A Brief History of the Bra

For most of recorded history, women's undergarments were less about supporting the bust and more about reshaping the entire torso. The corset dominated European fashion from the 16th century onward, compressing the waist and pushing the bust upward as a byproduct of its primary goal of creating an hourglass silhouette.

Corsets were typically stiffened with whalebone or later with steel boning, and they were laced tight enough to genuinely reshape the ribcage over time. The health consequences were significant and well documented by the late 19th century. Physicians raised concerns about compressed organs, restricted breathing, and skeletal deformation. The corset became a symbol not just of fashion but of the physical constraints placed on women's bodies.

By the 1890s, early reformers were designing "rational dress" alternatives, including divided bust supporters and looser waist cinchers that separated the breast support function from the waist compression function. The seeds of the modern bra were quietly being planted.

The pivotal moment in bra history is usually dated to November 3, 1914, when Mary Phelps Jacob — a young New York socialite who later became better known as the bohemian publisher Caresse Crosby — was granted US patent number 1,115,674 for a "backless brassiere."

The story is wonderfully practical. Preparing to attend a debutante ball, Jacob found her stiff corset cover was visible beneath her sheer evening gown. With the help of her French maid, she fashioned two pocket handkerchiefs and some pink ribbon into a soft garment that lay flat against her body and provided separation without the bulk of a corset.

Her friends wanted one too. She started making them. A stranger offered her $1.50 for hers. And then, with the business instincts of someone who was perhaps better suited to publishing avant garde literature than running a lingerie company, she sold the patent to the Warner Brothers Corset Company for $1,500. Warner's reportedly made $15 million from it over the next 30 years.

Jacob herself seemed unbothered. She used the money to move to Paris and co-found the Black Sun Press, which published early works by Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. A good trade, by most accounts.

The bra's adoption was dramatically accelerated by World War I. In 1917, the US War Industries Board asked American women to stop buying corsets, as the steel used in them was needed for the war effort. Women complied, and in doing so freed up an estimated 28,000 tons of metal — enough, it was said, to build two battleships.

The cultural shift was as significant as the practical one. Women who had worn corsets their whole lives discovered they could live without them. Combined with the broader social changes of the war years — women entering the workforce in large numbers, taking on physical roles previously reserved for men — the lighter, more practical brassiere gained permanent ground.

By the 1920s, the silhouette had shifted entirely. The flapper aesthetic actively flattened the bust rather than lifting it, and the early bras of this era reflected that — minimal construction, more of a bandeau than a shaped garment. It was not until the 1930s that the industry began developing the cup sizes and support structures that would eventually become standard.

The concept of alphabetically designated cup sizes was introduced in 1932 by the S.H. Camp and Company, which published a sizing chart correlating cup size with breast weight and pendulousness. The cups were designated A through D, based on the difference between the bust and underbust measurements.

Warner's adopted the system and popularized it. By the late 1930s, A through D had become the dominant sizing framework in the United States and United Kingdom. The system was functional but limited — it assumed that breast size was adequately described by four letters, which served most of the market in an era when size range simply was not a priority.

The French, Germans, and other Europeans developed their own parallel systems, creating the international inconsistency that this site exists to help navigate.

Post-war prosperity and the renewed emphasis on femininity in mainstream culture produced one of the most architecturally ambitious bras in history: the conical, torpedo shaped bra of the 1950s, associated most strongly with Howard Hughes and his engineering team's design for Jane Russell in the 1943 film The Outlaw (though the design was apparently so uncomfortable that Russell quietly replaced it with her own solution for most of the filming).

The 1950s silhouette demanded a high, pointed, separated bust line, and the bra industry delivered with enthusiasm. Wired, heavily structured, and frankly defiant of natural breast shape, these bras were feats of fabric engineering that prioritized the fashionable silhouette above all else.

They are now beloved as vintage artifacts and occasionally as costume pieces, and serve as a useful reminder that "supportive" and "comfortable" have not always been the same thing.

In 1968, at the Miss America protest in Atlantic City, feminist demonstrators threw items of "women's oppression" into a Freedom Trash Can. Bras, girdles, high heels, and copies of Playboy were among the items discarded. No bras were actually burned — that detail was embellished by a reporter drawing a parallel to Vietnam War draft card burning — but the "bra burning" myth stuck and became one of the most durable, if inaccurate, images of second wave feminism.

The cultural moment was real even if the fires were not. The braless look became a genuine fashion and political statement in the late 1960s and 1970s. The natural silhouette was embraced as a rejection of the constructed femininity of the 1950s, and many women simply stopped wearing bras or wore the lightest possible alternatives.

The industry responded with softer, more natural looking styles. The underwire, which had existed since the 1930s, became more refined. The foam cup emerged as a way to provide shape without visible seaming. The seeds of the modern T-shirt bra were being planted.

The modern sports bra was invented in 1977 when Lisa Lindahl and Polly Smith sewed two jockstraps together and called the result the "Jockbra." It was later renamed the Jogbra and became one of the most significant innovations in activewear history, enabling women to exercise comfortably at high impact levels for the first time.

The 1990s and 2000s brought the Wonderbra's global moment, the rise of supermodel culture, and an era dominated by push-up and heavily padded styles. Meanwhile, a quieter revolution was happening in the specialist lingerie community — the realization that the standard fitting method of "add 4 inches to your underbust" was producing systematically wrong sizes for millions of women.

The internet changed everything. Online communities — particularly the subreddit r/ABraThatFits, founded in 2011 — began sharing the evidence that the average woman was wearing the wrong size and explaining how to measure correctly. The knowledge that sizes like 28FF or 32H existed and were wearable by ordinary people spread through social media and changed the conversation.

Today the bra industry is a global market worth over $40 billion annually. Sizes run from AA to M cup and beyond in specialist ranges. Inclusive sizing, diverse skin tone ranges, sustainable materials, and adaptive designs for disabled wearers are mainstream conversations. The garment that started as two pocket handkerchiefs and a length of ribbon has come a remarkably long way.