"Toddy, if I have to strap down my bosom for the next 20 years they're going to look like two empty wallets."
— Victoria, Victor/Victoria
A popular, often young, female TV star is fairly flat-chested, or at least not very "pronounced", in her most recent or well-known role... but then you see her in an awards show or otherwise live event, and my, has she grown.
Faking a trim figure when the reality is more ballooned isn't as difficult as one might think, to the point that some exaggerations seen in modern anime and manga can reasonably be called Truth in Television. The breasts are one the most malleable parts of the female form, after all; suppressing bounciness and size is why the Sarashi was invented, but even something as simple as a bra and towel can make someone appear half as busty as they actually are. It takes a truly oversized pair of knockers to make this impractical, and that's more because of the lungs being compressed than any actual issues hiding the size. If a skilled actress is properly equipped, the audience will have no way of knowing what's really beneath those clothes.
This trope only applies to cases wherein the titular mammaries were quite obviously suppressed for the sake of the role (Sweet Polly Oliver cases included), and so if the actress underwent breast-oriented plastic surgery or a reasonable length of "developing time" had passed between the role and her more recent appearance, it is not an example of this trope (though this trope does give the tabloids plenty of "Did she get a boob job?" fodder).
Often a result of Not Allowed to Grow Up or D-Cup Distress. See also Contractual Purity. Fits into Reality Is Unrealistic because television and film producers used to dislike showing girls in between childhood and adulthood (you were supposed to be either a sex symbol or not), though those standards have loosened from how they were in the 1950s.
Hidden Buxom also involves concealing the breasts, but that is more for personal reasons. This trope is about hiding the breasts for a specific task.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- In-Universe example in My Dress-Up Darling. Shinju Inui is a Huge Schoolgirl who is also extremely curvaceous for her age, and her large bust becomes the biggest obstacle when she wants to cosplay as a male character. She manages to pull it off by the combination of a sarashi and a B-holder, although they end up giving out in the end.
- Came up at a couple of In-Universe points in Tomo-chan Is a Girl!:
- When she was ten or so, Tomo starting binding her developing breasts flat partially so "they would not get in the way" and partially to avoid making things "weird" with her playmate/rival Jun. When she entered middle school her mother finally put her foot down and made her wear a (presumably sports-) bra with her new school uniform... and things promptly got weird with Jun.
- As a high-school student who was firmly in the buxom range, Tomo got volunteered to play the prince in the class presentation of Cinderella and was obliged to go this route. One dress rehearsal was noted as having a containment failure.
- Ryuunosuke Fujinami of Urusei Yatsura has to wear a sarashi as despite the fact she would prefer to wear a bra and dress femininely in dresses and skirts and cute blouses her father is a raging misogynist who Wanted a Son Instead and tried to raise Ryuunosuke as a boy and will only buy her boys clothes. She's moderately busty so a sarashi is her only option to provide her any sort of support.
Film
- Christina Ricci tied her breasts down when she played Wednesday Addams in the movie version of The Addams Family and Addams Family Values. Puberty did not miss her. In what was almost assuredly a reference to this fact, her opening scene of Now and Then has her duct-taping her bra.
- Aliens: Jeanette Goldstein strapped down to play Vasquez, which is ironic since Vasquez is still stacked.
- This happened to Evanna Lynch in the fifth and sixth Harry Potter movies. While not overly endowed compared to other young actresses her age, she is noticeably bustier than her other female castmates.
- Emma Watson is reported to have resorted to binding herself during some of the later Harry Potter movies, due to "growing up" faster than her character.
- In a rare non-age-related example, Lindsay Lohan's bust was digitally reduced for Herbie: Fully Loaded.
- Averted with The Hunger Games. Jennifer Lawrence refused to tape her breasts down to play Katniss because she didn't want to send a message to young girls that they had to be ultra-skinny.
- Happened to child actress Lina Leandersson during the filming of Let the Right One In - she was a rare averted case of Dawson Casting, being a 13-year old playing a 12-year old, but puberty hit her hard during the latter half of the shoot. She grew outwards so quickly the wardrobe department could barely keep up and the bindings used to keep her both age-appropriate and ambiguously gendered are clearly visible during some of the outdoor shots.
- In My Life as a Dog, pre-teen Saga is a tomboy and top player on the boys' soccer team. To prevent being kicked off the team because of her female identity, she has her friend and teammate Ingemar help her in wrapping a bandage around her chest.
- Tami Erin for her role in The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking (1988). It became obvious during a Nickelodeon interview promoting the movie, when she wore a tight aerobics leotard without the binding that Tami had fairly big boobies that her version of Pippi didn’t have.
- Orphan: Leena Klammer put cloths and bandages around her breasts to appear more childlike.
- In The Railway Children (1970), Sally Thomsett (Phyllis) had to have her breasts strapped down because she was playing a much younger girl. In fact, this was such a big secret at the time that she wasn't allowed to smoke or drink off the set during filming, or for quite a while after that to keep up the pretense.
- Selena Gomez in Ramona and Beezus. While not too much bigger than the average teen actress her age, then 17-year-old Selena's large bust was a bit too big for the 15-year-old she was playing and wore bras that made it look smaller.
- Viola in She's the Man uses an Ace bandage to flatten herself to pull off her crossdress masquerade, removing it only to shower and to flash the stadium at the end of the movie.
- Rumors of this being done deliberately in Star Wars are false. True, Carrie Fisher's breasts were taped down to prevent bouncing under her costume, but she resorted to that expedient herself after George Lucas told her that women couldn't wear bras in space! Lucas eventually got the Hotter and Sexier he originally wanted with the notorious "metal bikini" slavegirl outfit in Return of the Jedi. Fisher went on to relate the whole sordid affair in her candid (and screamingly funny) memoir Wishful Drinking.
- Mara Wilson has written about being humiliated when she began to go through puberty during the filming of Thomas and the Magic Railroad and was asked to wear undergarments to hide her developing body. This distressed her enough that it contributed to her decision to give up film acting.
- A rare adult example: Julie Andrews did this in Thoroughly Modern Millie in order to achieve The Roaring '20s-appropriate pettanko "flapper" look and lampshaded it within the film. For a second Julie Andrews example, see Victor/Victoria, below.
- Victor/Victoria: Victoria (and consequently Julie Andrews) was forced to bind her breasts in order to disguise herself as the "female impersonator" Victor. Once again it's Lampshaded when Victoria complains about the discomfort and expresses a fear that she's damaging her figure.
- The exchange in its entirety for your amusement:
Toddy: Now we've had two major obstacles to overcome...
Victoria: [sobbing] My bosom...
Toddy: First, to convince everyone that you're a man...
Victoria: It's been damned uncomfortable.
Toddy: What has?
Victoria: Strapping down my bosom.
Toddy: Now all you have to do is go out there, and you'll be a star for the next 20 years.
Victoria: Toddy, if I have to strap down my bosom for the next 20 years they're going to look like two empty wallets.
- The exchange in its entirety for your amusement:
- This was famously done to Judy Garland to make her look younger for the role of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz as she was 16 playing an allegedly 12-year-old girl.
- The title character in Yentl binds herself down in order to pass as a man and study at Torah school, which wasn't allowed for women in those days.
Literature
- Referenced in the opening scene of Monstrous Regiment, in which Sweet Polly Oliver Polly Perks is mildly annoyed that she doesn't have to.
Live-Action TV
- Jodelle Ferland in Dark Matter (2015) is supposed to be a teenager, and thus she is always padded down and costumed in baggy, concealing clothing to disguise her large breasts.
- Jordan Todosey did this in Degrassi, where she was playing a trans boy; Adam's shown binding (with an Ace bandage) onscreen. Later it's mentioned in-series that Adam gets a chest compression vest.
- Buffy in later seasons of Family Affair. It did not end well for Anissa Jones, her actress.
- As the premise of The Flint Street Nativity is that the child characters are played by adult actors the female cast-members all had to do this in order to convincingly pass as children. Apparently they wore undersized swimsuits beneath their costumes.
- Referenced in Frasier wherein Daphne reveals she was once on a popular television show in England: "Of course, by the end of the series, I was 16, 5 foot 10, and they had me boozies bound up tighter than a mummy."
- From Game of Thrones, Maisie Williams. When the first season began filming in July 2010, Williams had just turned 13 but looked considerably younger, which fit her role as 11 or 12-year-old Arya Stark. By the time they started shooting season 2 in July 2011, however, Williams was now 14 years old and puberty had started to kick in big time. While it helped that Maisie is fairly short (5'1"), she quickly became considerably more well developed than Arya could realistically have been given that only a few weeks had passed in the storyline, and thus she was almost always costumed in thick, padded shirts or tunics until she got a new, more dress-like outfit in Season 5.
- In Gilmore Girls, Liza Weil had to play herself down with binding and loose clothing for most of the first four seasons as Paris Geller because of her size and when she started the series, was a 24-year-old playing a convincing 15-year-old sophomore; outside of a few scenes and a date prep at the start of season three, she was either dressed in a constricted sweater or a loose blouse. Seasons 4–7 at Yale without the uniform saw her dressing without much need to hide her natural form.
- Lea Michele is naturally curvy, but had to flatten her chest to play Rachel Berry on Glee, where her character is described as being "Kinda hot if you're not into boobs".
- Jennette McCurdy from iCarly. After seasons 1 and 2, the show took to wrapping Sam up in layers of 3 or 4 t-shirts. A few episodes in season 3, they forgot about this, such as the rabbi scene in iSaved Your Life.
- Julianna Rose Mauriello had to have her breasts taped down since puberty on LazyTown since Stephanie is supposed to be 8 years old (or 9 now, since one year's passing has been acknowledged). She was 17 during the last filming.
- That said, 'Stephanie' (Solla Stirða) was played by actual adult women in all the original Icelandic plays from before the TV show, and one of them was quite busty with no attempt to do anything about it, while Julianna definitely had grown between seasons and doesn't really look any bigger in out-of-character shots from the same era.
- Annette Funicello and the other female Mouseketeers, supposedly at Walt Disney's personal insistence. Funicello's rapid development in particular became fodder for comedians.
- Ariel Winter in Modern Family started out flat-chested (it makes sense; she was 11 when the show started) and eventually grew past Sofia Vergara's famously curvy frame (Vergara, though, is 5'7", while Winter is only 5'1") . Similarly to Soleil Moon Frye, Winter revealed in August 2015 that she'd had a breast reduction in June that took her from 32F to 34D, citing negative media attention as one of her primary reasons.
- Done For Science! in an episode of MythBusters, where the myth tested was whether large breasts resulted in bigger tips. Kari did three tests with her assets in different sizes; one with her breasts their usual size, one with her breasts temporarily "enhanced", and one fitting this trope, where her breasts were taped down to reduce them by two cup sizes. Conclusion
- Soleil Moon Frye discussed this in an interview on a Canadian talk show for teens only a couple of months after Punky Brewster was cancelled. She suffered from gigantomastia* , and had breast reduction surgery before her 16th birthday.
- On Small Wonder, the plastic vest Tiffany Brissette wore to simulate Vicki's access panel had to be periodically refitted over the show's four-year run. In the fourth-season episode "Double Dates", Brissette shows us how uncomfortably tight her wardrobe had become.
Music
- Jessica Simpson began her career in show business as a Christian pop singer. During this stage of her career, she would often tape down her breasts for performances because her promoters felt that an attractive blonde with D-cup boobs wasn't the best image for a gospel singer.
Professional Wrestling
- WWE women's wrestler Bayley wears a more suppressed athletic top than the usual revealing women's wrestling garb, due to her persona being geared towards little kids and being very endowed up top.
Theater
- When older cast members of the musical version of Annie would start to develop, many did this in order to avoid being fired from their roles.
Web Video
- In Rapidfire 3, Episode 5
by LoadingReadyRun, a Cloudcuckoolander and also Affably Evil version of Bob Ross was played by Kate Stark. In the Loading Time behind-the-scenes video, she can be seen taking off the compression bandages, shouting "NEVER AGAIN!" (though she did still enjoy the role otherwise).
Western Animation
- Blue Eye Samurai: Mizu is the Sweet Polly Oliver variety; she disguises herself as a male swordsman on her travels, and is shown using a Sarashi under her clothes. It's also shown to be fairly uncomfortable, and it's a testament to her skill that she fights as well as she does while wearing it.
Real Life
- Along with Petite Pride, flappers of The Roaring '20s wore special flattening bras to make them appear younger and more boyish.
- It has become common among female cosplayers to use binders to conceal their chests for cosplaying male characters (or female characters who cross-dress). There are even "cosplay binders" specifically sold for this purpose. note
- Similarly, otokoyaku (male role actresses) of the Takarazuka Revue bind in public and onstage until they have graduated from (left) the Revue. Some retired otokoyaku such as Yuuga Yamato are actually stacked.
- Quite a few trans men will bind their breasts to get a look that reads as male. Some nonbinary people with chest dysphoria will do this as well.
- Even cisgender women with large breasts will sometimes wear garments that make their breasts look smaller ("minimizer" bras are a thing in larger cup sizes), often to keep them more contained, to make certain clothing fit better, and/or to avoid the sexualized attention that many large-breasted women get.
- Patty Maloney once wrote that she had her chest bound whenever she portrayed a little girl.
