History of Bras
Before the Modern Bra: How Women Supported and Shaped Their Breasts Around the World
When we think about the history of the bra, it is very easy to picture a neat little timeline: women wore corsets, corsets were uncomfortable, somebody invented the bra and we all lived happily ever after. As you might expect, the real history is considerably messier — and much more interesting.
Women obviously had breasts for rather a long time before the modern bra appeared, and different cultures developed their own ways of covering, supporting, binding or shaping them. Some garments were practical, some were about modesty, some helped create whatever body shape happened to be fashionable at the time, and quite often they did several of those jobs at once. We also have to be a little careful about calling all of these garments “bras”. A strip of fabric wrapped around the chest might have performed one of the jobs we now expect a bra to do, but that doesn’t necessarily make it an ancient version of a 36C plunge bra. So rather than hunting for one woman who supposedly invented breast support, I think it’s much more interesting to ask what women around the world actually did before the modern bra existed.
Ancient women had already thought of breast bands
Some of our clearest early evidence comes from the ancient Mediterranean. Women in ancient Greece could wear a soft band known as a strophion around the body underneath garments such as the peplos or chiton. Roman women also used breast bands, and a famous fourth-century Roman mosaic from Sicily shows athletic women wearing bandeau-like coverings across their chests. They look remarkably modern at first glance — although they are around 1,600 years too early for your average gym membership.
We shouldn’t assume these garments worked exactly like modern bras. They were generally bands rather than fitted cups, and they could bind the breasts closer to the body as well as offering some support.
But the basic idea was already there: women could use fabric around the bust to control movement and alter the way their breasts sat underneath their clothes.
It wasn't just Greece and Rome
This is where histories of underwear can become rather misleading, because Western accounts have a habit of hopping from Greece and Rome straight into medieval Europe as if nobody else in the world was getting dressed.
South Asia had its own traditions of breast coverings and chest bands. Historical sources refer to garments including the stanapatta, worn across the chest in ancient India, while a fourth-century Indian play also refers to a heroine wearing something comparable to a breast-supporting garment.
That doesn’t mean Indian women were wearing the same garment as Roman women under a different name. Clothing develops within culture, climate, ideas of modesty, available fabrics and the other clothes being worn with it. What I find much more interesting is that women in very different societies were independently dealing with the same basic thing: breasts move, clothes sit differently depending on what is underneath them, and sometimes you simply want your body to look a particular way.
There wasn't one civilisation inventing breast support and kindly passing the idea on to everybody else.
Women in different places came up with their own solutions.
China had a rather different idea of the ideal shape
Traditional Chinese clothing gives us another lovely example of how dangerous it is to assume that “supporting the breasts” always meant making them look higher or larger.
A garment known as the dudou covered the front of the chest and abdomen and tied around the neck and waist. It looked far more like a soft, backless halter-shaped panel than a European corset or modern bra. During the Ming Dynasty, a flatter chest was fashionable at court, and garments such as the dudou could help produce that smoother silhouette.
I love this because it rather ruins the idea that women throughout history have all been chasing the same “perfect” breasts. They haven't. One society might prefer breasts to look fuller and more obvious, another flatter and less defined. Sometimes women lifted them; sometimes they bound them closer to the body.
Fashion has been changing its mind about our boobs for a very long time.
Then archaeologists found something suspiciously familiar
One of my favourite parts of this story comes from Lengberg Castle in Austria.
During renovation work beginning in 2008, archaeologists discovered more than 2,700 fragments of textiles and clothing hidden within material that had been used to fill part of the castle structure. The building evidence suggested the material dated from the fifteenth century, and later carbon-14 testing confirmed the medieval dating.
Among all those scraps of old linen were four garments that caused rather a stir because they had recognisable shaped cups. Researchers at the University of Innsbruck describe them as resembling modern bras, and one is particularly striking: two separately sewn cups with fabric extending down beneath the ribcage, giving it a surprisingly modern longline shape. Others had decoration around areas that would normally have been completely hidden underneath clothing.
This mattered because historians previously had very little physical evidence for separately cupped breast-support garments in medieval Europe.
Written sources contained vague references to things such as “breast bags” and garments used to contain or bind large breasts, but fabric doesn't tend to survive hundreds of years particularly well. Suddenly, several actual examples had turned up.
It is one of those wonderful reminders of how history works. Sometimes our picture of the past isn't wrong because historians have been silly; it is simply the best interpretation of the evidence that survived. Find one extraordinary bundle of old underwear hidden in a castle and the story can change rather dramatically.
Medieval women worried about breast size too
The research into Lengberg also points to a fifteenth-century satirical poem describing women using different breast garments depending on the appearance they wanted. Some are described as making garments which showed off attractive breasts, while women whose breasts were considered too large used tighter ones to make them appear smaller.
Six hundred years later, this all feels remarkably familiar.
Women being told their breasts are too large, too small, too obvious or not obvious enough seems to have a depressingly long history. It is also a useful reminder that these garments weren't always simply practical. Clothing could change how other people saw your body, just as it does now.
Europe starts shaping the whole body
As European clothing developed through the early modern period, breast support increasingly became part of something much bigger. Bodies, stays and eventually corsets didn't just affect the breasts; they helped control the position of the waist, the posture and the shape of the whole torso.
By the Victorian period, what was hidden underneath a dress was absolutely crucial to the shape seen on the outside. The V&A describes corsets moulding the waist while crinolines and bustles created entirely different shapes lower down the body. Even within the Victorian period there was no single corset or silhouette.
Fashion changed quickly, and the underwear underneath changed along with it.
I think this is also where our modern picture of the corset can become a little too tidy. We sometimes tell the story as though every Victorian woman spent her life being miserably squeezed into a terrifying torture device until the lovely comfortable bra arrived to rescue her. There certainly were health concerns and campaigns against restrictive forms of corsetry, and some women did tight-lace dramatically. But corsets came in different shapes and strengths and were worn by different women in different ways. For many, they were simply part of getting dressed.
History is rarely as satisfying as “bad old thing replaced by good new thing”, unfortunately.
There was never one road leading to the bra
Once you look beyond the familiar corset-to-bra story, the history becomes much more interesting. Ancient Greek and Roman women used breast bands. Women in India had their own traditions of chest coverings and breast support. Chinese women wore garments such as the dudou and, at times, deliberately created a flatter bust. Medieval European women apparently had shaped breast garments far more sophisticated than historians once realised, while later European fashions increasingly used corsetry to reshape the whole torso.
These weren't all early versions of exactly the same thing, and I think it would be a shame to pretend they were.
Women weren't spending thousands of years unsuccessfully trying to invent our modern bra. They were dressing their bodies according to their own cultures, the fabrics available to them, the clothes they wore over the top, the things they needed to do and — inevitably — whatever their society had decided the female body ought to look like at the time.
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, another change was beginning. Support for the breasts was starting to separate again from the corset that shaped the waist and torso, and something much closer to our modern bra was appearing.
If you think that meant we'd finally decided what breasts were supposed to look like, I'm afraid not.
Flattened, lifted, separated, pointed, padded and pushed together — the twentieth century was only just getting started.