Underwires and flame resistance are only the latest innovations in a millennia-long struggle to keep the girls in line.
Roman women in a fourth-century A.D. mosaic from Sicily compete in an athletic contest while wearingan amictorium, a bandeau-type linen garment that bound the breasts.
Modern bras lift, separate, and contribute to a global lingerie market valued at more than $90 billion in annual sales. While today’s versions may contain high-tech fabrics and precisely engineered support, they stand on (hang from?) the shoulders of surprisingly ancient forebears.
Pre-brassiere eras
It’s unclear when the first of the bra’s many precursors was invented, but historians have found references to breast-supporting cords or belts likely worn over garments in ancient Greek works such as Homer’s Iliad, which depicts the goddess Aphrodite removing a “curiously embroidered girdle” (according to an 1898 translation by Samuel Butler) from her bosom. And in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, a woman withholding sex from her husband teases him by saying she’s taking off her strophion, a twisted cord or belt worn outside clothing and below or between the breasts for support.
Classical archaeologist Mireille Lee notes that breast coverings or supports worn under clothing were probably the exception rather than the rule, especially as they could interfere with breastfeeding.
Italian dressing
In another example, archaeologists excavating Sicily’s Villa Romana del Casale discovered a mosaic from the fourth century A.D. featuring Roman women in an athletic competition with breasts bound by a piece of apparel scholars think may have been called an amictorium. This linen garment has a bandeau-like appearance that earned the mural’s subjects the nickname “Bikini Girls.” Another Roman breast covering, the mamillare, was made of sturdier leather.
According to classicist Jan Radicke, Roman women seem to have had several options for covering and shaping their breasts, but there’s not enough evidence to determine what the garments actually looked like or whether their uses were decorative, sexual, or simply supportive.
Breast bags of yore
In 2008, archaeologists discovered two linen “bras” in a vault containing 15th-century clutter at Austria’s Lengberg Castle. The garments, which resemble a modern longline bra and a slip with cups, may be evidence of the “breast bags” referred to by some medieval authors.
At the time, explain textile historians Rachel Case and Marion McNealy and archaeologist Beatrix Nutz, large breasts were not considered fashionable, and women wore supportive garments to reduce their size—and the gossip about female bodies.
The 600-year-old breast bags found at Lengberg Castle had cups like modern bras to shape and support the breasts individually. The find electrified dress historians, giving evidence that undergarments with cups—once thought to have originated in the 19th century—were invented earlier than previously thought.
Making of the modern bra
The bra as we know it arose when both inventors and dress reformers pushed new ways of shaping and supporting breasts to the forefront—but opinions on the inventor of the modern bra vary. Was it Herminie Cadolle, the late-1800s French revolutionary and retailer who cut a corset in two and called the top a corselet-gorge? Or Olivia Flynt, the dressmaker whose “Flynt waist” corset substitute received a U.S. patent in 1876?
By the 1930s, brassieres were replacing the corset, and in that decade the lingerie industry introduced both standardized cup sizes and adjustable straps to the increasingly essential garment.
By 1968, shape-enhancing bras were so ubiquitous and associated with female sexuality and beauty standards that feminists protesting the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, threw them in garbage cans. Though stigmatized as “bra burners” in popular culture, the protesters never actually set their brassieres on fire. They had intended to burn a trash can filled with bras on the Atlantic City boardwalk, Carol Hanisch, a protest organizer, told National Public Radio in 2008, “but the police department … wouldn’t let us do the burning.”
Then there are sports bras. Before their development, writes sports clothing historian Jaime Schultz, many women just wore regular bras or bound their breasts with cloth as the ancient Roman Bikini Girls did.
In the 1970s, three women took inspiration from the male jockstrap to make the Jogbra, now considered the first modern sports bra. But it would take until 1999 for sports bras to become more accepted as stand-alone garments, thanks to U.S. soccer star Brandi Chastain. Her World Cup victory gesture of stripping off her shirt and celebrating in her sports bra on the soccer pitch in Pasadena, California, served as what Schultz calls the garment’s “coming-out party.”
The COVID-19 pandemic provoked another shift in bra wearing, pushing many people to go braless or adopt less supportive bralettes and sports bras instead of the plunge, push-up, and T-shirt bras popularized in recent years.
From bandeaux to breast bags and beyond, bra innovation continues marching forward. One example: In 2022, the U.S. Army showcased prototypes of the flame-resistant Army Tactical Bra, which will eventually be incorporated into military-issued uniforms—proof that there’s always room to improve the ways in which we hoist, position, and encase the female breast.
