Visible Bra Straps

This article appeared on the op-ed page of USA Today, for which I am a regular contributor, on June 17, 1998.

By Robin Marantz Henig

As it did last summer, the Visible Bra Strap issue has reared its head again at my house.

VBS seems to be the last bastion of a generation gap between baby boomers and their teenaged daughters. We mothers believe that underwear is meant to be hidden. The kids seem to think that it’s perfectly acceptable to wear skimpy, spaghetti-strapped tank tops with huge white lingerie straps not only peeking out, but positively leering.

"Everybody knows I wear a bra, so what’s the big deal?" asks Samantha, who’s 14. And her sister Jessica, whose bra straps these days come in sky blue and teal as well as basic white, agrees. "It’s too much trouble to try to cover everything up," says Jess, who is 18 and home for the summer after her first year of college. "Anyway, this is how everybody dresses at school."

The VBS debate – which I knew was a real national phenomenon when it appeared in the comic strip "Cathy" at the beginning of tank top season – is the first wardrobe issue that makes it clear that even for my own enlightened self, there really is a generation gap.

I’d been able to fool myself for years into thinking my girls and I were kind of interchangeable, at least on matters of wardrobe. Yes, I knew that if you caught sight of the three of us walking down the street, you’d have no doubt who was the fortysomething mother and who were the teenaged daughters. But I always believed that if you could deconstruct our clothes – t-shirts, jeans, big black boots – you might not be able to tell us apart.

Since baby boomers and teenagers so often swap Doc Martens and choker necklaces, we mothers often like to think we have transcended the generation gap that stood between us and our own mothers. It takes the VBS issue to remind us that generation gaps are eternal.

My daughters and I exchange clothes and shoes all the time. We all have basically the same blunt-cut, shoulder-length hairstyles. How different this is from when I was growing up, when my mother, like the mothers of all my friends, wore dresses –- or, on her casual days, "slacks" – and had her short hair washed, set, and styled at the beauty parlor once a week. When my high school finally allowed girls to wear pants in 1969, we adopted a counterculture uniform of faded bell-bottoms, shaggy hair, and love beads that was as far as we could get from the sheaths and pearls of our mothers’ generation.

I probably always assumed I would adopt some sort of different "mother look" when I had children of my own. But I never got around to it. Like most of my friends, I still dress basically the same way I did in college. And the odd thing is, our daughters choose to dress that way, too.

The commonalties in outward appearance between today’s mothers and daughters often translate into commonalties in our inner lives. On a good day, my girls and I spend a lot of time talking about boys and books and life in general. We tell each other raunchy jokes and use swear words and overall act in a way that would still appall my mother – a woman who has never owned a pair of jeans in her life.

These similarities are not simply about clothing, of course. The generation gap has shrunk because the world – or at least the part of the world that’s relevant to mothers and daughters -- hasn’t really changed that much in the past 30 years. My formative years were strikingly different from my mother’s; my options, my opportunities, my world view were virtually limitless compared to hers. But the biggest cultural factors that separated my mother’s adolescence from mine – the sexual revolution and the dawn of feminism – are still in place for my daughters’ adolescence. They have pretty much the same expectations I did when I was their age: to finish college, have sexual adventures, become professionals, raise families, and think for themselves.

The result of all this cozy similarity is that we’ve stripped our kids of most of their opportunities for harmless rebellion. Anything they try to do in terms of outlandish dress, we’ve already done – or are still doing. Want another hole in your ear? Fine, I’ll drive you to the mall – and maybe get a new hole for myself while I’m at it. Want to paint your fingernails black, or purple, or turquoise? That’s OK – as long as I can borrow the bottle when you’re done. Shave your head, pierce your eyebrow, dye your hair fire-engine red? Been there, done that.

But let your underwear show? On purpose? Now that’s something that no mother, no matter how cool, can imagine is actually supposed to look good.

VBS seems to be the one wardrobe issue that baby boom mothers can still get worked up about. And it’s the one source of discord that blatantly reminds us that a woman’s perspective inevitably, and mercifully, shifts just a bit when she crosses that invisible frontier that turns her into someone’s Mom.

The great VBS debate has quieted somewhat at my house. Apparently deciding that this was not the battle over which she wanted to stake her claim to independence, Sam has acceded to my request that if she’s going to wear spaghetti-strapped tank tops, she’s got to wear them with a strapless bra. She looks great in her new summer shirts – not a smidgen of lingerie in sight.

Her big sister Jess, meanwhile, has said she’ll consider buying a strapless bra, too. Until then, she is still happily wearing shirts that show her underwear. But I have chosen to back off on the VBS point with her. I’m saving my energy for the next issue she’s brought home from college, another of those few remaining appearance disagreements that remind us that mothers and daughters are not the same, even if we wear the same jeans.

Jess is thinking about getting a tattoo.