Bullet Bra Blogging

Google Reader alerts me to blog updates from a rich variety of sites of different types. Me, I follow quite a few fashion and foundation garment commentators. As a part time cross dresser, I have much to learn, and a lot of catching up to do knowledge-wise. Yeah, and the pictures are pretty, I must confess. I have followed Tomima (pron. toe-MY-mah) Edmark, the proprietress of HerRoom.com for some time now. Tomima’s own blog (linked here) is typically pretty rich in tips and tricks to finding the right underwear and getting the most out of them. Really informative stuff.

Her post today had a little reference to cross dressing that moved me to write a little note to her. I am all about recycling and so I thought I would kill two birds with one stone here by sharing the conversational volleys so far. I hope the discussion continues. Take a minute to read the post if you can. And then do come back here love, would you? Here is a short summary to save you the trip:

1. Cone shape bras are showing up on runways. 2. This silhouette always appears in troubled economic times. 3. Women will not welcome this – too, too unpractical. 4., and lastly, I will quote directly from Tomima (italics, mine):

...That said, we do get phone calls every once in a while asking which bras we carry at HerRoom that give a pointed silhouette. And, I will tell you that most calls asking this are from men who like to wear ladies lingerie. But, if you happen to like this silhouette, the Fantasie Belle 6010 and Goddess Longline 689 are two good choices. ...

Interesting reference I thought. My comment here:

A terrific and welcomed post. Yes I have been seeing some of the same silhouettes and breathless commentary about bullet bras from the commentariat, and have a couple of thoughts on the matter.

The designers who start the trends tumbling downhill surely into our closets are motivated in part by doing something different than last year. Change being at the heart of creativity. Change is clearly at the heart of commerce too I suppose. From short to long and back, from natural to de-natured and back, from round and soft to hard and angular and back we go and hope we can find a good parking spot at the mall.

Bullet bras and the resulting Russell-esque shapes will be seen in greater numbers for a while yes, but I suspect always near cameras and stages, catwalks and nightclubs. Boudoirs too I suppose for women and men both who like a little playful time and perhaps have a sense of nostalgia for an era they missed barely or by decades. God bless the girlfriends and wives who are willing to humour their spouses for a few uncomfortable hours.

I suspect that most of the men that inquire of your personnel about conical brassieres are possessed a little by that nostalgia, and perhaps a desire to feature the campier and less flattering aspects of “drag”, rather than the sincerely admiring and envious “femulations” undertaken by the vast majority of periodic cross dressers.

Speaking as one of the sincere latter, the search for comfort, support and prettiness remains paramount. I look for bras that contain my breast forms well, and disappear beneath my dresses leaving only the most setting appropriate and flattering figure lines up front. The experience of cross dressing is for many, if not most, the experience of blending in and being. Not standing out and being seen.

Thanks, sincere thanks, for your many blog posts. They have helped me be a smarter consumer of foundation garments of all types. Any time you have any thoughts or advice for the studious cross dresser or committed transgender, I would love to see them here. I can assure you that a surprising number of your current readers will be happy to see themselves respectfully addressed.

Fond regards

Again, a fine and educational blog, highly recommended. If I see anything catering to the CD/TG audience there, I will let you know here.

But tell me friends .. bullet bras? Yes or no. Leave a comment,

Happy dressing.

A Cross Dressers personality

In prior posts (here, there, and o yeah, over here too) I have spoken about The Gender Analyzer. The Gender Analyzer is a piece of web gadgetry that makes an educated guess as to the gender of the author of a blog by examining the language used and how its put together.

I was typically a little delighted with “fooling” the machine, but more delighted by confirming my own feelings of, and pride about what I believe to be a healthy mix of gender characteristics in my outlook on life. Gender Analyzer said at different times that it had a 68%, 74%, and most recently, an 82% degree of certainty that Voyages en Rose was written by a woman. Nice.

Staci-Lana of Femulate (86%, go Staci!) directed me to another tool/toy from some people that use the same technology as The Gender Analyzer, over at uclassify.com. Amongst the tools at this site is something called the Typealizer. Typealizer does a lot of the same things in terms of analyzing the writing for “tells” about the gender of the author, but it goes a step or two further.

It goes in fact into the same territory as those personality typing tests that many of us have may have doddled through on the way to winning a job, or to addressing somebody in HR’s concern that we are perhaps doing the wrong one. Job that is. Ah yes. Personality typing. One of the grand-daddies is the Myers-Briggs. Not too far in the shadows is the Keirsey. There are countless others, but these, I am familiar with, and there is a Keirsey outcome in this post.

I have thought, in the past, when taking such tests that I was driving repeatedly past the same building having taken four left turns to get back where I started. And having forgotten how I answered the seemingly same question the first, and second time around. It always seemed to me that these exercises are a better test of whether you have control over your sweat glands and blush response than they are determinative of ones personality, but I am happy to cede to the professionals what they profess to know. There must be something in all the smoke and mirrors.

So imagine my delight at being able to take the test without a career hanging in the balance, and even better, minus all the sweaty and blushy bits. Simple as popping the Voyages en Rose URL into a box, and in less time than it takes to buff a nail, presto:

ESFP – The Performers. More on that in a moment, but first off, I love that they got my fashion sense right and placed me in my natural environment. An attractively dressed young thing with fine taste in boots and a bubbly beverage held happily on a bar. Bullseye! I love these people.

The language used to summarize my type follows:

ESFP = The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to
pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics,
bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don’t like
to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves. They enjoy work
that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They
tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can
make it hard for them in management positions.

Hmmm. Killing me softly, with their code, telling my whole life, on their site, killing me softly, with their code. They just get better by the minute. The observation on management is really trenchant.

I have quite pointedly pursued work that gave me as much responsibility for outcomes as I could handle, with the absolute minimum responsibility for the well-being and productivity of direct reports, otherwise known as people.

People are a daunting responsibility. I take it very seriously when responsible for a persons career track and general happiness in the workplace. I get better at it with time and practice, but its about the only aspect of my work life that I have constant second thoughts about. I truly worry that I over-said this, or under-stressed that. Some people call it throttle-control, which I sometimes took to mean controlling the urge to throttle a co-worker, but turns out to be about the even, constant and predictable application of force against an objective. Ah well, clearly this ESFP bar-fly has much to learn.

Further into the analysis, and with a familiar hand on my thigh, our newish friends at Uclassify lean in close and share some sweet uttering’s on the very workings of the pink fluff between my ears. Pictured here:

This visual happily sorts well with how I think my brain works. You will note an overcompensation to the lower left quadrant. Order, habit, detail, all of the things I focus on, perpetually, to sort out the otherwise busy jumble of impulses that I am besieged by when not mindful of my, well, my mind. Resolute concentration on how things are and fit together help me get along reasonably well in the face of my own self-diagnosed case of CDADHD. That would be Cross Dressers Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

In any event, if you blog, go ahead and learn something about yourself here. And if you do not blog, but visit my blog from time to time, I am glad that the personality you see expressed here is in some way curious and interesting to you. Come again.

Happy dressing and everything else ….

The Technology of Cross Dressing

It is natural that we think of ourselves as living in unique times, and in unique circumstances. Many will agree with me when I suggest that if there is something that defines our time today as unique, that thing would be technology. More specifically, the technology underpinning the communications explosion facilitated by what we think of as the Internet. “www” is, by any measure, a unique signature of our time.

But technology has long had an impact on the lives of cross dressers. Sadly much of this rich history lays obscured beneath the rustling crinolines of yesteryear, lost to historians and orphaned from our present day.

We all learned, for example, as school kids that the very first words uttered into a telephone by the great innovator Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant Thomas Watson were “Watson come here I need you”.

What is less well known though is the shocking rest of the conversation. Watson replied:

“I’m busy dammit what do you want?”

“I need help with my zip”

Well baby, we’ve come a long way. As I approach my own mid-century mark I marvel at how different life can be today, for the transgendered, for cross dressers, and by extension, anyone who at anytime in their life asks themselves this question:

“Am I the only person in the world who does this or feels that”

There was a time in my life where I could only assume that I was the only boy in the world curious about the touch and feel and sensations conferred by women’s clothing. I had no evidence to the contrary.

In my early teen years, I was startled, slack-jawed really while reading a letter to the editors of Penthouse Magazine that began predictably enough with… I am a sophomore at a small mid-western college …. but moved from the mid-west to the darkest recesses of my imagination a couple of paragraphs in, when our hero confessed to how explosively good it had felt to be dressed as a woman by the random (ed. and of course totally hot, playful but somehow menacing, wise beyond her years and yet coltish still) girl from a dorm across campus.

No literary merit in the letter of course, but I felt at the time I suspect very much the same way as the inhabitants of Easter Island must have in 1722 after 1400 years of complete isolation, all of a sudden other humans just pitch up and say, howdy.

Wow. I am not alone.

This perpetually aroused teenager let his inner detective and amateur anthropologist loose on the world in search of evidence of delicate heel prints and lipstick smears where they might surprise and was not disappointed. With a little digging about, I found a good amount of “specialty literature’ and indeed photographic evidence describing and depicting people in outfits (and positions and predicaments) that I fancied I might like to try out, just to satisfy my curiosity of course. Only until I grew out of it all quite inevitably and naturally.

On the predictable path to that not happening, I was noticing a growing number of increasingly public and outrageous flaunters of gender conventions in the arts and culture spaces. Bowie lead a long parade, Boy George, Adam Ant and David Sylvain and countless more made up and laced up, threatening the very moral foundations of our society by … well, by exploring. Not much of a threat as it happens.

I further found around that time in the classified ads of weekly alternative newspapers a growing number of entrepreneurs, veritable Florence Nightingales’ (except that they might dress you as the nurse) who might be engaged with to actually transform the willing into the woman of ones dreams. This discovery was available to me though in part because of my stridently urban life style. I lived in a city. A big city, a cool city, a rich city. 50 miles from where I was may as well have been Easter Island. Isolated, unknown, untouched.

Fast forward, not too far, to today. Most of the world, certainly all of you reading here today, live in a massive city. The greatest metropolis ever imagined and perhaps never imagined. A city of 3, perhaps 4 billon people with another few billion knocking at the gates and sure to take up residence in the next pretty flutter of a generational eyelash. And while many will not have the luxuries of time and comfort in large enough measures to explore their multi-faceted gender compositions, more do have, and many more in the future will have those luxuries. How much easier is the discovery today, and how many more people will make that always unique discovery that they are not alone?

And now, not being alone, what do we say and do with each other, and with the rest of the world through our technologies?

More heavy ponderings along these lines in the never too distant future.

Happy dressing, and etc ...

Cross dressers of the world, unite!

There are slender odds that a tiny trickle of you kind, beautiful visitors are not fully acquainted with and trans-crushing on Staci-Lana over at world famous Femulate. If you are in that trickle, be a complete lamb and meet me quietly in the next paragraph for a little chit chat.

Yes. I am addressing you directly here. If you do not know Femulate, now is the time.

Staci-Lana is running a poll for a few days. The more participants, the better the insights. Not only for a dear friend, but for you too. Well, that is to say that you can see results in near real time. Please visit. Then put a little thought to how you identify yourself. Then vote. This is good practice. Remember, 2010 is a Census year here in the good old US of A, so limber up for that labor with a mere flick of a mouse on Femulate today.

After that, give yourself a treat.

Long time visitors to Voyages en Rose know that I take my pretty hosiery pretty seriously. I have attempted to turn my passion for pantyhose into a science (without losing the thrill along the way) here in a weekly feature I call Petra’s Pantyhose Parade. If you have enjoyed those posts, or just generally have an eye and a thigh for fine things, then you simply must visit The Panty Drawer. Our correspondent, Tights Lover, goes places with a passion for hosiery and foundation garments that I admire and endorse.

I then suppress a small eruption of jealousy at TL’s ability to effortlessly swan around in a seemingly endless ocean of up-market, high-end, far from bargain-bin leggings and etc., because jealousy does not serve well in any circumstances, right? Of course. There, Petra is all better now.

So go visit, enjoy the views and insights, and leave a happier, smarter dresser. However you identify yourself.

Enjoy the weekend. Happy Dressing and everything else … Petra

Petra’s Pantyhose Parade – It is all about Hue

With abject apologies to Cole Porter fans everywhere …

I’ve got Hue over my skin
I’ve got Hue, clinging to parts of me
From waist to the tips of my toes, they’re really a part of me
I’ve got Hue over my skin

I took care to not ladder them
So fine and frail that I walked in fear they would tear
But they have survived and thrived the test of my normal wear
I love Hue's over my skin.

I would sacrifice anything come what might
For a fine thing, the perfect dress sheers
In spite of the warning signs, that I own enough,
Enough now to last all my years ….

Yes friends, Thursday it is, and time for another high-steppin’ Pantyhose Parade. For newish visitors, a recap of the protocols. I like hosiery. I purchase a pair or 2 time to time. I wear them, and objectively as possible grade them so that we may some happy day possess a Rosetta Stone, a reliable periodic table, a statistically sound barometer of the relative merits of these bewitching garments that give so much and ask so little in return. I use a mathematical model as complex a those employed to bring Wall Street to its very knees last year to generate a Petra's Pantyhose Parade value, and have not yet received any kick-backs or threats of physical violence from the vendors I have subjected to my withering and/or longing glances.

So this week, as the poorly wrought lyric indicates, we have Hue up on the slab. Hue had always meant colorful, opaque tights to me. Lovely, useful items, but not fully in my fashion or editorial sweet spot. I was prompted to look more closely at this brand after noticing, in too much of a hurry to drop in, a Hue boutique in a nearby mall some weeks back. When I poked about the website, I found a much broader range of goods than I had previously perceived, including the stuff frequently featured here. The sheers.

Hue, as the name suggests is typically a brand more interested in color. You have likely seen massive walls of bright tights and funky leggings in your favorite shops and may have stayed away from them if you are more inclined, as I am, to dressier fare. Winter is coming on though, and great strides on the fashion tights front are being made daily, so perhaps it is time to broaden our horizons a little. More on that theme in a future post I am sure. But for now, a short review on the Hue offering for the pantyhose enthusiast.

Hue, as it happens, is a Kayser-Roth mills product. KR is the parent company, and Hue has a better known sister by the name of No Nonsense. No Nonsense has come in for some pretty harsh language from me in prior reviews. Truly a brand that brings out my own much unloved talent for caustic criticism. The net outcome of my reviews was that No Nonsense are the perfect fashion accessory for an armed robbery, or perhaps as a temporary fan belt replacement, and better kept off ones legs.

Nice to see, and to say then that Mr. & Mrs. Kayser-Roth have one lovely daughter. If they can forgive me for treating the other daughter coarsely, I would like to begin a serious courtship.

The tested product, the Ultrasoft Control Top is a 17 denier dressy sheer that straddles the day-to-night (ed. enough with the Cole Porter already…) divide confidently. With a subtle glimmer in natural light, that amplifies nicely under interior lighting, the leg arrives, announces and attracts.

Lets go to the name now: Ultrasoft. When you lead with “Ultrasoft”, they had better, and I mean better, feel soft. These do, curiously so with a practically downy feel to the leg, but to the hand, polished, sleek and glossy. Not often do you get the 2 feelings at once. Complement that with lightness and very sure wicking, and you get cool comfort which is a key consideration especially now in heated, dry indoor environments. Things can heat up quickly with those nice new boots on. You know the ones.

So, agreed, they look good, and feel fine. What else? Quality fabrication. Subtle sandal foot seam and clean finishing around the waist and through the gusset of a nicely firm, smoothing control top. Very sensibly, the Hue name is stitched into the waistband, making them easy to retrieve from crowded top drawers. The waistband sits, patiently, happily right at the waist. No roll. Nothing fancy or femmy in the private bits, no lacey or floral details to appeal to my aesthetic sense, and this is fine provided the best resources have been allocated to the look of the leg, and the comfort of the leggy. Which, I am happy to report they have. Abundantly so.

With a price tag of $8.00 ($7.00 each purchased in twins and trips) they are suitably priced for everyday wear, and do a better than everyday job at it. If you are a TJ Maxx shopper, keep your eyes peeled for these at a penny under $4.00. Unassailable value there, and still really good value at full retail. If soft is what you want, these will be your go-to-girls. As to the rankings, they earn a laudable 156.3 Petra Points and nestle into the middle of the pack at # 11 after a day nestled on my legs.

I am sorry to report though that they closed down that local shop. Walked by there hopefully the other day, and where once there was an ocean of nylon, lycra and general prettiness, there were dark lights. Was I too late to my realization? Again, Mr. and Mrs. Kayser-Roth, I beg your forgiveness.

Happy dressing and everything else….