The Boob Gap: Improving Button-up Shirts for Women
We’ve all been burned by the dreaded boob gap before.
Picture this: You buy a new button-up shirt, and you’re excited to roll it out as a feature in your curated wardrobe. The first day you wear it, you’re feeling good, until you’re mid-meeting and realize that reaching across the table has made your shirt gape open across your chest.
UGH.
Now you’re self-conscious and spend the rest of the day walking around with your arms crossed over your chest to keep that gap closed.
A Straightforward Fix
The boob gap in most button-up shirts for women is revealing, and not in a cute way.
It makes all of us uncomfortable and it makes you wonder if the designers for these brands ever actually try their pieces on!
Well, we decided that enough is enough. No more gaping holes where a button should be. No more unnecessary layers to keep your chest covered beneath your shirts, and no more anxiety about what’s on show that shouldn’t be.
No matter what size you are, what age you are, or what kind of lifestyle you have, you deserve to look and feel like a knockout in your clothes.
As it turns out, fixing the boob gap was pretty straightforward.
Why 8 Buttons
Most women’s shirts only have six or seven buttons, and the design doesn’t allow quite enough fabric in the chest area. This means that the shirt pulls to accommodate your body and your movements, creating tension between the buttons — and because the spaces between them are too large, this tension causes a gap to emerge. Sometimes the cut of the shirt has so little chest space that even sitting still will bring on a boob gap.
We looked at dozens of shirts and saw the same thing over and over: the cut was narrow in the chest and back, and there were not enough buttons to keep everything under wraps… so we changed the design and added a button.
Every Tradlands shirt has eight buttons, spaced carefully down the placket — the strip down the middle where you button up your shirt. While it doesn’t seem like it would make a big difference, the extra button reduces the space between each button significantly, and makes each section close up much more snugly.
It also helps to allow some extra material in the chest area in the actual design as well. Each of our shirts are designed with this in mind — that most of us need a little bit more wriggle room up top than you would get with a traditional cut.
This means adding some extra space in the front of the shirt, and also in the back and shoulders. We don’t want too much space, or you’ll be swimming in your shirt, but enough that you can move comfortably without the shirt pulling tight across your back or chest.
We thought that the extra button was going to get all the attention from customers, but the relaxed, feminine cut has also got people pretty excited.
Each Tradlands shirt is designed to make you feel unstoppable every time you walk out the door. They’re tailored to create classic lines with a modern twist — timeless elegance combined with bone-deep confidence. They’re made with you in mind.
Tell us your experience with the boob gap and if any of your Tradlands purchases have made a difference to you. Leave a comment below. We'd love to hear from you.