Modern bras lift, separate, and contribute to a lingerie market valued at $88 billion in annual sales the U.S. alone. But while today’s versions may contain cutting-edge fabrics and precisely engineered support, they stand on (hang from?) the shoulders of surprisingly ancient forbears. From ancient breastplates to fiery icons, here’s how the bra’s precursors evolved—and why the modern brassiere has withstood the test of time.
Pre-brassiere eras
Though it’s unclear when the first of the bra’s many precursors was invented, historians have found references to bra-like garments in ancient Greek works like Homer’s Iliad,which depicts the goddess Aphrodite removing a “curiously embroidered girdle” from her bosom, and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in which a woman withholding sex from her husband teases him by saying she’s taking off her strophion, clumsily translated as “breast-band.”
Historian Mireille Lee writes that though the strophion had sexual and gendered connotations, it’s difficult to determine exactly what, if anything, ancients wore beneath their clothes—there’s only a single artistic depiction from the time that shows a woman wearing a strophion beneath clothing.
In another example, archaeologists excavating Sicily’s Villa del Casale discovered a mosaic from the 4th-century A.D. featuring athletic Roman women with breasts were bound by a garment scholars think may have been an amictorium, a linen garment whose bikini-like appearance earned the mural’s subjects the nickname “Bikini Women.” Another Roman breast covering, the mamillare, was made of sturdier leather. But as classicist Jan Radicke writes, though Roman women seem to have “had several options for covering and shaping their breasts…We have too little evidence to make a determination” as to what the garments actually looked like or whether their uses were decorative, sexual, or simply supportive.
Bags of medieval yore
In 2008, archaeologists discovered four linen “bras” in a vault containing 15th-century clutter at Austria’s Lengberg Castle. The garments, which strongly resemble modern brassieres, may be evidence of the “breast bags” referred to by some medieval authors.
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At the time, explain textile historians Rachel Case, Marion McNealy, and Beatrix Nutz, large breasts were not considered fashionable, and women wore supportive garments to reduce their size and reduce gossip about their bodies. The 600-year-old “breast bags” discovered at Lengberg Castle had cups like modern bras and, in the historians’ words, “are masterpieces of working with the grain of the fabric” to shape and support the breasts. The find electrified dress historians, giving evidence that bras with cups—once thought to have originated in the 19th century—were invented earlier than previously thought.
The making of the modern bra
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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 1880s French retailer who sold the cut a corset in half and sold it as a “soutien-gorge” (throat support)? Olivia Flynt, the dressmaker whose “Flynt waist” corset substitute received a U.S. patent in 1873? Or maybe Caresse Crosby, granted a patent in 1914 for a “corslette” to provide support for the era’s sheer and backless fashions? (Crosby would later sell the patent to Warner Brothers Corset Company, whose bra brand still exists today.)
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. In 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 threw them in trash cans. (Though stigmatized as “bra burners” in popular culture, the protesters never actually burned their brassieres: “We had intended to burn [a trash can filled with bras on the Atlantic City boardwalk],” protest organizer Carol Hanisch told NPR 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 like the ancient Roman “Bikini Women.” Then in the 1970s, two women runners took inspiration from the male jock strap to make the Jockbra, 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, whose World Cup victory gesture of stripping off her shirt and celebrating on the soccer pitch in her sports bra served as what Schultz calls the garment’s “coming-out party.”
The pandemic has 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. But from bandeaus to breast bags and beyond, bra innovation continues marching forward. One example: In 2022, the U.S. Army showcased prototypes of the fireproof 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.
