Eris, Uranus and The Bra!

However, I had all the symptoms on/off for three years and not a single physiotherapist, osteopath etc that I saw mentioned bras.

So after I shut down my 120 browser tabs, I conducted a one-day bra-free experiment and guess what? Within three hours of au-natural, my posture innately improved, the pain was tangibly melting away and I felt more mobile.

It’s still incrementally improving!  Before we progress to the astrological connections, it’s darkly hilarious that every freaky bra article emphasized the importance of getting them professionally fitted.

Shopping in big stores has a suspense thriller ambience even if you’re just on the prowl for a sales assistant to take your money: you spot them, lock eyes and then must pursue as they flee, speed-walking so as not to alert other seekers – sorry – shoppers.

Missing The Classic Department Store Bra-Priestesses

If you’re a Baby Boomer or Generation X – ie: born with Pluto in Leo or Virgo – you’ll recall the classic department store bra-fitting women.

God I miss them: they had expertise and gravitas. Once, festooned with scarlet-fuschia foofoo lacy things, I skipped into the cubicle and encountered a bra-fitter with the enigmatic smile of a Thracian priestess. “My dear, those won’t do,” she said, moving her head almost imperceptibly from side to side in the universal no gesture.

Later she posed a question along the lines of “Do you want to impress some lout or be serenely comfortable and have a regal bearing?”

Bra-fitting aside, it seems that being bra-free more/most of the time would minimize unnatural pressure on your clavicles etc. How wild would it be if this became commonplace? It’s hard to imagine – say – a newsreader, politician or pilot going sans-bra, for example.

Yet there is a breasts-emancipation trend afoot even if society is not quite ready to celebrate what the writer Ariel Levy calls “the free-flying natural woman boobs of yore“: In 2017, the sales of cleavage-boosting bras (like the ‘Hello Boys’ Wonderbra) fell by 45% and they – along with underwire bras in general – have declined year on year even since.

This correlates with the ‘Me Too’ movement and the pandemic lockdown…

“But now, as more women work from home and can only be seen from the clavicles up on video chats, they are reveling in the siren song of bralessness, discovering a new way of life that involves truth, beauty and sure, maybe some saggage, but also definitely freedom.

“It’s a happiness that I’ve never known before,” says a project manager for a South Miami media company, who usually wears a suit to the office. “I have never not worn a bra.”

Connie Ogle – Miami Herald

And…

Astrologically, Eris-Persephone was conjunct Uranus in Aries over 2016-2017 and then square Pluto from 2020-2021.

The previous Eris-Uranus conjunction – at zero degrees Aries in 1927-1928 – ended the corset’s reign as an everyday item for nearly all women.

And Eris was conjunct the Moon’s Node on September 7 1968, when feminists protesting a Miss America competition may or may not have burned their bras – accounts vary – but the idea took hold.

This was shortly after the mid-1960s counter-cultural eruption of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction. Their previous conjunction was over 1850-1851,  which was also when Eris entered Pisces.

Uranus Conjunct Pluto + Eris In Pisces = Fashion Feminist Flashpoint

Was this a lingerie fashion-feminist flashpoint? Yes!

It was the start of the ‘Artistic Dress’ reform movement, championed by many but most notably the Pre-Raphaelite women – artists and models who had celebrity status in their day.

They eschewed “ugly, immoral” whalebone corsets, hoops beneath skirts and ‘undergarments’ in favor of long flowing robes, loose waistlines and what they called ‘the natural bustline.’

From our contemporary perspective, it’s difficult to imagine the scorn that ‘polite society’ initially directed toward these women. Loose clothing equated to loose morals.

As fashion culture historian Cassidy Percoco writes, “to wear ‘stays’, with your gown pinned close around them, was to be neat and attractive; to wear shapeless ‘jumps’ was to be untidy and probably sexually incontinent.

A woman without the proper foundation garments for her time would be considered to look very strange and soft and sexual – not too different from what many people think of women without bras today.“

The Pre-Raphaelite Women Didn’t Like Rules or Tight Clothing

But as the Pre-Raphaelite style evolved into smocks, house dresses and so-called tea dresses, women increasingly began to question their rigid norm of tight-lacing, maximum contrivance and unnatural silohuettes that could only be achieved with cantilevered understructures.

They may also have fancied the idea of sitting around with their corsets off drinking gooseberry wine, doing Circe or Queen Guinevere re-enactments and taking extra-marital lovers.

Isadora Duncan, the triple Gemini modern dance pioneer, was another core influencer. Favoring diaphanous tunics with bare calves and arms, she talked about creating “freedom of the mind through freedom of the body…by liberating women from the prison of corsets.”

(She  was born with Eris conjunct her Node in Pisces and Uranus square Pluto FYI.)

In 1914 (Eris square Pluto), 23 year-old Caresse Crosby – who would later found the iconic Black Sun Press – patented the modern bra.

An ingenious Taurus, she’d created the prototype from handkerchiefs and ribbons after her standard-issue corset disastrously malfunctioned at a debutante ball.

World War 1 also helped to see out the corset because women surrendered them for the war effort – this yielded 28,000 tonnes of metal, aka two battleships worth – and they were suddenly factory workers or nurses. No time for fainting or the occasional organ displacement.

When Eris in Pisces segued into the 1927-1928 Eris-Uranus conjunction, the  mandatory corset was done, replaced by the bra and – for a while – the panty-girdle.

Ninety years later, Uranus reconnected with Eris, initiating a similar cultural shift: A formerly supportive, necessary and ubiquitous accessory deemed not only superfluous but restrictive.

Gillian Anderson: “It’s just too fuqing uncomfortable.”

Modern bras won’t impede movement but they can undermine comfort or performance, factors that even privileged women from previous generations wouldn’t have been allowed to value.

In 2021, Gillian Anderson – a luminous Leo with natal Eris conjunct the Node and Uranus conjunct Pluto – renounced bras on Instagram Live: “I don’t wear a bra anymore. I can’t wear a bra. I’m sorry. It’s just too f***ing uncomfortable.”

Naturally Gen Z picked up this trend and really ran with it post-pandemic. They were born with Pluto in Saggo and bras are just the latest momentum-slowing faux must-have to jauntily decline.

But braless on the red carpet with a stylist hovering or when your boobs are still unacquainted with gravity is a cinch. Would a significant proportion of woman just say ‘fuq it’ and cruise around with a ‘natural bustline’ until it was normalized?

Fascinating opinion pieces like this and this make me think actually, yes.

And even more compellingly, Eris-Persephone is conjunct Chiron over 2025 and 2026 while Uranus trines Pluto from – wait for it – 2025 until 2029.

Thoughts?