Iris the Bra Lady Knows Better Than Your Instagram Ad

How the death of the mom-and-pop shop has been fueled by our own algorithmic-informed arrogance.

I have a bra lady.

Her name is Iris, she has an eponymous lingerie shop on Atlantic Avenue, and for the past 10 years she, with her Xray vision and prodigious ability to size up a rack, has been outfitting me with beautiful, flattering undergarments. Prior to Iris, I went to a since-retired older woman in Park Slope, and before that, I would schlep out to Boro Park once or twice a year to visit these two aging sisters with a hole-in-the-wall shop on New Utrecht Avenue. All of them mistresses in the dying art of bra-fitting. Indeed, as a self-identified “busty lady,” I had not purchased a bra without the intervention of an expert since high school. Until 2020, that was.

Home, as we all were, and inundated with influencer campaigns and targeted ads, I decided to take a chance.* To cast off my Gen X ways, and join the throngs of Millennial and Gen-Z women buying their lingerie online, at a fraction of what I was spending with Iris. Lingerie that looked modern and beautiful and sexy in photos. Lingerie that supported women-owned tech start-ups that pledged to rethink the bra- and panty-shopping experience. Companies dedicated to convincing me—and everyone else—that Iris and her ilk were relics of the past. Who, these companies posited in their body-positive ad campaigns, knows your shape better than you?

In my case, it turns out, the answer was Iris. Several experiments, and many, many returns later, I went back to Iris’s storefront with my tail between my legs, desperate for her to fix my situation and return my girls to all their glory. Eager, even, to open my wallet and pay a premium for her no-nonsense expertise. Grateful when she—as every great bra-lady throughout time has done—barged into my dressing room, shaking her head at my slack bosom in my terrible internet brassiere, and handed me what she called “bras that actually work.”

Of course, this situation is very specific to me. Chances are, you’re reading this and have no need for a bra lady. But the experience got me thinking about expertise more generally, and the ways in which it has become devalued in favor of the supposed convenience and allure of online and big-box commerce. Because make no mistake, what Iris and many small brick-and-mortar specialty stores offer to us is expertise.

These days I tend to go grocery shopping at the giant Wegmans that they opened up at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The prices are decent, the customer service good, and the selection bountiful, and I’m in and out of the place in about an hour, depending on how much shopping I’m doing. But I don’t delude myself into thinking that the quality of product that I’m purchasing, or the thought behind what and why I’m buying, is the same as when I was a kid and my grandmother would send me to shop not at one store, but at no less than three or four. Meat from the butcher, fish from the fish market, bread from the bakery, and produce from the fruit store. (We did, in those days, have electricity, so while the butcher and baker were still very busy, the candlestick maker had already gone under.) It simply isn’t possible that a generalist focused on volume is going to offer the same product as a specialist who has built their livelihood on providing one niche service and providing it well. Just as it simply isn’t possible that an algorithm of any kind is going to provide the same kind of knowledge-base and wisdom as a working specialist.

In my prior life, I was a luxury-wedding planner. This was in the infancy of “online wedding planning,” when websites like The Knot billed themselves as “the only wedding planner you’ll ever need.” Couples would come into our office and ask, “Why do I need you when I can use this website?” It was hard to explain to them, in advance of their having lived the experience, that a human being with thousands of lived work hours and emotional intelligence could manage the nuances of finding and negotiating with vendors and mitigating family conflict in a way that a website and online registry couldn’t. It was a false equivalence. In time, The Knot stopped billing themselves this way. But the thought process of the consumer—which, as they came of age, became Millennials and Gen Zers—more or less stuck. Why should I trust a human when this computer or corporate entity can give me more for less?

Much is made in America of those coming of age who don’t remember 9/11. But I’d argue that this is the wrong metric for registering the change in our country. The far deeper line in the sand, in terms of how we behave as a society? Who has lived before Amazon, and who has lived exclusively after Amazon.

A large and growing swath of our population has never known a time when you could think of something and—for better or worse—three clicks and a day later, have it at your doorstep. Put another way, this is a population who sees the idea of going to a store and engaging with a retailer as a potential “waste of time.” The arrival of shipping boxes provides the tactile, real-world equivalent of getting “likes.”

There was a recent article in The New York Times about Millennials struggling to make peace with their Gen Z co-workers, who refuse to acknowledge hierarchy or superiority in the workplace. The Gen Zers did not feel that they, despite having just gotten there, had anything less to offer than their more experienced counterparts. On the surface, this seemingly has nothing to do with Iris, my bra lady. And yet, it has everything to do with her.

The internet has falsely convinced us that we—aided by algorithms and goaded on by glossy marketing and free shipping—know better than everybody. Yes, I recognize that shopping and consumerism are but one facet of life, but in America these days, isn’t it the largest facet? Why expect a generation (really, two) reared in a world of declining expertise to have any respect for it? Why would a swath of America raised with instant gratification not expect and demand to be immediately elevated to the status they have been told by brands that they are entitled to?

This is not meant to be another article criticizing our younger generations. It’s just meant to connect a couple dots. The decline of mom-and-pop stores is about more than the decline of neighborhoods and neighborly interactions: It has fundamentally shifted how we consume, which I believe has fundamentally begun to change us as a society. The nagging thought in my mind, of course, is this: When I was walking around with ill-fitting bras purchased at bargain prices with a spontaneous click of an Instagram ad late one night, I knew my boobs could look better. I had learned that from Iris. So many others will never know.

*Many women no doubt read this and wondered, “Wait? You wore a bra in 2020?” And I say: “Yes. I think better when things are organized.”