Let me be plain with you at this hour, because nothing good comes of overselling kit. This is a low-support bra. It is designed for light impact sports and workouts, and that is the manufacturer's own wording, not a hedge I have added. If you are hitting serves for an hour it is the wrong garment and you should buy for the impact you actually generate.
For a hitting session, a warm-up, a studio class, a long quiet stretch at the end of the day — which is my sort of hour — it is very good indeed.
It is seamless, which is the whole point: with no seams there is nothing to rub, and chafing is the injury nobody reports and everybody has. The fabric is 80% recycled polyester, 12% polyamide and 8% elastane, quick-drying and breathable. The back is a racerback, so the shoulders move freely and nothing slides off during an overhead.
What makes it good is the construction.
Below the chest sits a wide ribbed band, which is where the support actually lives on a garment like this — a broad band spreading the load rather than a narrow elastic cutting a line. Made in Turkey. Wash it at 30 degrees with like colours, iron low, and keep it away from bleach, the dry cleaner and the tumble dryer.
Rib-knitted details run down the sides and around the neck.
Colours run Simply Purple, Clematis Blue, Urban Chic, Pink Glo, Outerspace and Lily Pad.
You will get use out of it everywhere from an early indoor session to a court back home in high summer, and by the way, it is also perfect for a sauna evening, which here is not a treat but the ordinary end of a day. Kuopio suits a night shift. The Market Square has been selling kalakukko, that rye loaf baked around fish, since 1818 — a thing made to be carried and eaten late.
The Korttelimuseo keeps eleven old wooden houses standing as one intact block, lit low and completely quiet after hours. And Puijo Tower puts a slowly revolving restaurant seventy-five metres up, where the whole lake system turns past you while you sit still.
"Seventy-five metres up, the room turning, the lakes going by, and nobody in a hurry. That is my kind of shift."
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