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There is so much to say about this BBC story by Katya Foreman that I don’t even know where to begin. There are books and books about the history of the bra. So I’ll just give you some facts that I pulled from the article, and then a wonderful quote about the development of bras and their sizing (that features words such as “pendulous”).

• bras come in and go out of fashion
• from the French word brassiere, meaning bodice or child’s vest
• difficult to determine when they were first developed with ruins in ancient Greece depicting bras but with several interludes through history when the bra didn’t seem to feature at all
• at some point in history, a doctor described women placing their breasts each in to a bag that they wore under their dresses – some think this could be considered a precursor to the modern bra
• there have been many iconic iterations of The Bra, including some from the ’60s and Madonna’s famous conical Gaulthier apparatus

There’s lots more reading at the original article, link below. But first, here’s the great quote I mentioned earlier, taken from the book Uplift: The Bra in America and describing the 1930s when large-scale manufacturing of bras began:

“Mature customers and women of all ages with large pendulous breasts were offered long-line brassieres, built-up backs, firm bands under the cup, wedge-shaped inserts of cloth between the cups, wide straps, power Lastex and light boning.” According to the tome, it was SH Camp and Company that pioneered the chart relating the “size and pendulousness” of breasts to letters of the alphabet, A to D (a scale that today stretches to infinity). Prior to that, “companies had relied on stretchable cups to accommodate different depths of breast”.

Full story here: BBC: Culture.

More stories about Fashion.

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