A nineteen-year-old patented the modern brassiere in 1914
Ancient Greek and Roman women already bound their breasts for support, yet the modern bra is credited to nineteen-year-old Mary Phelps Jacob, who stitched one from two handkerchiefs and ribbon in 1913. Vogue printed the word brassiere in 1907, and on 3 November 1914 she received the first patent in America's new brassiere category.
Jacob, later known as Caresse Crosby, was a New York socialite fed up with a whalebone corset poking through a party dress. She sold her invention to friends for a dollar, ran a Boston factory with two workers, then let Warner Brothers, a corset maker, buy her patent for $1,500; Warner reportedly earned more than $15 million from bras over the next thirty years. She was not alone. Christine Hardt of Dresden patented a modern brassiere in 1899, Sigmund Lindauer of Stuttgart patented a mass-production design in 1912, and New Yorker Marie Tucek's 1893 breast supporter resembled a push-up bra. Women filed about half of all bra patents. The tale of an inventor called Otto Titzling comes from a 1971 joke book.
Greek women wrapped a wool or linen band called an apodesmos across the chest, and a Roman mosaic shows athletes in breast-bands. Linen fragments found in 2008 at Lengberg Castle in Austria, dated 1440 to 1485, have sewn cups, eyelets and in one case shoulder straps. From the 16th century corsets pushed wealthy women's busts upward, but they faded after 1917, when metal was needed for tanks and munitions and 1920s fashion favoured boyish figures.
The French word brassière once meant a short garment covering the arms and upper body; the French themselves say soutien-gorge, throat-supporter. A Syracuse newspaper used brassiere in 1893, and by the 1930s it had shrunk to bra. Cup sizing came from S.H. Camp and Company, which matched breast size and droop to the letters A through D in 1932; Warner adopted cup sizes in 1937, and adjustable hook-and-eye bands arrived the same decade.
Underwires appeared in the 1930s but spread only after World War II freed up metal; Howard Hughes designed one for Jane Russell in The Outlaw in 1941. Canadian Louise Poirier created the Wonderbra push-up in 1964, a garment with 54 design elements that in the US once sold one every 15 seconds.
Source: Bra
