A bra, short for brassiere or brassière, is a form-fitting undergarment that is primarily used to support and cover women's breasts. It can serve a range of other practical and aesthetic purposes, including enhancing or reducing the appearance of breast size and creating cleavage. Bras can also serve specific functions, such as nursing bras to facilitate breastfeeding or sports bras to minimize discomfort during exercise.
The bra gained widespread adoption in the early twentieth century, when it largely replaced the corset. The first modern bra is attributed to Caresse Crosby, a New York socialite who created the garment in 1910 by using two handkerchiefs and some ribbon. After patenting her design in 1914, she briefly manufactured bras at at two-woman factory in Boston before selling her patent to the Warner Brothers Corset Company, which began mass-producing the garment. A typical bra consists of a chest band that wraps around the torso, supporting two breast cups that are held in place by shoulder straps. A bra is usually closed in the back by a hook and eye fastener. However, bras are available in a large range of styles, whose designs can vary widely. Initially, the bra was exclusively an undergarment, but the sports bra has gained acceptance as outerwear, as have fashions that deliberately expose the bra straps.
Bras have gained symbolic significance beyond their mere functionality. Since a girl typically begins wearing her first bra during puberty, the garment can symbolize a rite of passage to adulthood. However, some feminists have argued that bras sexualize and objectify women's breasts to conform to male expectations. Surveys suggest that increasing numbers of women are going braless or adopting more comfortable wireless bras and bralettes for reasons of comfort.
Etymology
The term brassiere, from French brassière, was used by the Evening Herald in Syracuse, New York, in 1893. It gained wider acceptance in 1904 when the DeBevoise Company used it in their advertising copy—although the word is actually French for a child's undershirt. In French, it is called a soutien-gorge. It and other early versions resembled a camisole stiffened with boning.
Vogue magazine first used the term brassiere in 1907, and by 1911 the word had entered the Oxford English Dictionary. On 3 November 1914, the newly formed US patent category for "brassieres" was inaugurated with the first patent issued to Mary Phelps Jacob, later and better known as Caresse Crosby. In the 1930s, brassiere/brassière was gradually shortened to bra. As many as 30 kinds of bras are available, including push-up, strapless, bandeau, demicup, sports bra, the minimiser, padded, a T-shirt bra, multiway, plunge, wireless, maternity, seamless, silicone, and stick-on. The history of the brassière is full of myths in which people like Caresse Crosby, Howard Hughes, Herminie Cadolle and Otto Titzling command center stage.
Before the spread of brassières, the female bust was encased in corsets and structured garments called "bust improvers", made of boning and lace. The history of corsets indicates they started to go out of fashion by 1917, when metal was needed to make tanks and munitions for World War I, With the return to more womanly figures in the 1930s, corsetry maintained a strong demand even at the height of the Great Depression. In 1989, Jean Paul Gaultier dressed Madonna in a pink corset. Soon Westwood introduced an elastic-sided variant that worked as a balcony to push up the cleavage. According to Rebecca Scritchfield, the resurgent popularity of corsets is driven by "the picture on Instagram of somebody with a tiny waist and giant boobs."
When corsets became unfashionable, brassières and padding helped to project, display and emphasize the breasts. In 1893, New Yorker Marie Tucek was granted a patent for a "breast supporter", described as a modification of the corset, and was very similar to a modern push-up bra designed to support the breasts. It consisted of a plate made of metal, cardboard or other stiff material shaped to fit against the torso under the breasts, following the contour of the breasts. It was covered with silk, canvas or other cloth, which extended above the plate to form a pocket for each breast. The plate curved around the torso and ended near the armpits.
Early brassières
Wearing a garment to support the breasts may date back to ancient Greece. later stēthodesmē, mastodesmos and mastodeton, all meaning "breast-band", a band of wool or linen that was wrapped across the breasts and tied or pinned at the back. Roman women wore breast-bands during sport, such as those shown on the Coronation of the Winner mosaic.
Fragments of linen textiles found at Lengberg Castle in East Tyrol in Austria dated to between 1440 and 1485 are believed to have been bras. Two of them had cups made from two pieces of linen sewn with fabric that extended to the bottom of the torso with a row of six eyelets for fastening with a lace or string. One had two shoulder straps and was decorated with lace in the cleavage.
From the 16th century, the undergarments of wealthier women in the Western world were dominated by the corset, which pushed the breasts upwards. In the later 19th century, clothing designers began experimenting with alternatives, splitting the corset into multiple parts: a girdle-like restraining device for the lower torso, and devices that suspended the breasts from the shoulder to the upper torso. Frustrated with a whale bone corset that kept popping through a new party dress, she created the bra from two handkerchiefs and some ribbon to show off her cleavage.
Since it made her look better, Phelps Jacob a.k.a. Polly started selling bras to her friends for one dollar. Soon she founded the Fashion Form Brassière Company, a two-woman factory in Boston, and patented the first bra as "the backless brassière" in 1914. After making a few hundred bras and some orders from department stores, she was persuaded by her husband to close the company. She sold the patent to The Warner Brothers Corset Company for US$1,500. In the next 30 years, Warner Brothers made more than US$15 million from the design. An urban legend that the brassière was invented by a man named Otto Titzling who lost a lawsuit with Phillip de Brassière originated with the 1971 book Bust-Up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling and the Development of the Bra and was propagated in a comedic song from the movie Beaches.
Women have played a large part in the design and manufacture of the bra, accounting for half the patents filed. The Dresden-based German, Christine Hardt, patented the first modern brassière in 1899. Sigmund Lindauer from Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Germany, developed a brassière for mass production and patented it in 1912. It was mass-produced by Mechanische Trikotweberei Ludwig Maier und Cie. in Böblingen, Germany. In the United States, Mary Phelps Jacob received a patent in 1914 for the first brassière design that is recognized as the basis for modern bras. Mass production in the early 20th century made the garment widely available to women in the United States, England, Western Europe, and other countries influenced by western fashion. though it did not gain widespread popularity until the 1950s, when the end of World War II freed metal for domestic use. Aviator and filmmaker Howard Hughes designed a prototype for an aerodynamic underwire bra for Jane Russell when filming The Outlaw in 1941. According to Hughes, the resultant amount was "the length of the actual cleavage is five and one-quarter inches." Bras in 1940s left a substantial amount of fabric in the center, thus creating a separation of breasts instead of the pushed-together cleavage of today. Frederick Mellinger of Frederick's of Hollywood created the first padded bra in 1947, followed by an early push-up bra a year later to the cups to help the breasts look fuller. There are different designs, from a slight lift to a highly pushed-up effect, that provide coverage and support, hides nipples, add shape to breasts that are far apart and adds comfort. There also are semi-padded bras that suits deep neck dresses. With the advent of padded bras, sales of removable pads took a plunge, though some padded bras also have removable inserts.
Brassières were initially manufactured by small production companies and supplied to retailers. The term "cup" was not used until 1916, and manufacturers relied on stretchable cups to accommodate different sized breasts. Women with larger or sagging breasts had the choice of long-line bras, built-up backs, wedge-shaped inserts between the cups, wider straps, Lastex, firm bands under the cup, and light boning.
In October 1932, the S.H. Camp and Company correlated the size and pendulousness of breasts to letters A through D. Camp's advertising featured letter-labeled profiles of breasts in the February 1933 issue of Corset and Underwear Review. In 1937, Warner began to feature cup sizing in its products. Adjustable bands were introduced using multiple hook and eye closures in the 1930s. By the time World War II ended, most fashion-conscious women in Europe and North America were wearing brassière, and women in Asia, Africa, and Latin America began to adopt it. It also has a lower, shorter and narrower center gore that maintains support while increasing cleavage by allowing the gore to drop several inches below the middle of the breasts. Plunge bras comes in different depths that provide great cleavage. Like a push up bra these have some padding and provide support,
The first push-up bra was created in 1964 by Canadian Louise Poirier and patented for Wonderbra, the central, side and back panels, and straps, are cut to manufacturer's specifications. Many layers of fabric may be cut at the same time using computer-controlled lasers or bandsaw shearing devices. The pieces are assembled by piece workers using industrial sewing machines or automated machines. Coated metal hooks and eyes are sewn in by machine and heat processed or ironed into the back ends of the band and a tag or label is attached or printed onto the bra itself.
The chest band and cups, not the shoulder straps, are designed to support the weight of women's breasts. Strapless bras rely on an underwire and additional seaming and stiffening panels to support them. The shoulder straps of some sports bras cross over at the back to take the pressure off the shoulders when arms are raised. Manufacturers continually experiment with proprietary frame designs. For example, the Playtex "18-Hour Bra" model utilizes an M-Frame design. Others use padding or shaping materials to enhance bust size or cleavage.
Size and fitting
In most countries, bras come in a band and cup size, such as 34C; 34 is the chest band, or the measurement around the torso directly underneath the breasts, and C is the cup size, which refers to the volume of the breasts. Most bras are offered in 36 sizes; the Triumph "Doreen" comes in 67 sizes, up to 46J.
The cup size varies depending on the band size. A D cup on a 38 band is larger in volume than a D cup on a 34 band, as the volume of a woman's breast increases as her chest band dimension increases. In countries that have adopted the European EN 13402 dress-size standard, the measurement is rounded to the nearest multiple of.
International manufacturing standards and measurement systems vary widely. Bras are designed for an ideal body, but women's anatomy vary widely. Ten percent of women's breasts are asymmetrical, with the left breast being larger in 62 percent of cases. One woman's breasts may be ptotic and widely spaced, another's might be centered closely on the chest, upright, and very full. As a result, finding a correctly fitting bra is extremely difficult. When women find a bra that appears to fit, they tend to stay with that size, even though they may lose and gain weight.
In a survey in the United Kingdom, 60 per cent of over 2,000 women between the ages of 16 to 75 said they had had a bra fitting, and 99 per cent said that fit was the least important factor when selecting a bra. Increased publicity about the issue of poorly fitted bras has increased the number of women seeking a fitting. The UK retailer Marks & Spencer stated that about 8,000 women are fitted for bras in their stores weekly.
Bra experts recommend professional bra fittings from the lingerie department of a clothing store or a specialty lingerie store, especially for cup sizes D or larger, and particularly if there has been significant weight gain or loss, or if the wearer is continually adjusting her bra.
Signs of a loose bra band include the band riding up the back. If the band causes flesh to spill over the edges, it is too small. A woman can test whether a bra band is too tight or loose by reversing the bra on her torso so that the cups are in the back and then check for fit and comfort. Experts suggest that women choose a band size that fits using the outermost set of hooks. This allows the wearer to use the tighter hooks as the bra stretches during its lifetime.
Styles
Bras may be designed to enhance a woman's breast size, or to create cleavage, or for other aesthetic, fashion, or more practical considerations. Nursing bras are designed to aid breastfeeding. Compression bras, such as sports bras, push against and minimize breast movement, whereas encapsulation bras have cups for support. Breast support may be built into some swimsuits, camisoles and dresses. Cancer bras are designed specifically for breast cancer patients who have undergone a mastectomy. The styles provide post-surgical support, and some include pads or pockets for stuffing.
Bras come in a variety of styles, including backless, balconette, convertible, shelf, full cup, full coverage bra, demi-cup, minimizing, padded, plunge, lounge bra, posture, push-up, racerback, sheer, strapless, T-shirt, underwire, unlined, and soft cup.
Culture
Fashion
Women's choices about what bra to wear are consciously and unconsciously affected by social perceptions of the ideal female body shape, which changes over time. As lingerie, women wear bras for sex appeal. Bras can also be used to make a social statement as evidenced by Jean-Paul Gaultier's designs and the cone-shaped bra Madonna wore outside her clothing on her Blond Ambition World Tour.
In the 1920s in the United States – the flapper era – the fashion was to flatten the breasts. During the 1940s and 1950s, the sweater girl became fashionable, supported by a bullet bra as worn by Jane Russell and Patti Page. In the early 1960s, smaller breasts gained popularity, and in the late 1990s larger breasts became more fashionable. In the 1970s women sought more comfortable and natural-looking bras. From that point forward, sports bras were increasingly worn as outerwear.
Madonna was one of the first to start showing her bra straps, in the late 1980s. A corset she wore as outerwear during her 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour sold for US$52,000 in 2012 at the Christie's Pop Culture auction in London. Versace's autumn 2013 couture collection featured fashions that were open in the front, revealing underwire bras. It became fashionable from the early 1990s to wear clothing that showed bra straps.
Wearing clothes that reveal the bra or straps became so common that Cosmopolitan created guidelines in 2012 on how to expose them. Advice included avoiding plain, flesh-toned, smooth-cup bras, so that the exposure does not appear accidental; making sure the bra is in good condition; and wearing a style that either matches the colour of the outerwear or is dramatically different.
Decreasing Western usage
While a few women have a medical and surgical need to wear a brassiere, informal surveys have found that many women began wearing bras to be fashionable, to conform to social or maternal pressure, or for physical support. Very few cited comfort as the reason. In fact, many women experience so much discomfort that they remove their bra as soon as they can. Being seen in public while not wearing a bra has become more acceptable over the past 6 decades, encouraging more women to go without. In 2016, Allure magazine fashion director Rachael Wang wrote, "Going braless is as old as feminism but it seems to be bubbling to the surface more recently as a direct response to Third Wave moments like #freethenipple hashtag campaign, increased trans-visibility like Caitlyn Jenner's Vanity Fair cover... and Lena Dunham's show Girls."
In an online survey for All You magazine in 2013, 25 percent of women reported that they do not wear a bra every day. Surveys have reported that 5–25 per cent of Western women do not wear a bra.
A National No Bra Day was first observed in the United States on 9 July 2011. Women posted on Twitter about the relief they felt when taking off their bra. More than 250,000 people expressed an interest in "attending" the day on a Facebook page. No Bra Day is now observed internationally on 13 October.
Third-world usage
Bras are not universally worn around the world; in some third-world countries bras may cost up to 10–30 hours of a woman's wages, making them unaffordable to most of the population. Bras are highly prized at second-hand markets in West Africa. The Uplift Project provides recycled bras to women in developing countries. Since 2005 they have shipped 330,000, including to Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga, and Cambodia.
In 2009 Somalia's hard-line Islamic group Al-Shabaab forced women to shake their breasts at gunpoint to see if they were wearing bras, which they called "un-Islamic". A resident of Mogadishu whose daughters were whipped said, "The Islamists say a woman's chest should be firm naturally, or flat."
Economic impact
Consumers spend around $16 billion a year worldwide on bras. That increased from 2006, when the average American woman owned six, one of which was strapless, and one in a colour other than white. British women in a 2009 survey reported that they owned an average of 16 bras.
The average bra size among North American women has changed from 34B in 1983 to a 34DD in 2012–2013, and from 36C in 2013 to 36DD in the UK during 2014–2015. The change in bra size has been linked to growing obesity rates, breast implants, increased birth control usage, estrogen mimicking pollutants, the availability of a larger selection of bras, and women wearing better fitting bras.
Bras are made in Asian countries, including Sri Lanka, India, and China. While there has been some social pressure from the anti-sweatshop and anti-globalization movements on manufacturers to reduce use of sweatshop labour, most major apparel manufacturers rely on them directly and indirectly. Prior to 2005, a trade agreement limited textile imports to the European Union and the US. China was exporting US$33.9 billion in textiles and clothing each year to the EU and the US. When those quotas expired on 1 January 2005, the so-called Bra Wars began. Within six months, China shipped 30 million more bras to the two markets: 33 per cent more to the US and 63 per cent more to the EU. an average bra cost £29.80. Africa imported US$107 million worth of bras, with South Africa accounting for 40 per cent. Morocco was second and Nigeria third, while Mauritius topped purchasing on a per capita basis.
In countries where labour costs are low, bras that cost US$5–7 to manufacture sell for US$50 or more in American retail stores. female garment workers in Sri Lanka earned about US$2.20 per day. In 2009, residents in the textile manufacturing city of Gurao in the Guangdong province of China made more than 200 million bras. Children were employed to assemble bras and were paid 0.30 yuan for every 100 bra straps they helped assemble. In one day they could earn 20 to 30 yuan.
Western feminist opinions
In 1968 at the feminist Miss America protest, protesters symbolically threw a number of feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can". These included bras, which were among items the protesters called "instruments of female torture" and accouterments of what they perceived to be enforced femininity. A local news story in the Atlantic City Press erroneously reported that "the bras, girdles, falsies, curlers, and copies of popular women's magazines burned in the 'Freedom Trash Can'". Individuals who were present said that no one burned a bra nor did anyone take off her bra.
Feminism and "bra-burning" became linked in popular culture. The analogous term jockstrap-burning has since been coined as a reference to masculism. While feminist women did not literally burn their bras, some stopped wearing them in protest. The feminist author Bonnie J. Dow has suggested that the association between feminism and bra-burning was encouraged by individuals who opposed the feminist movement. "Bra-burning" created an image that women weren't really seeking freedom from sexism, but were attempting to assert themselves as sexual beings. This might lead individuals to believe, as Susan J. Douglas wrote, that the women were merely trying to be "trendy, and to attract men." Some feminist activists believe that anti-feminists use the bra burning myth and the subject of going braless to trivialize what the protesters were trying to accomplish at the feminist 1968 Miss America protest and the feminist movement in general.
The trope of feminists burning their bras was anticipated by an earlier generation of feminists who called for burning corsets as a step toward liberation. In 1873 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward wrote:
Some feminists began arguing in the 1960s and 1970s that the bra was an example of how women's clothing shaped and even deformed women's bodies to male expectations. Professor Lisa Jardine listened to feminist Germaine Greer talk about bras during a formal college dinner in Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1964 :
Germaine Greer's book The Female Eunuch became associated with the anti-bra movement because she pointed out how restrictive and uncomfortable a bra could be. "Bras are a ludicrous invention", she wrote, "but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression."
Susan Brownmiller in her book Femininity took the position that women without bras shock and anger men because men "implicitly think that they own breasts and that only they should remove bras."
The feminist author Iris Marion Young wrote in 2005 that the bra "serves as a barrier to touch" and that a bra less woman is "deobjectified", eliminating the "hard, pointy look that phallic culture posits as the norm." Without a bra, in her view, women's breasts are not consistently shaped objects but change as the woman moves, reflecting the natural body. Other feminist anti-bra arguments from Young in 2005 include that training bras are used to indoctrinate girls into thinking about their breasts as sexual objects and to accentuate their sexuality. Young also wrote in 2007 that, in American culture, breasts are subject to patriarchal American media-dominated culture objectifies breasts before such a distancing glance that freezes and masters." The academic Wendy Burns-Ardolino wrote in 2007 that women's decision to wear bras is mediated by the "male gaze".
Health
Fit
Many women look forward to the time of day when they can take off their bra.
Some women experience generalized breast discomfort and tenderness from fibrocystic breast changes, and their breast tissue is often described as "lumpy", "rope-like", or "doughy". Doctors often recommend that women wear a well-fitted, supportive bra to help resolve the symptoms.
Exercise
Biomechanical studies have demonstrated that, depending on the activity and the size of a woman's breast, when she walks or runs braless, her breasts may move up and down by or more, and also oscillate side to side.
Breast sagging
Women sometimes wear bras because they mistakenly believe they prevent breasts from sagging as they get older.
This belief was based on the incorrect idea that since breasts cannot anatomically support themselves, wearing a brassiere makes a difference as a woman ages. A 2013 study by Jean-Denis Rouillon said that wearing a bra may actually weaken the supportive tissue that holds up breasts. Bra manufacturers are careful to claim that bras only affect the shape of breasts while they are being worn. The key factors influencing breast ptosis over a woman's lifetime are cigarette smoking, her number of pregnancies, gravity, higher body mass index, larger bra cup size, and significant weight gain and loss.
See also
Bustier
Handbra
Male bra
Pasties
Victorian dress reform
Panties
References
Footnotes
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
—1859 Combined breast pads and arm-pit shield
—1907 Bust supporter
—1914 Mary Phelps Jacob's Brassiere
Bibliography:
Wikipedia
@baygross
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