Push-Up Contest

Hey there, it's Avery here. Okay, a little housekeeping. I'm putting the final edits on my book and I'm working on the episodes for 2026. There's going to be one a month this year and I cannot wait to share them. I actually just got back from China. So I'm writing this at three in the morning. I'm so jet lagged. But wait until you hear the story that I found there. I'm very excited for that one. I'm also working with some of my favorite minds in fashion to develop new episodes and ideas, including a story about bras and how they work and whether or not we need them. But I need a little more time to get it all together. So I wanted to share a different podcast that I really like. This is also a story about bras, but with a very different perspective. This is a piece from Signal Hill, which is an audio magazine. It's such a smart concept. They publish all kinds of audio documentaries from all different contributors. Long-form reported work, short essays, reviews, poems. And it's packaged together in issues that you can subscribe to. But I particularly loved this dispatch from their last issue. It's called Push-Up Contest by Zoe Kurland. And it's about how her dad designed a bra that changed the world. It's a delight. I'll have that for you after this little break. Before we start today's show, we want to shout out another member of the Radiotopia family, Radio Diaries. For almost 30 years, Radio Diaries has been helping people document their own lives and histories. Now they're back with a new series called Orson Welles and the Blind Soldier, about a small-town crime that sparked the desegregation of the U.S. military. In 1946, a black World War II veteran named Isaac Woodard was blinded by a white police officer. Nobody knew who the officer was or where the attack happened. But when famed director Orson Welles found out about the attack, he pledged to not only broadcast it, but solve it on the radio week by week. Wash your hands, Officer X. Wash them well. Scrub and scour. You won't blot out the blood of a blinded war veteran. You're going to be uncovered. We will blast out your name, and I will find means to remove from you all refuge, Officer X. You can't get rid of me. This series is a riveting true crime investigation told by descendants, activists, and the last known witness to the attack. Listen to Orson Welles and The Blind Soldier out now wherever you get your podcasts or at radiotopia.fm. And now, Push-Up Contest by Zoe Kurland. Stop slamming your foot and also you might want to just sit on your hands. I mean, the rings are collatery chattery. Don't make them off. Don't, okay. I think you just took off 11 rings. It should be 13. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. Oh, 14. Thank you very much. 14 rings. And how many bracelets? Well, 1, 2, 3, 4. This is my dad, Jeffrey Kurland. He's a costume designer for movies, and he dresses like it. Patterned shirts, elaborate knitwear, scarves and pocket squares, vintage loafers, all of those rings you just heard, and bracelets and chains. He has wavy, shoulder-length hair. His style is luxurious, timeless, and a little genderless, like Tilda Swinton as Orlando, or a Renaissance prince. Eclectic. In a word. I think probably is the best word. Today, for example, he's wearing a poncho, and I assure you, he's pulling it off. This is probably the first thing that people notice about me is what apparel I happen to be wearing at the time. Shoes, jewelry, it's all there. I grew up watching my dad use clothes to transform people into characters. They'd step in front of the trifold mirror under fluorescent fitting room lights. As they moved, the reflective panels multiplied their bodies to infinity, making them into mythical multi-limbed creatures. And then he would slice them into pieces with his measuring tape, searching for golden ratios, 28, 23, 27, or 41, 35, 40. Finally, he'd reconstruct them via textile, giving them contours they didn't come into the room with. As a kid, sitting in the corner of the fitting room, I witnessed this transformation over and over again. My dad designed the costumes for some very iconic movies. My Best Friend's Wedding, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ocean's Eleven, Inception. But of all of his movies, I have one very clear favorite. it. The movie came out in the year 2000, but I didn't see it until a decade later. I was 15, curled up on the couch at a friend's house. Exveillance call me. I can be very harmful. So it kills people. Oh, yeah. You're a lawyer? Hell no. I hate lawyers. I just work for them. We're going to have to spend a little time filling in the holes in your research. Don't talk to me like I'm an idiot, OK? I think we got off on the wrong foot here. That's all you got, lady. Two wrong feet and ugly shoes. You gotta find a different job or a different guy. Erin Brakovich. For the uninitiated, the movie stars Julia Roberts as Erin, a dogged, whip-smart, foul-mouthed paralegal who helps a small desert town in California take on an energy company that's poisoning their water. Why are there medical records and blood samples in real estate files? Would you mind if I investigate this a little further? At the end of the movie, Erin handily defeats Pacific Gas and Electric in court and wins a $333 million settlement for the town, all while raising her three kids as a single mom. The whole thing is based on a true story. Erin Brockovich is a real person who really did all that stuff. Watching the movie at 15, I swooned. Julia as Erin was just it. Her take-no-prisoners attitude, her smile, and, notably, her clothes. Erin clomps around the hot sun-bleached town of Hinkley in high heels, miniskirts, skin-tight vests, leather, laces, gold belts, animal print, red. Her curly blonde hair is gigantic, tossing around in the dry wind. Now that you're working here, you may want to rethink your wardrobe a little. Is that so? Well, it just so happens I think I look nice. And as long as I have one ass instead of two, I'll wear what I like if that's all right with you. And then there were her boobs. Whether she's running circles around the dumb men trying to keep her from the truth or deftly scaling the side of a swimming pool to fish out a dead frog, Erin's cleavage is just right there. It's basically a star in its own right, catapulting past the zip-up neckline of a halter top, smashed together at the center of a corset, pole vaulting over the top button of a sheer leopard blouse. Some people write her off as a bimbo, but that's actually part of her power. What makes you think you can just walk in there and find what we need? They're called boobs, Ed. I was a late bloomer. At 15, I still looked 12, pre-alphabet chested, and I wished for boobs incessantly. Plus, as a teenager, I thought constantly, paranoically, about how to look amazing, and also how to look like I didn't care. In the golden glow of my friend's TV, I was mesmerized by Aaron. I wanted to know how I could look like that. Be like that? I'm 30 now. basically the same age as Julia Roberts was when she played Erin Brockovich. Lately, I feel like I'm going through a new kind of puberty. After feeling for a decade like I'd largely escaped the fray of adolescence, I'm suddenly, once again, stepping from what feels like one life phase to another. No longer young, but not yet old. There's something mushy and liminal about this age. The vague feeling of being at a turning point, like I supposed to be solid crystallized in some new identity that I don quite understand yet In this liminal moment suggestion is powerful I'm not immune to the rhythmic push and pull of society slash culture slash the algorithm, which is telling me I should be ageless, have a baby tomorrow, and adopt a meat-only diet for some reason. I see pictures of my friends getting married or somehow working from Tahiti or, like, looking really amazing in a hat. And not since I was 15 have I thought this much about how other people might see me. Should I become a hat person? When I was a teenager, Erin was a vision of a shining adult future I could look forward to when I reached that point. But now I'm there. Or here, rather. And I guess I'm still wondering, in some way, how to look like that. Be like that. You see Erin Brockovich. You see Julia Roberts. You have to transform that into that. That's just the job. And if you're good at it, you can do it. And if you're not, you can't. You're either good or you're not. I'm good. I am good. It dawns on me as I enter the Aaron chapter of my own life. Somehow, I'd never actually asked my dad about the making of Aaron Brockovich. I don't know, when you were just saying, like, that you were transforming Julia into Aaron, like, where did you start with that? The logical place was in the bust. The bust. It's the most noticed, probably noticed, property of Erin when you meet her. She features that, and you see it. It's there. And she's not ashamed of it, nor should she be. In 1999, Julia Roberts was known as this statuesque, classic, clean lines type of beautiful. Sexy in an essentially flat-chested kind of way. To put it bluntly, she didn't really have the boobs for this job. Please note, though, that my dad would never call them that. You're so good at using words that are kind of not crass to describe bodies. Because I find bodies beautiful. I have no reason to be crass about them. I don't think anything's crass about them, male or female. And I also have great respect for the actor. I mean, you can't, I would never say it, Julia. Your boobs, I would just never do that. Because that's just inappropriate. It's a serious business. It was not a joke. We were trying to create something real. My dad takes his work extremely seriously. Fake boobs were not on the table. That would be anti-real. But this was the 20th century. Push-up bra technology of the time was not up to the task. Regular bras didn't work. So my dad and his collaborator, seamstress Mary Ellen Fields, got creative. We used everything there was out there. They made these little things called cutlets. They would use, people who had to have mastectomies, they had gel in them, so they moved rather like a bosom. And so that was very helpful also. And then it was just the bra itself, just the tightening and the pushing and the pulling and the filling and all of that. So it was pads on the side, pads on the bottom, tight through the back and close in the front. After much trial and error, hours in the fitting room, they got it. In the end, basically, her bosom sat on a shelf in the bra that lifted it and pushed it together. Do you remember when people saw Julia for the first time in the outfits? Oh, they loved it. Everyone was like, ah, ha, ha. Just they thought it was great, you know, because it was a transformation. On screen, the bra did exactly what it was supposed to do. It's a wonderful scene when she goes to the Hall of Records. What can I do for you, Erin? Well, believe it or not, I'm on the prowl for some water records. And there's a guy there, and he doesn't want to show her the books. And she leans into the counter, and she pushes her forearms on her bus, and she features it, she pushes it forward. You know, it would probably be easiest if I just squeezed back there and poked around myself. Would that be all right with you? And it's just, it looks incredibly ample, large, and it's perfect. Well, I'll call you if I need you. All right. Okay. Thank you. It's great. And she just used it. She just naturally just did it. And that's what I wanted. I didn't want her to think about it. And I wanted her to feel like that was her. Growing up, I knew that Erin Brockovich was a capital B big deal movie for my dad. It was a massive hit. Julia Roberts won her first and only Oscar for it. We had my dad's drawings of the costumes framed in our house. But I didn't know how big a deal the bra itself was until I started researching this story. I found lots of footage of Julia Roberts on the Erin Brockovich press tour. She's asked about her cleavage in nearly every interview. There was cleavage. There was lots of cleavage. Here she is with noted sex pest, Charlie Rose. Cleavage for days. Cleavage for days. There was, of course, a slightly leering tone to a lot of these interviews. But Julia talked a lot about the bra on her own, too, even in more recent interviews, like here on The Graham Norton Show in 2023, when she was asked about how she got into character as Erin. I just listened to audio tapes of her being interviewed by the director and got myself a really, really beautifully engineered bra. I remember. Yeah. That person saying I remember in the background is Cher, as in the mononymous singer-actress extraordinaire. Even Cher noticed the beautifully engineered bra. Everybody did. Oh, Erin Brockovich. Fabulous. So fabulous. The bra was such a sensation that it inspired knockoffs. A British lingerie designer started marketing Brockovich bras. And then she had the gall to claim that she had actually created the bra worn by Julia Roberts in the movie herself. Totally false, of course. My dad defended his honor to the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal. Was it funny to you that that even... No, that's never funny. When someone tries to steal your thunder, that's not funny. I don't find that funny. After the movie, there was a push-up bra wave that took over the world. My dad shouldn't get all the credit for that, but it seems safe to say that he and that highly engineered Frankenbra were part of the upswing, which lasted through the mid-tens, when boobs gave way to butts for a time. It was around that time, the peak of the boob era, perhaps, that mine finally arrived. It must be said that they are the most average breasts in the world. Ever since they showed up, I've felt completely ambivalent about them. They can be paraded out like party balloons or put away like socks in a drawer. They're malleable pieces of equipment, and they're not quite a part of me. And I've never invested much in bras. For the last few years, I've seen them as a sort of blight on the bust, a sometimes necessary evil. But as Erin Brockovich resurfaces in my life, I'm starting to reconsider that opinion. Everything worked because that character was created from underneath to feature what was on top. The character was created underneath. I love that. The character was created from underneath. I've heard my dad say this before, but this is the first time it really clicked for me. In Erin Brockovich, the bra was more than a bra. It was a place that this amazing performance of confidence, ease, paralegallic badassery could radiate out from. The message is clear. I need to buy a push-up bra. How will this push-up bra fit? How will it look? All answers will be revealed after the break. Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, Global Director of Vogue Runway and Vogue Business and host of the Run-Through Podcast. Every Tuesday, join me for the latest fashion news like the shakeups of Balenciaga and Dior and what's trending in Paris and Milan. You'll also hear interviews with top designers from Marc Jacobs and Rick Owens to Daniel Roseberry, Sarah Burton, and many more. on Thursdays Chloe Maul editor of Vogue.com and Choma Nadi head of editorial content at British Vogue take you behind the scenes at Vogue and share their thoughts on fashion through the lens of culture You hear interviews with some of your favorite stars like Julianne Moore Pharrell Williams and celebrity stylist La Roche Join us to get your fashion and culture news twice a week. Listen to The Run-Through with Vogue every Tuesday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. We are back with reporter Zoe Kerlin's story about a bra that her dad designed that change the world, Zoe is about to try on a push-up bra of her own. Thankfully, to get this kind of bra now, one does not have to enlist my dad. Oh my gosh, this looks incredible. So today I'm trying the new Skims Ultimate Super Push-Up Bra. This is the most flattering bra and the color? Chef's kiss. This is the before and look at how full and naturally rounded looks after. Obsessed. Many thanks to the slew of influencers, mostly Australian for some reason, who turned me on to the latest in bra technology. Kim Kardashian's underwear brand, Skims, has apparently picked up where Jeffrey Kurland left off. I placed my order online. $58 plus shipping. It comes in this kind of chic, frosted plastic bag. It's like so modest. It's like, ooh, what's inside? what's inside is this sort of pearlescent nude bra it's very smooth it's very soft it looks like barbie boobs the bra is sort of sexy but also deeply sanitary like your skin but also not it's pretending to be something essential and corporeal you but better exclamation point. Okay, I'm gonna try it on. I will take you with me to do so. Okay, I'm walking over to the mirror. Nope. Or yes, I don't know. The bra did do some kind of job pushing my flesh together and up. I showed my boyfriend the contraption, breast apparatus. What do you think? By the way, he asked me to pitch shift his voice for anonymity. I thought it was going to make them look big, but they kind of just look long. Long. Long. Long! Hearing this reaction from totally anonymous focus group participant number one, I had an acute experience of body horror, imagining my long breasts animated like a Looney Tunes cartoon extending from my chest like headlight beams, further and further wrapping twice around the circumference of the earth. When I was studying film in college, I read a book by the film theorist Marianne Dwan about femme fatales. She wrote, Walking around town with brought-up boobs, I wasn't sure how to harness their power. In a tank top, they were enormous and felt like a malevolent parasite. Sentient puppets affixed my body with their own thing going on. I felt, on some level, slightly unreal, like I was looking at myself from the outside, watching myself like a character in a movie. What was her story? Truth be told, it seemed less like the intrepid exploits of a woman in stilettos fighting the power, and more like the tale of a sturdy lass working the barley fields, churning butter. not exactly what I was going for. When my dad told me the story of making the Erin look, he'd said the hard part was making her feel real. And not just to the people watching the movie, but to Julia herself. Now, I also had to create an Erin Brockovich that was true to her, but also that Julia Roberts could perform something that she, a skin that she felt comfortable in also. I went back to the interviews with Julia, and I felt like I could kind of hear what my dad was talking about, that Julia had to find a place between the real Aaron and the real her, and get used to it. Your costume, I know everyone's talking about the cleavage thing and all that, but the costumes, how fun for you to go into wardrobe every day and find out what you're going to wear, and what kind of comments were you getting from the crew? Uh, fun. I don't know. You know, a great, there was a great sense of intrigue. I would walk in and kind of look at my bed every morning and go, hmm, that's an approach. But then I got used to it after a while. Everybody got used to it. I wondered what that process was like for Julia. What had inhabiting that skin actually felt like? How had she done it? And then I thought, I'm a journalist. I could just ask her. So I called her agency. Thank you for calling CIA. How can I help? I got in touch with an assistant. I'm an audio producer. Great. Okay. Can do. What is your email? Okay. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Bye. And then, after weeks of attempting various communiques over email with an Ouroboros of agents and assistant agents. Hey, my name is Zoe Kerland. I was looking to speak to someone about that, possibly interviewing me. And basically, I tried to see what she's got in the story or an interview, either over the phone or through email. I gave up. Of course, Julia Roberts wasn't going to call me back. Maybe, at long last, she was over talking about the boobs. I had been foiled in my quest, and I was sitting in my dejection when it hit me. What I really wanted to know wasn't what it felt like to be an actor, to put on a bra that turned me into another person. It was how to inhabit my own actual body. The Aaron aura I was seeking didn't start with Julia Roberts, she too was copying someone. I realized I was calling the wrong Aaron. And this time, when I called, the right Aaron picked up. Hi, it's nice to meet you. You too. Thank you so much for doing this. Sure. My pleasure. This is Erin Brockovich, the real Erin Brockovich, talking to me on Zoom. Her hair is swept up into a voluminous updo. Huge, glittering smile. Jangly bracelets. A black v-neck top. She's 65 and tanned. Coming to me from what looks like a new-agey home office. Stone floors. Leather furniture. A Buddha head next to her desk. It kind of tripped me out to see the real Erin. When I pictured Erin Brockovich, I pictured Julia Roberts. Now here was this completely different woman. Erin was, of course, very familiar with this confusion. She told me she was maybe more surprised than anyone when Julia Roberts was chosen to play her. I'm fun. I'm crazy. I'm that girl from Kansas. Cute. Fun. I'm not statuesque. I was thinking more along the lines of, like, maybe Goldie Hawn. And I wonder, when you saw her in her costume, what did you think? seeing a weird mirror version of yourself. Well, when I first met her on set, I was getting hair and makeup done. Erin was there to shoot a cameo part in the movie. And I saw her in the mirror come in and she went through a door to the right. And she didn't know I was going to be there. So she came back out and walked behind my chair. I'm watching this in a mirror. And she stopped after she passed the chair and she turned around and she's looking at me and I'm looking at, she goes, hi, I'm Julia. I go, hi, I'm Erin. And she goes, oh, I'm so embarrassed. I don't even have my boobs in yet. So that actually happened. Then for the actual cameo, the director, Steven Soderbergh, thought it would be fun to play into this mirror image thing. He'd asked Erin to play a diner waitress serving Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich. I'm like, yeah, no, I don't want to do this. He goes, you're going to do it. You'll be sorry if you don't. I don't always like to be seen. I've been that way forever. So generally, if I see a camera, I will turn. My dad had stitched a name tag onto Aaron's diner waitress costume I don know what possessed him to do this It feels almost diabolical but it read Julia It was weird because I Julia Talking to Julia who Aaron it was like an out experience In the bright lights of the movie diner, caught in a cameo she didn't want to be in, Aaron experienced a split between herself and the person that the world would come to see as her. When you saw the costumes, when you saw the movie, did you feel like it was accurate? Do you feel like it made sense? It felt good to me. The style felt good to me. It felt true to me. And it wasn't always one thing. I'm very eclectic with that. I was kind of surprised to hear how blasé Erin was about seeing what I considered to be the most iconic set of outfits in movie history. I had this sense that Erin was really particular about what she wore and that the costumes reflected that. But she told me that back in Hinkley, that hadn't been true at all. I wasn't focused on outfits or wardrobes. You know, I'm very comfortable in heels. I just am. I have a high arch. I got a tight calf. And so I am comfortable that way. Now, in many, many, many instances out in Hinkley, it is very hot. hot is a human blow dryer so the less I had on the more comfortable I was I wasn't in the courtroom I'm not the attorney I was a person out there that was attached to the people to the environment and that's where I was I was collecting hazardous waste I was just comfortable in my shoes but I would generally wear short shorts. The cleavage thing I get. The bra kind of conversation surprised me because there would be many days out there actually I didn't have on a bra. It's not like I was wearing see-through shirts, but I'd have on, you know, a t-shirt, a black t-shirt, short-sleeved with shorts because I was hot. It sounded like the way Erin dressed had always been natural to her. She wore what she liked, what worked. But she told me that after the movie, things started to change. You got to remember, I was 31 years old, 32 years old, when I began my work in Hinkley. I was pretty overwhelmed. I felt a shift of, you're trying to now make a person into this idea of what you think somebody who's had a film made about him is supposed to look like walk, talk, and dress and behave. Not to be totally insane, but it sounds like Aaron is talking about a version of the same thing that I'm experiencing. A slightly more dramatic situation than simply exiting young adulthood, obviously. But this idea of feeling like the person you were isn't exactly working anymore. You're suddenly more conscious of the way the world is seeing you, trying to look like a more polished version of yourself, trying to dress for the role you're supposed to be playing. I did start trying to adjust my wardrobe, or I became more conscious. Okay, maybe I should cover up a little more. Or I became more conscious. Well, maybe my skirt is too short. Things like that started to change for me. But then Erin told me about when she first saw the movie. I remember when I saw the film for the first time, I think it was a matinee, I went by myself and it was packed. And I sat in the back of the room, nobody knew who I was. And to this day, half the world, you know, if they saw me, they're like, they have no idea who I am. I mean, I'm another person in life. I was amazed at the standing ovation in the theater, but I was listening to people. I was at the back against the wall and their comments. Oh my God, do you think she really did that? And then someone going, I think she really did. It's based on a true story. I found this really moving. The idea that Erin walked into a movie theater alone, watched her life story play out and could appreciate it from afar. Sit in the back row, sort of sanguine and watch the people watch her. In my own life, I'm always trying to figure out if it looks right, if it is right, if it's right for right now. I'm rarely just sitting back, watching the show. I'll tell you one thing. I can now, with more confidence than I ever had back then because so much was coming at me, I absolutely will not ever feel bad about who I was and how I dressed. It's about the result I got and the lives that it changed. I've learned from my dad that in costume design, every single thing on the screen has an intention behind it. You can close read a button if you want to. It'll provide some hidden piece of the story. After a lifetime of watching my dad do his job, I think hard about what I wear, what story it's telling about me. Correct me if I'm wrong. I've always seen, you know, your presentation, who you are, the way you dress, the way that you act, is very authentic to you. but do you ever feel like you get up in the morning and you're like I just don't want to be Jeffrey Crowley I just don't want to do all this yeah that's interesting you should say that because I I do I have those days do I want to put all the rings on do I want to put the jewelry on do I want to do I just don't yeah because there are octaves and I go fuck I'm just tired I don't want to slap all this stuff all over the place Nobody I know wears clothes as well as my dad does. If he's wearing it, it works. And he moves with confidence, like he's delighting in being and looking exactly himself. In this way, my dad actually reminds me a lot of Erin. The real one, and also his version of her. But most of the time, it's such a natural thing for me to do, just wake up and put everything on. It's just, it's there. Yeah, and I like the choice that I can or I can't. I don't have to. No one's, you know, like if I don't put anything on and I come to work, it is always at least six people going, where are the rings? Where's your stuff? They just want to know where it is. They want to make sure I didn't lose it or something or other. They're like, where is it? Yeah, so you don't want to disappoint people either. You know, that's good. If that makes them smile, it makes me smile too. I always thought I'd work in the movies like my dad. But I don't. I'm a radio journalist in far west Texas. The light is golden. The wind is dry. In my job, I knock on strangers' doors to ask them about their lives. Sometimes even about their water. I sit with them on their couches, at their kitchen tables, follow them out screen doors to their backyards, crackling with dry heat. I have a big head of curly blonde hair, and I have been known to throw on a heel and clomp around in the desert. It occurs to me that if you sat in the last row of the theater, if you squinted, it might look a little familiar. When my dad and I finish our interview, he puts his rings back on, one at a time. The placing of the jewelry ritual is the oldest time itself. It's very elegant. Aren't you shocked that I know exactly where to put each one? Yes. That was an anisro. I know. That's yours. Yes. Okay, you can go downstairs. Fabulous. This story was reported, written, and produced by Zoe Kurland. Edited by Liza Yeager, Jackson Roach, Omar Etman, and Annie Rosenthal. Sound design and additional production by Liza Yeager. This is just one of the articles in Signal Hill, which is a fantastic audio magazine. The New Yorker actually called them one of the best podcasts of 2025, along with articles of interest. I couldn't agree with them more. Check it out at signalhill.fm and I'll see you soon with more regular episodes.