Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/bras.
HZ: Welcome to The Allusionist, a show from Radiotopia from PRX, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, pull up language's skirts and laugh at its underpants. Coming up in today's show...
CLIP: To lift and separate. You're suddenly shapelier.
HZ: Sort of. To warm-up, here's some word history. Let's learn why ladies' busts are called "busts". It's not because they're busted. It's a reference to the sculpture of the same name, you know, with a head on top of a fraction of chest. The bust stops tactfully before the sculptor had to contend with any nipples. These busts were often found on tombs to commemorate the occupants, so they got their name from "bustom", a Latin word that meant "tomb" or "corpse", which itself descended from the Latin for "funeral pyre, or the place where bodies are burned".
So now, my mind's eye keeps picturing a woman's bust with a miniature cremation ceremony taking place on it. Thanks a bunch, etymology. Yet again, you ruin everything. On with the show.
HZ: There are loads of synonyms for underwear. "Undergarments", "foundation garments", "scanties", "intimates", "unmentionables", "lingerie", "skivvies", "smalls". And there are lots of synonyms for underpants. "Knickers", "undercrackers", "grundy's", "drawers", "panties", "bloomers", "briefs", "banana hammock". If you're getting turned on by this list, please switch off this podcast immediately and go for a brisk walk. There's also a huge variety of terms - slang, medical, and otherwise - for the body parts contained in underwear. But, when it comes to bras, are you going to use any other word than "bra"? "Yes, Helen, I called bras by their full name, 'brassiere'." No, you don't. I've never heard anybody use that word.
The first time I encountered the word "brassiere" was as a child leafing through my picture dictionary. It was on the page about clothes. I thought it was very exotic, but that's pretty much the last time I've ever seen brassiere used as well. Officially, the first ever appearance of the word "brassiere", to mean a lady's bra, occurred in Vogue magazine in 1907. But what kind of garment was this referring to? What were women wearing on their boobs in 1907?
LORI SMITH: Corsets were getting shorter, or they were more moving down the body.
HZ: This is Lori Smith from the London College of Fashion. Lori wrote her master's thesis on bras, so she really is the master of bras.
LORI SMITH: So corsets used to cover the breasts as well. But then with fashions changing and skirts becoming slimmer, the corsets became a bit longer down the hips, and so that they weren't lumpy under the dress on the top half they finished underneath the boobs. So, of course, that sort of left a bit of a... You'd just have your dress on top of your naked skin.
HZ: Filthy!
LORI SMITH: And nobody wants to do that, no, very filthy. So, yes, to protect the clothes from the body underneath they put another layer in between, and so, yeah, the sort of shorter, chemise-like top just became the bra. It was, there were quite a lot of sort of "bust improvers" or "bust supporters" that maybe had a little bit of boning and stuff in to begin with, but then as the fashions got a little bit more kind of shear on the top half and you got kind of shirtwaisted blouses, the bra just became a little bit of lining really for underneath that, so you weren't being indecent.
HZ: These brassieres were almost like extra blouses underneath women's actual blouses.
LORI SMITH: If I find it... This is an advertisement which is apparently the first one that used the word "brassiere", but nobody seems to quite know why.
HZ: The advert, in the 23rd of May 1907 edition of Vogue, for "DeBevoise brassieres and combination undergarments", shows four rather sleepy-looking women waiting around in their undies and outdoor shoes, as you do. Their wastes are the same size as their necks, while their chests are improbably-barrelly, as shapeless and overstuffed as if they'd each swallowed a large cushion. They certainly don't look fit for battle, even though "brassiere" was originally a French term for a piece of armour, deriving from the French word for arm, "bras".
A "brassière" was an arm protector, and later on a breastplate. So presumably the word was chosen firstly because French words were considered sophisticated by underwear companies, secondly because it was worn on the same part of the body as a breastplate brassière, and thirdly because women's underwear was a lot like armour. Corsetry was reinforced with whalebone or metal. Lycra was a long way off.
LORI SMITH: They were about shaping the body, and it also, very strangely, became thought of that rather than, as people might think now, that actually if you went around lacing yourself very tightly into things that actually, you know, maybe your core muscles, because having nothing to do, they might not be quite as strong because you were using the corset for support, but years ago they seemed to think that actually it was better to wear a corset, because it would help give you a good posture, and it would help children grow and to be kind of straight and strong.
HZ: You heard right. Children wore corsets, girls and boys.
Then men didn't go around wearing them.
LORI SMITH: Very true.
HZ: So they can't have been that good.
LORI SMITH: That is a very good point, yes. I wonder at what point a young boy would be able to ditch his corset and become a manly man that let it all hang out.
HZ: That kind of underwear bar mitzvah or something.
But a change was going to come to women's underpinnings. These kind of wearable prison cells were neither practical nor comfortable, and around the late 19th, early 20th century, feminist organisations such as the National Dress Reform Association were calling to emancipate women from their corsets, so that women would be able to do more things, like working, sticking votes into ballot boxes, and being able to move. And the clothes they wore over them were lightening up too, becoming less structured, and they were made of thinner fabrics.
In 1910, 19-year-old New York socialite Mary Phelps Jacob didn't want the look of her diaphanous evening dress to be ruined by the intrusions of the usual scaffolding beneath. So she grabbed two silk handkerchiefs, sewed them together, made straps out of pink ribbon, lashed on the garment, and sailed off, unimpeded, into the night. Her friends started begging her to make them these bras, too. They were a roaring success. And on the 3rd of November 1914, Mary Phelps Jacob was granted the patent for the brassiere, and thus she's the one who usually gets the credit for inventing the modern bra. This kind of bra really became popular during the First World War, because they needed to conserve metal. Plus, women were working in factories, which wasn't really compatible with rigid corsetry. Unlike present-day bras, promising uplift and cleavage fit to divert rivers down, women of this era actually wanted to flatten down their chests.
LORI SMITH: The flappers mixed everything up, really. Yeah, the line of those clothes was just so different, and the corsets, by that time, it was still the same starting under the bust and going down across the hips. You would think that the 1920s, it was all kind of free and loose, but actually, I can't really tell whether it was that women didn't want to quite be that loose, because, having a slim line underneath your dress look quite nice, not everybody is completely free of lumps and bumps, as we all know, or whether it was the people in corsetry departments going, "Ooh, no, well, actually it'll look much better if you don't completely ditch the corsets, and go with these fabulous new things called girdles, with elastic panels in." But of course they had all the same steel boning as the corsets, it was just ever-so-slightly more comfortable to wear, but on the top half, obviously, because of the more sort of boyish shape, the little chemise-type brassiere underneath just became a very sort of flattening bandeau, because all you wanted to do was just squash everything flat so that your lovely dresses just hung straight down from the shoulders.
When you got into the 1930s, and the fashions changed again from the sort of flat, boyish styles in the 20s and went to a more, I hate the word, but a more "womanly" silhouette, that's when the the flat bandeau bras, they started to use traditional dressmaking techniques with like different sort of darts and shaping to define the individual breasts and provide uplift. And that's when the obsession with uplift properly started, was in the 1930s. And also the 1930s was when "brassiere" got shortened to "bra" by pretty much everybody.
HZ: They didn't have time. There was a war about to happen, they needed to save some syllables.
LORI SMITH: Exactly.
HZ: There was, of course, another significant linguistic moment for the word "bra" in the 20th century. Its affiliation with the word "burning".
LORI SMITH: The bra-burning thing is a big old myth, really. It was protesters at the Miss America pageant who, as part of their protests, they were throwing things into a fire, one of which was a bra. But it was a symbolic thing. It wasn't like everyone was discarding their bras. Not for that reason anyway. A lot of people still wore bras, they just changed to have a softer look to them. A "natural" look, as they called it, so instead of all the kind of the structure and uplift and sort of pointiness that you would get in sort of the 50s and 60s, this was a kind of no-bra look. And yeah, there was a lot of shear fabrics, and kind of sort of looser-looking stuff in the 70s, but the vast majority of women didn't really get rid of them, and there's a lot of feminists I know that would never get rid of their bras.
HZ: So the bra's reputation as a very political garment is undeserved, really?
LORI SMITH: Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. I think there's, you know, the focus should really be on other things, when it comes to the feminist fight. But yeah, it does seem to get reproduced in a lot of books, though. A lot of the books that have pictures of bras, they talk about the bra-burning and you think, "Well, hang on, why have we still got photos of bras from those decades if everyone burned them and didn't wear them?"
CLIP: Wonderful Wonderbra. To be free and alive everywhere that you go is to wear what you dare anywhere and to travel with flair. You care about the shape you're in, so does he, so does he. Wonderful, wonderful Wonderbra.
HZ: A very liberating message in a 1969 advert for Wonderbra there. Bra master Lori Smith blogs about underwear and other things at rarelywearslipstick.com, and she tweets @LipstickLori. In case you were wondering earlier about all those underpants words and why they're all plural - apart from from "banana hammock", let's not dwell - it's because the garment itself used to be two halves, separate fabric legs tied together at the waist, but left open at the crotch. That's right. Queen Victoria wore split-crotch knickers.
The Allusionist was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks to Lori Smith, Amber Butchart, and Greg Jenner. I've posted some pictures of old bras, by which I mean the historic old bras, not just some bras that should have been thrown out several years ago, on theallusionist.org, and if you want to chat about words in between episodes, find @allusionistshow on Facebook and Twitter.
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