From Torpedo Bras to Whale Tails: A Brief History of Women’s Underwear
We come in different shapes and sizes, and idealistic views decrying certain, usually exaggerated, fashionable proportions suggest that women, and presumably men, might do well to avoid trying to transform themselves into the fashionable shape of the moment. There is an implicit suggestion that we should perhaps avoid altering aspects of our bodies just because they are not currently in fashion. The constant flux of fashion design will always have its detractors, as well as its more determined adherents. Since fashion will surely change again and again, the body risks being in constant and painful reorganization.
Just as you have achieved a plumped-up behind as pneumatic as a Kardashian in a bodycon dress, fashions change and we find ourselves longing for straight up-and-down adolescent contours, lean muscularity and a tiny waistline. Underwear, or rather the new shapewear, comes to the rescue with its modern ‘future’ fabrics that can constrain and enlarge with equal ease. Twenty-first-century underwear producers claim their state-of-the-art sustainable technologies and use of eco-friendly materials will take our bodies wherever fashion dictates while also “saving the planet.”
Advances in surgery have helped those recovering from mastectomies. A range of enlargement and reduction possibilities serve transgender patients. Since ancient times breasts have been bound with bandages, but modern-day adhesive tape does the same job, though it can be hard to remove without discomfort. The selling point of such binding is that it makes someone look as if they have no need of a bra, and suggests “the promise of recreating the appearance of one’s younger, fuller bust—a bust full of youthful potential and hope, unravaged by the sands of time.”
The constant flux of fashion design will always have its detractors, as well as its more determined adherents.
Most women in a position to enjoy fashion are likely to possess a range of bras, rifled through and selected depending on the day, or night, ahead: which is most comfortable, which looks best with whatever other clothes one is wearing and also whether it is likely to be seen and judged. At the gym you might prefer to bind yourself firmly in place for rigorous exercise, the sports bra making the breasts into one smoothly evened-out mound, avoiding painful jiggling. Perhaps you are challenged by a clinging dress that will expose evidence of droop and surrounding bulge, and so you need to search for the most accommodating, flattering item. There have been times when a softer, more mature bust was extolled, evidenced by the great screen sirens of the 1940s and ’50s. Moreover, sometimes old film, perhaps less well defined or the color faded, can allow a more forgiving gaze.
Given the different shapes and sizes of female breasts and how they lie in relation to the torso, the brassiere is a complicated item of clothing to construct. The cups, band and bridge between the two cups vary considerably, and yet many women assume they continue to be the same size for life, though this is far from true. The writer Alison Lurie describes how young girls’ “training bras” often have little practical function, but act as a sign for the child that she is on the way to becoming a woman.
Bras provide different degrees of coverage: full, half or sometimes covering only the lower quarter of the breast. If the nipple beneath is not matched up with the point of a dart in the outer layer of clothing then it can spoil a smooth silhouette. If a bra is to offer support and fit accurately, then careful individual measurements are required. Those experienced in selling underwear sometimes claim they can assess precisely what size a woman should be wearing at a glance.
Few would attempt to manufacture their own bras today, and in any case even the finest sewers of the past might not have aspired to the sort of precise fit that a modern bra can in theory achieve. That said, a fitter at Marks & Spencer confided that most women are entirely ignorant of what size they should be wearing and may either insist on purchasing the size they have always worn or alternatively depend on the one-size-fits-all (OSFA) stretch of the sports bra. Too tight and the flesh will be squeezed and bulge; too loose and little support is given. Apparently many of us would do well to simply adjust the length of our bra straps to gain a better fit. Such knowledge—and tact—is gained from years of fitting women of all shapes and sizes. We can be embarrassed and defensive about such intimate matters, blinded by self-deception, or simply resistant to looking at our bodies with any degree of objectivity, particularly in the bleak, bright mirrors of many a fitting room.
Mildred Lathbury in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952) is a modest-mannered, intelligent and ladylike single woman who is brought up sharp against the beautifully dressed Mrs. Gray. She contemplates her washing with dismay: “It was depressing the way the same old things turned up every week. Just the kind of underclothes a person like me might wear, I thought dejectedly, so there is no need to describe them.” When she is visited by an old school friend, Dora, who duly washes some unlovely smalls and hangs them up to dry, “within half an hour the kitchen [is] festooned with lines of depressing-looking underwear—fawn locknit knickers and petticoats of the same material.” Mildred declares that Dora’s underwear is “even drearier than mine.” Mildred is appalled when the dashing Rocky Napier enters, “threading his way through the lines of dripping garments.” However, later in the novel, she has begun to find him rather less attractive and cares less what he makes of her clothing:
Rocky followed me into my kitchen and stood under the line of washing, which I noticed with irritation had become too dry to be ironed comfortably. He began pulling down the garments and making jokes about them, but I felt that this was not the time for coyness and embarrassment, so I took no notice of him.
More somber in mood is an example in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” In Part III of the poem, “The Fire Sermon,” a typist returns from work and carries out her solitary domestic tasks; her combinations are hung up to dry, but here with the sun upon them there is a suggestion that they are communing with a heavenly body. It is rare for single women past their youth to be allowed sexy underwear in fiction, and when they are it is presented as a ridiculous vanity capable of evoking pity at best. Men, it seems, retain their sexual status for far longer, whatever their outward appearance.
In the confident youth culture of the 1960s couture fashion was increasingly directed towards the young, with even couturiers like Yves Saint Laurent, for example, producing sheer blouses that were intended to be worn without a bra. The period is sometimes referred to as the burn-the-bra era, a time when some feminists must have wanted to support female liberation but might have felt conflicted if they happened to have larger or less-than-firm breasts or simply found the idea of going without a bra immodest.
At the 1968 Miss America pageant, held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on September 7, a demonstration led by the feminist group New York Radical Women (NYRW) was widely reported to have burned ‘female torture’ items, notably the bra. It appears that no actual bra-burning took place and the story was merely a media ruse to trivialize the women’s objectives. On the one hand, women might have wanted to be fashionable and show their allegiance to the hippie counterculture, but on the other it could be uncomfortable, even painful, for them to leave their breasts unsupported. Wearing a bra, and particularly a supportive bra rather than a more minimal fashionable design, risked seeming prim and perhaps politically conservative. The business of breast-feeding made for further practical difficulties, as lactating breasts are often particularly sensitive and in need of extra support.
An advertisement published in Vogue, January 1937.
In the history of women’s fashion the cleavage has hardly ever been entirely out of sight, yet when a corseted evening dress was depicted with one strap astray, it created quite a furore. The portrait of Virginie Gautreau (1883–4), the young American wife of a French banker, shows her wearing a dark satin dress, her body facing but her head twisting away from the viewer. One jeweled strap appears to have fallen negligently onto her bare white shoulder. The sense of sexy disregard stirred up considerable moral disapproval. The American artist, John Singer Sargent, was forced to withdraw the painting from the Paris Salon in 1884, and repainted the strap firmly in place, where it should in all decency have been all along. He also changed the painting’s title to Madame X, ostensibly to protect the subject’s privacy, but ironically endowing it with an added sense of dangerous suggestiveness.
As recently as 1984 the American athlete Joan Benoit Samuelson caused a stir in the media simply because she was pictured, after winning the marathon at the Olympic Games, with a plain white bra strap exposed, albeit safely on the shoulder. It is only recently that showing a bra strap has not been seen as sluttish. Footballer Brandi Chastain received press coverage not so much for scoring the deciding penalty in the finals of the 1999 World Cup, but because in her jubilation she copied what men often do in such circumstances: she ripped off her shirt and swung it in the air. She exposed an impeccably modest black sports bra, and yet it set off “a firestorm of debate.” It was as if she had flaunted her breasts, even though the actual flesh was completely hidden from view. In comparison, when a male rugby player accidentally loses his shorts on the pitch and exposes his jockstrapped buttocks, he is unlikely to face disapproval. Such reproof remains directed towards the female.
For many younger women today the sports bra has become everyday wear. An experienced seamstress working for a couture bridal shop explained to me that she regularly has to remind her customers to wear a proper tailored bra for their fittings rather than their customary pull-on affair, or it would never be possible to achieve a good, close fit for their wedding dress toile. The finished garment would have firm, shaped bra cups as part of its inbuilt structure, so that no additional bra would need to be worn.
The concept of attractive dishabille is a decreasing asset: exposed underwear gains distaste or pity rather than positive attention as the years pass, as if an older person can no longer follow the same sartorial rules of femininity. With the disappearance of the corset, which had not required support from the shoulder, bra straps could slip out of place, a solution being to hold them in place on the underside of outer clothing with small poppered devices, either permanently sewn into a garment or safety-pinned in place. Significantly, more expensive and couturier garments continue to have such devices sewn in. It is an example of a small and unseen high-status feature of fashion, fast on the way to becoming obsolete, and for that reason its presence bears extra kudos. However, although it can be irritating to have a bra strap that is frequently falling down, the necessary hitching movement, accompanied by a small shrug of the shoulders, can be a highly suggestive gesture of apparently absentminded seduction. What is replaced can also slip down again.
In 2022 there was a marked couturier fashion for lingerie being worn as evening wear, just as had been popular in the 1990s. At the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 see-through dresses over negligible underwear were splashed across the fashion pages. On London’s streets in the same year young women wore stockings held up by suspenders under micro-mini skirts or shorts. The stockings were usually black fishnet, with tears for added grunge, and worn with chunky boots. It is a more manicured look than punk, but still, when I asked if the torn areas of the fishnets were deliberate, I was told that they were not, but that when they occur, as tears will on fishnets, then they are quite ok.
Less successful was a fragile-looking girl in Holborn in similar suspenders and torn stockings, but whose skirt was so short that as she walked she had to keep tugging it down or risk exposing her knickers. A bolder person might have carried it off without bothering to check, and to hell with what the rest of us might see! If underwear can be worn as outerwear, then why should it matter if the crotch or underpants are in sight? The shock value of glimpsing usually private underwear is often the point of such fashion.
Underwear’s private character when it is either accidentally or deliberately exposed takes on a range of possible meanings. British prime minister John Major was rumored to expose the waistband of his underpants when he leant forward, having tucked his shirt under the elastic to keep matters neat, and was mocked by the British press as demonstrating prissy unmanly caution. The practice is common in Italy, though somehow the waistbands of men’s underpants there are rarely exposed to view. In 2007 a similar idea was put about by the New Statesman, suggesting that the politician Menzies (“Ming”) Campbell should be judged by a small feature of underwear he had on show: “Does Ming the Merciless wear sock garters? I ask only because a colleague swears he saw a clip hanging out of the bottom of the Edwardian gentleman’s trouser leg?”
The trend for wearing low-cut jeans exposes the so-called “whale tail” effect of thong underwear, often embellished with lace and rhinestone and suggesting the unseen private parts beneath. The association with the heft of such a mammal captures something of the problem. On all but the slimmest, a whale tail also has the tendency to accentuate so-called “love handles” or “muffin tops” of flesh pressed between the waistband of trousers and that of the underwear. If underwear should not be seen, then when underpants show through tight clothing many attempts are made to avoid the VPL. Various ways to camouflage these effects, such as avoiding too fine an outer clothing layer, vie with recommendations to wear boy-shorts or to go commando—and, to come full circle, to wear a thong.
Some hope that underwear may transform their bodies and bring about the desirability they surely possess, that has hitherto somehow been overlooked.
In the actor Jane Russell’s first film role, as Rio McDonald in The Outlaw (dir. Howard Hughes, 1943), the sight of her impressive cleavage so shocked the censors that the film’s release was blocked for five years. The Production Code Administration complained that “the girl’s breasts are shockingly emphasized.” A Maryland judge was moved to describe Russell’s breasts as “hung like a thunderstorm over a summer landscape.” Howard Hughes had been determined that his own seamless bra design would show off her breasts to best advantage by giving the impression that she was not wearing a bra at all.
Although Russell secretly wore her own bra, lining it with tissues to hide any seams, the notoriety the censorship had caused and the publicity posters showing her lying on a haystack apparently braless meant that when the film finally appeared it was a huge financial success. Nevertheless, film companies subsequently preferred their stars to wear close-fitting garments that did not show too much embonpoint so as to avoid such costly delays, opting instead for accentuating the shape and size of the breasts but keeping them well covered beneath outer garments. Bras were padded and hitched up high.
The Hollywood of the 1940s had introduced the conical bra, which became more defined in the 1950s and was often termed the bullet or torpedo bra. Yet what people might find acceptable in a film could be found shocking and unacceptable when worn off-screen. A Pittsburgh police superintendent, Harvey J. Scott, feared national chaos over the new attention-grabbing pointed missile, and psychiatrist Edward E. Mayer, supervising director of that city’s Behavior Clinic at the Criminal Court, was also firmly against what he saw as the provocative bras, because “They tempt and entice the male drinker who can’t control his inflamed passions and likely rape results.”
With nineteenth-century morality still influencing mainstream publishing even into the second half of the twentieth century, before the Internet age, many experienced their first images of undressed adult bodies from between the yellow covers of National Geographic. The evidence the magazine provided suggested not only that some societies did not see breasts as private parts of the body, but that some form of brassiere was advisable for women in the long run.
In the 1960s models like Twiggy made the braless, breastless torso seem appealing, but soon designers such as Janet Reger were heralding a return to nostalgic items like the fancy padded bra. British designer Reger also promoted suspender belts and stockings as well as matching sets of bras and knickers, emphasizing their sexual appeal. The journalist Lucy Mangan in The Stylist was surprised in 2016 to realize that she had never possessed a single matching set herself, and upbraided her husband for never having given her lingerie. He replied: “I did!… Once. I bought you a matching set and you gave me a speech on the corrosive effect of lace on labia, your unswerving commitment to the cotton gusset and how your boobs were too small to deserve nice things.”
Mary Quant, famed for her clean 1960s architectural designs, admitted to being drawn to fancy underwear, even though she understood how it could easily spoil the line of her outer clothing: “I know I am always seduced myself by the prettiest, frilliest, laciest bras that look so good when you’re undressed. But under a dress, they are nothing but unsightly lumps and bumps.”
The market for elaborate lingerie-type bras and other items of fancy underwear is alive and well, from constricting mini waspwaisted corsets to thongs that bruise the tenderest flesh and suspender belts, rather than tights, that ping undone and are chilly in cold weather. The question here is why this longing persists, at a time when many women appear to have gained a far greater level of autonomy. Do they dress to please themselves, delighting in the texture of fine silks and satins and the feeling of luxurious self-generated extravagance?
In a scene from Annie Hall (dir. Woody Allen, 1977), Alvy Singer (played by Allen) gives Diane Keaton’s Annie a sexy negligee as a present: “Are you kidding? This is more like a present for you,” Annie retorts. News website HuffPost remarks that, “not all undies-as-gifts are created equal. A vintage-inspired La Perla nightie is one thing, but what about a crotchless onesie? Or nipple tassels?” Some hope that underwear may transform their bodies and bring about the desirability they surely possess, that has hitherto somehow been overlooked.
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Reprinted with permission from The Virtues of Underwear: Modesty, Flamboyance and Filth by Nina Edwards. Published by Reaktion Books Ltd. Copyright © 2024 by Nina Edwards. All rights reserved.
