After posting on dress clips, a very good friend of mine suggested I post on Bra Stays. Dutifully I obliged but must confess, I had no idea what bra stays were! Well, now I know and boy are they a clever piece of dress accessorizing which need to be re-established in modern society!
These ingenius 'stays' or 'retainers' pin into the shoulder seam of your dress or top and then you put
your bra strap inbetween the two pices of ribbon and popper the ribbon
together. Straps never peek out and the dress never drops from shoulder. The friend who put me on to them is infact a wedding dress designer and she says she
'would even use these if wearing a cotton vest. They are one of the best
but mainly forgotten inventions we have for lady like dressing'.
Intrigued by all of this I nipped in to my local Hobbycraft and purchased my very own pair of bra stays for around £2. Out of the packet, they look like this
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| Popped closed |
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| Unpopped |
I then tried them on a halterneck top. It was a bit fiddly to saftey pin them into place, but once I had I was delighted with the results!
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| Safely attached around the strap |
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| and pinned to my top |
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| like so! |
Here's before I attempted them...
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| Chavvy slapper straps |
And after!....
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| Chavvy slapper straps BE GONE! |
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| Yes, you can just see the saftey pin! |
I think I need to practise attaching them so you can't see the saftey pin quite so much, but otherwise a real old style accessory which could do with a modern following- no more chavvy slapper straps for us glamorous gels!
*My friend Sam's stunning designs can be seen at
Unique Bridalwear and she also designs and creates bespoke vintage style dresses, prom dresses and pretty much anything else you could wish for under her couture label The House of Webb!
2 comments:
On vintage dresses of good quality those bra stays are already sewn into the dress. Having experience them that way I fell in love, and was pondering sewing some into the dress I finished making this week (I might still) I didn't realise, however, that you could buy them like that! That's fab and I will be getting a set myself. X
oooh I've not seen these and they seem really cheap - though I had a feeling I might have some old ones in my sewing box...
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