Orchard Corset

On Monday, two of my coworkers and I left work in a hurry at 5 o’clock. For me this meant leaving early—half an hour early—but our mission was important. We were venturing to the Lower East Side to find the supposed bra/lingerie store to end all bra/lingerie stores.

Orchard Corset, as the store is called, has the most uniformly positive reviews of any place/thing I’ve ever looked at on Yelp. Twenty-five happy ladies, particularly happy ladies talking about their breasts, cannot be wrong. Or can they? After making the pilgrimage, I’m still not entirely sure about the answer to this one (nor are my friends who went with), but for me, at least, Orchard Corset was well worth the trip just to see the place in all its quirky glory.

Located on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side (hence the name), the store occupies a small, semi-unnoticeable storefront in a row of many. Headless mannequin torsos hang in the front windows, but if you didn’t know ahead of time, nothing really indicates to the average passerby that this is a hole-in-the-wall lingerie store you should actually enter. I mean, not to knock the little guys, but I suspect most of us buys our bras and underwear from Victoria’s Secret, Gap Body, Filene’s Basement, and other big-name places these days. Underwear on the street is a thing of the past, which, to be honest, I’m okay with, since I find it a little gross.

We entered the store to the sounds of Survivor (the TV show, not the Destiny’s Child song) blaring from a computer and the delicate face of a frum-looking woman. (For the uninitiated, take your pick: urban dictionary—caution against reading definitions further down the page, just stick to number 1—or a completely unsourced Wikipedia page. Ah, the internet.) Which isn’t to say she looked schlumpy (there I go again with the Yiddish) or matronly; she was pretty, and wore impressively high-heeled pumps, a skirt, and a pink jacket, with her ginger-brown hair pulled partly back, though I suspect that was a wig (frum sign #1, for anyone new to the game). Towards the back of the store hung a loose green curtain, behind which the famed and fateful fittings were to take place.

Since I went second, I had time to examine the space while waiting: floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves, like bookshelves, with a rolling ladder or two of the sort that I most often see in my head when picturing the stately library of my one-day imaginary home. Except replace the books with boxes—tons and tons of boxes, all marked with a label,  “Olga 40DD” or some such, handwritten in black Sharpie and all looking as if they’d been sitting on the shelf for just a few months too long. My grandmother hoards tinfoil and food items in her pantry; Orchard Corset would be my grandmother’s pantry if she amassed bras, in shoeboxes, instead.

As we waited, a portly Jewish man entered the store. He had a beard and wore a kippah (yarmulkah), as all Orthodox Jewish men do, and his outfit was generally that of his kind: white button-down shirt tucked into black pants. He was quite affable, which helped alleviate the immense awkwardness I felt at being in a bra store and talking about my boobs in front of an Orthodox Jewish guy. Though I’ve only learned this just now, from the internet, his name is Ralph (Ralph and his wife, Peggy). We talked about Survivor (“It’s the only show I watch on TV,” he told us) and the coming holiday, Shavuot.

When it was at last my turn, Peggy took me behind a curtain. She told me to lift my shirt, and then—the slightest graze of a touch and a look that suggested she knew all. This was the famous “fitting” that everyone on Yelp raves about. She immediately went in search of a box—and I should note here that I could find no rhyme or reason to the arrangement of the boxes on the shelves, which only increased my awe of her—and gave me a bra to try on. She told me that this bra indicated the direction she wanted me to go in, words I can honestly say I have never thought to use when describing the way a bra fits.

Without going into too much detail, I’ll say simply that I left the store empty handed. My friends made purchases, but they left not entirely thrilled with things Peggy had told them. She is, in a word, blunt. This is a quality I tend to value in people, but it is, I think, something we’ve come not to expect from people selling us stuff. Her honesty also lends her an authoritative air…or maybe she just is authoritative. Either way, when combined with her demeanor, which in this entirely inexplicable way unless you’ve been around a lot of Orthodox Jews is so—well, Orthodox Jewish—the whole experience feels sort of like visiting a rabbi’s wife to solicit advice about your breasts. While the rabbi sits in the next room and the door between the two rooms has been left open. In short, it’s bizarre. And how running a bra shop counts as a socially acceptable living for an Orthodox couple, whose culture so values and emphasizes, often ad nauseum, the concept of modesty, I have no clue.

The funniest part of the experience was realizing, after we left, that we had all been so excited to go and then all left somehow unsatisfied. But I loved it, at best for the strange confluence of cultural factors at play and at very least for this photo, courtesy of Jess: