Bras are a part of life for most women, but it was not
always so. Over the past century we have lived through the bra revolution,
and, in reality, it lives on. No one knows what the future may bring, but we
can at
least learn the history of the bra.
Before the invention of the modern-day bra, women commonly wore corsets under
their dresses. Corsets were devises designed to narrow a woman's waistline
and were made from whalebones and steel rods. Besides being painful, they were
impractical under some evening gowns, as Mary Phelps Jacob, a New York
socialite, found out after trying on an evening gown. The whalebones poked out
visibly around the low neckline and could be seen through the sheer fabric; so
instead of parting with the dress, Jacob, with the help of her maid, created
what most people consider the first modern bra (or as she called it a
brassier), which derives from the old French word for "upper arm." Jacob's
brassiere was made of two silk handkerchiefs and a pink ribbon. It was
lightweight and did not really have cups to support the breasts, but flattened
them instead which was the fashion at the time. Jacob's brassiere quickly
became popular with her friends and family whom she would make them for, but
it was not until one day when a stranger offered her a dollar in return for
making her a brassier that Jacobs saw the possibility of a profit to be
made. On November
3, 1914, Jacob was awarded a patent for the "backless brassiere." Jacob then
set up business under the name "Caresse Crosby" and sold several hundred
brassieres. But due to lack of publicity, the company went under. Jacob then
sold her patent to the Warner Brothers Corset Company for $1,500. Over the
next 30 years, the Warner Brothers Corset Company made $15 million from Jacob's
brassiere. Jacob died in 1970, but she lived to see the brassiere
go through many transformations. Though business was not her forte, Jacob was
politically minded, and she founded the organization Women Against War. Though it was Jacob's design that began the bra revolution it was not actually
the first bra. In 1893, Marie Tucek patented the first brassiere, which she
called "Breast Supporter." Tucek's bra included two separate pockets for the
breasts and straps that went over the shoulder and were fastened by hook-and- eye closures. But even this was not totally revolutionary, for the idea of
breast support has been around for thousands of years. Styles have since then
fluctuated back and forth from exposing the breasts to hiding them. From
artifacts it can be seen that around 2500 B.C., the Minoan women who lived
on the Greek island of Crete wore bra-like garments that literally lifted
their bare breasts out of their clothes. Later artifacts show Roman and Greek
women strapping their breasts down to reduce their bust size. Jacob's design
was definitely not the last step in bra design, either.
Even with the backing of the Warner Company, these bras were not yet
mainstream. In fact, they were very much low-key in comparison to corsets.
Then came World War I, and in 1917 the U.S. War Industries Board asked women
to stop buying corsets to free up the metal. The results? Bras became
widespread, and 28,000 tons of metal, enough to build two
battleships, was free. In 1928 a Russian immigrant, Ida Rosenthal, with the
backing
of her husband, founded Maidenform. Rosenthal was the first to create bust
size categories, or more commonly known as cup sizes. Maidenform developed
bras for every woman in every stage of life. In 1935, Warner, the same company
that bought Jacob's patent, took Rosenthal's work a step further and created
the A-D standardized cup system still used today. Also in the 1930s Warner
introduced the all-elastic bra, which showed off a woman's curves. Then, in
the 1940s, again came a World War, and as such so did a scarcity of the
natural materials used to make bras. Instead of buckling under like corsets,
bras turned to synthetic materials. Since then, there have been numerous
inventions and renditions in the field of bra design strapless bras such as:
the WonderBra, the 18-hour bra, cross-your-heart bras, training bras, jogging
bras, and after the invention of the bra what naturally comes next... the
bikini, which premiered in Paris 1946.
The revolution lives on, but in the end, all of this tries to answer two age- old
problems: breast support and style.
If you are interested at all in the history of bra advertising check out the Bali Bra
gallery for some wonderful and fun examples.
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Name: Shaggy
Comments:
Jonelle, once again you bend over backwards to make something great for this online rag and you succeed again. Awesome job.
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