Heya! Do you have a moment to talk about the kind of fabric you used to make these prototypes? I know that, for the sake of ease and accessibility, they’re adapted sports bras, and the material looks sort of t-shirty. I’ve made corsets before and they usually take really stiff material, like the canvas in the chest part of my binder. Do you have any thoughts on how the stretchiness vs stiffness of the fabric affects this garment?

I think the ideal binder would be half stiff and half stretch. The waist of a corset is trying to cinch in a column of muscle, which is very difficult, so of course you want to bring all the force possible with stiff fabric and boning. However, the upper chest is a very different affair, because the ribcage is very solid and should not be compressed very much, while the chest we want to flatten is easily-squishable fat.

Although humans can make our stomachs expand when we breathe, as in diaphragmatic breathing, this isn’t strictly necessary. Our lungs are in our chests, and it’s mostly the ribcage that expands when we breathe. Traditional corsetry compresses the waist but allows the chest to expand, and the traditional result of an expanding chest and a non-expanding corset has been the “heaving bosoms” of great lore: The breasts push against the corset and rise up because there is no more room for them inside the garment.

However, this is not something we want with a binder. We want the breast tissue to already be pressed flat. Therefore, it needs somewhere else to go. I think that failing to give the ribcage enough room to expand accounts for a lot of the pain and breathing problems non-stretch binders cause. So I’d say that the front half of a binder would do a lot better if it could easily stretch out a few inches so its wearer could breathe without the chest trying to rearrange itself.

The biggest problem I’ve found so far with my current binder model is that the elastic becomes overstretched in the back, causing the entire garment to become baggy and loose. Ideally, the back half of the garment would be non-stretch, just accommodating the shape of the ribcage without trying to exert much pressure on it. (In wearing similar garments I’ve found that a little light boning in the back makes it more comfortable, but isn’t 100% necessary.)

So if I were making a completely new garment from scratch, I’d use two different materials for the front and back. The back, non-stretch version would be fitted with the chest expanded, and then the stretch version would easily provide compression, but not so much that its wearer can’t breathe deeply. And less compression is necessary if the garment is boned than if it isn’t.