Bra history 101 (with nifty vintage photos)

In honor of the 100th Anniversary of the invention of the bra, “The Secret History of the Bra” aired the last 2 Fridays on the National Geographic Channel. A timeline of bras can be viewed in video format on their website, here.

The program starts with the corset, which was considered both proper and sexy. The corset fulfilled 2 needs for the female figure. It created the tiny waistline that was fashionable and accentuated breasts. There was not much concern for the mis-shapened internal organs women experienced from wearing tight corsets…

During WWI a ban on corsets was created because of the military’s need for steel. With the sales of corsets at a halt, there was enough steel available to build 2 battleships! I can’t imagine women were too sad about giving up an undergarment that crushed them and made it hard to move and breathe…

Snopes.com reports that Clara P. Clark’s “improved corset” of 1874 may have taken the corset one step closer to the modern day bra by adding individual breast pockets and shoulder straps that criss-crossed in back.

During the popularity of the masculine figure on Flappers of the 1920s, a specially designed bra that laced on the sides was developed to cinch & flatten the chest. A boyish figure was in style then.

In 1928, William Rosenthal and his wife Ida were designing undergarments, and developed the band/cup sizing system we still use today. According to Wikipedia, Ida has a lot more to do with today’s bra than most people think!

In the 1950s, curvy women were considered sexy, a la Marilyn Monroe. Bras began helping out those who wanted more up front by adding a cup size or creating a false front with very cone-shaped bra cups. The difficulty for bra manufacturers of the time was that they could not show a woman wearing a bra in their newspaper or TV ads. Remember, this was before Lucy and Ricky were allowed to announce a pregnancy on “I Love Lucy”, and had to say they were ‘in a family way’. When bras could be shown in ads, Maidenform became a household name with their “I dreamed I… in my Maidenform bra” – showing women doing anything and everything they wanted to do while in total comfort.

To promote “The Secret History of the Bra” on NGC, NBC’s Today show featured the Sr. VP of Design and Development at Maidenform. She had mannequins dressed in vintage bras and their modern day counterparts.

1. The original Maidenform bra was patented in the 1920s. Made of a woven cotton net, all shaping came from the center gore separating the breasts and slight shirring in the cup fabric. There is no elastic or adjustable strap featured on this bra, in fact adjustable straps were not seen on bras until 1942. You can hardly compare this to today’s stretchy, flexible bras.

2. Moving up the timeline, the vintage strapless plunge bra has a very pointed cup. Today’s best strapless bras haves elastic in the band to help it stay up and make it comfortable for all-day wearing.

3. A vintage sweater bra, or bullet bra, is shown below next to a modern T-shirt bra. The old one make me think of the Rydell High cheerleaders in the movie “Grease”. It has very cone shaped cups – like Madonna’s Jean Paul Gaultier Blonde Ambition Tour look of 1990.
Today’s push-up bras look great under a sweater, but have a natural, rounded shape.

Maidenform was quick to say they have chemical engineers involved with development and dying of bras, and scientists to develop fabrics to “minute specifications” i.e. just the right amount of stretch. Event the simplest bra has 30 parts, she explained.

The Today show website says, “Even the simplest bra is composed of complex industrial parts that require the expertise of chemical engineers, biomechanics scientists, veteran seamstresses and color specialists. It takes hundreds of machines to produce…”

You can view the National Geographic clip here, or the Today Show clip here.

Some little-known bra facts include:

• Caterpillar spit and crude oil are among the ingredients of some bras
• Over 4,000,000 new bras are created on average every day
• Women own an average of 6.5 bras (I have way more!)
• In the last 15 years, the average bust size has increased from 34B to 36C
• How many ounces in a cup? An A cup – approximately 8 fluid ounces; B cup – 13 ounces; C cup – 21 ounces; and D cup – 27 ounces. They were originally known as egg cup, tea cup, coffee cup and challenge cup. Here is a funny video equating bra cup size to fruit size.
• Consumers spend around $16 billion a year on bras.
• The word bra (used to mean what we think of as a bra) first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1911.