Though she expected to be retired by now, “I feel very, very fortunate to have the health that I do.”

She’s still hoping to find someone to train to carry on her calling, to teach the detailed measurements, the delicate balance of hands-on moving of breast tissue to the right place without making a customer uncomfortable.

“I’m a people person, and I love what I do,” Illa said. “I love to serve. … It’s a challenge to me. There’s nothing I like better than to take that weight off a lady and give her a perfect fit.”

Some weeks back, Illa was shopping and saw a woman in the store weighed down with extremely heavy breasts and an ill-fitting bra. She debated approaching her, then hesitated: “I didn’t want to embarrass her.”

But then, walking to her car, she saw the same woman loading the car next to her. It was fate: Illa forged ahead.

“I saw you inside, and my heart just went out to you,” Illa told her, handing her a card.

“Come see me sometime. I can help you.”