100% cotton bras (organic too)

Post Reply New Topic

This is a follow-up post to my post in the General Autism Discussion forum on socks. I'll repeat and adapt the introduction here for anyone who hasn't read the other post.

I have been researching online sources for several kinds of clothing with high cotton percentages, and thought I would share what I've found in case it's useful to anyone with similar sensitivities. My skin can't handle wool or other animal hair fibres (including really soft ones like cashmere and angora), and generally can't handle significant percentages of synthetic material (small percentages are sometimes okay, but it varies according to criteria I don't understand). The fibres that I can wear without trouble are cotton, linen, silk, probably hemp, and sometimes rayon (though I generally avoid rayon). Most of my clothing is cotton, though I'm starting to branch out into the other fibres that I don't have difficulty with.

Some of the hardest things for me to find in 100% or high-percentage cotton have been socks, underwear, and bras, and those are the items in my wardrobe that have been mostly worn-out recently, so they are what I have been researching. In this post, I am listing sources of bras I have found with 100% cotton fabric; a listing of '100% cotton' doesn't always include the trim composition, so I've also categorized them according to whether the trim is cotton, cotton-wrapped elastic, or exposed elastic. I have also recently decided to buy organic cotton whenever possible, and since this is a list of resources I compiled for myself, bras in this list are made from organic cotton. Since I'm currently in the US, most of the resources I've listed are US-based; I've also included a few from outside the US with less detail than the main list.

I plan to follow the socks post and this post with another post on underwear.

The format for the list is:

Maker or seller: name/type of bra - price (comments)

Organic cotton including trim
Cottonique: Drawstring bra $30.75 (ties)
Cottonique: Slimfit drawstring bra $30.75 (adjustable slider probably plastic)

Organic cotton with cloth-wrapped elastic
Cottonfield: Bra top - $26
Decent Exposures: Unbra - "The Un-Bra costs between $32 and $59. Prices vary by fabric and size. " (The organic cotton / size combination I tried was $32.)
Cottonique: Slimfit pull over bra - $24.75
Cottonique: Women's front closure support bra - $32.75
Cottonique: Women's bra liner - $19.75 (designed to go under a well-fitting bra of less comfortable fabric)

Organic cotton with exposed non-cotton trim
Blue Canoe: Cotton bra - $34.00 (covered elastic around ribs; satin elastic straps)
Peau Ethique: [doesn't appear to sell online, but other companies such as Faerie's Dance sell their products]
--'elegance' line (bras and panties) (trim make-up unclear; could be cotton-wrapped elastic)
--'eternelle' line (bra and panties)

And that's the end of my rather short list of bras. Feel free to add more; if they're organic cotton, I'll probably add them to my list, and if they're not, they may still be useful to others.