Chapter I: History Of Fashion In The American Corset And Brassiere Industry
It is wise to know and understand the history of the industry. The more you know about this subject, the more authoritative you sound when discussing any phase of it. Furthermore, the subject can be fascinating. An understanding of the history of fashion in the industry gives you an insight into the merchandising developments which were so dependent upon the fashion changes of each decade and upon the state of mind of the changing American Woman.
The tremendous corset and bra industry of today is a far cry from its beginning when, in 1860, McAllister and Smith set up a few machines in New Haven, Connecticut, for the manufacture of "unmentionables." This operation was later to become The Strouse Adler Company. In the same year, 1860, the Royal Worcester Company was founded.
Prior to 1860, all corsets worn in the United States were either imported from France or other parts of Europe, and could only be bought by the wealthy few, or they were made by hand at home. Most of the latter were hand-woven, hand-bleached cotton or linen, hand-stitched with tiny, even stitches like quilting around heavy stays of hand-hewn whalebone from the whaling ships of New England. Some New England companies, when they started to manufacture corsets in quantity, bought whalebone in huge quantities and cut it in their own plants. Later, steel, and then flexible spring steel, came into use. Today even plastics are used in light-weight boned garments.
With the introduction of the Singer Industrial sewing machine in 1848, it was possible to stitch corsets by machine and thus to manufacture them in larger quantities, putting the business on a basis where styles could be ordered in lots of a dozen or a half-dozen.
[Editor's note: the following paragraph contains a number of assertions believed inaccurate by contemporary historians of fashion.]
From the "wasp waist" era of 1860, almost to 1900 the tiny waist with rounded tops and rounded hips continued in popularity. Only slight changes in the very full bustle, back to a modified look, and a slight loosening of the waistline changed the silhouette. To be fashionable, a woman's waist measured as little as 18 inches. (Even today, our stringiest ready-to-wear models do not have waistlines like that.) One manufacturer said, "Victorian ladies didn't faint because they were delicate but because their corsets were too tight." The lacing process required either a strong maid or a solid bedpost. The maid would pull the laces until the corseted lady could not breathe properly or the corset's victim would tie the laces to a bedpost and walk away until the same result was achieved.
Taylor's collapsible bustle, manufactured by the Warner Brothers Company, consisted of circular wires in graduated sizes, attached to a heavy, woven waistband. When the lady sat down, the wires collapsed in a flat layer, and when she stood up the whole series rounded out around her buttocks. After the bustle, thin women simply wore pads. These were half-round padded circles of cloth about one-and-a-half inches thick, tapering to nothing at the top and tied with a cord around the waist. To enhance the size of the breast, women would wear a series of lace ruffles, sewn on a straight band and starched heavily to stand up under the frilly shirtwaists of outer wear. Brassieres were not worn. The corsets of the period were built up high in front, and the breasts rested on top or in the top of the corset.
Around the turn of the century, when the artist Gibson started to make the Gibson Girl famous, it was fashionable to have a very straight, long front and to jut out in the "derriere." Ladies were taught to pull back their shoulders, stick out their chests and derrieres, and to stoop forward slightly to give this longer look. This was known in fashion circles as the "Kangaroo Stoop" and continued in popularity, but waists started to loosen slightly and hips became straighter until World War I when women went all-out to look like boys.
It may have been psychological, but when women finally got the vote they had worked so hard and so long to obtain, they wanted to look masculine, too. This fashion era almost killed the corset industry. Women first tried going without corsets entirely and then, during the 1920's, started to wear brassieres. Early brassieres had little or no shaping. They were literally straight pieces of cloth with hooks in the back and straps attached that bound down and broke the breast tissue. There were elongated versions of these cloth monstrosities, too, which bound, rather than flattered, the figure. There are many women today who matured during this era and whose breast tissue was broken by these early brassieres. In those days manufacturers knew little about breast tissue, breast cancer and breast changes during menstrual periods or pregnancy. They just manufactured what a woman wanted-a garment to make her look as flat-chested as her brother or her husband. The physiological aspect of such things was not discussed among male manufacturers-nor even among women. The brassiere was really "intimate" apparel. Today a woman discusses her corsets as readily as she does her cigarette brand or her vacuum cleaner.
During the late teens and twenties, very little rubber was used in corsets and then only in little panels or V's. These were heavy-cut rubber bands covered with cotton or silk thread. Woven together, they were hard to launder, and when they started to stretch or wear out, little pieces of black, cut rubber would show through the pink or white garments. Until this time, women did not wash their corsets very often as they were afraid the corsets would rot- forgetting, of course, that the two things which rot both fabric and rubber are body heat and perspiration.
Two big innovations in the nineteen-thirties revolutionized corset and brassiere fashion: alphabet brassieres and elastic thread. Young women of today who take A.B-C-D sizing for granted in brassieres do not realize that until 1935, most brassieres were sized for girth and not breast depth. John Field of The Warner Brothers Company was quick to realize that this was the beginning of a new era for brassieres. He set the company's designer, the famous Leona Lax, to working out the patterns for the standard bra sizes which today are accepted by the whole industry.
It was during 1922, that Ida and William Rosenthal started the Maidenform Company. Both were couturiers, and by this time William was an amateur sculptor also. Ida Rosenthal complained about making her clothes fit her clientele properly and they both realized that brassieres should be built for dresses and should fit like a second skin or like a sculptured mold. Thus in the back sewing room of a fashionable dressmaking establishment, a great, international company was born. The Maidenform Company, even then, began shaping their brassieres to the natural figure, believing in the natural, rounded line.
It should be explained here how patented designs, intended to make women feel better and look better groomed, effected fashion through their improvement in the well-being of the customer and of her appearance in her outer apparel. Such designs were responsible for the first thoughts of coordinating outer fashion with intimate apparel, now an accepted practice in fine stores. Take, for instance, the Tru.Balance patented corset which was designed by a physical education instructor to perform a posture trick. Because the side front sections were cut on the diagonal and joined to a straight front panel, they followed the line of the actual stomach muscles. This design, put into a girdle, lifted the abdominal cavity and spanked the "fanny." You can imagine that a high fashion girdle which did this naturally gave the wearer a feeling of better posture.
An engineer who designed buildings and bridges for a living got tired of hearing his wife complain about her girdle rolling over at the waist and vowed he would design a girdle on engineering principles. This became the famous Herbener design, put into Warner's Sta-Up.Top. Newcomers to the industry will ask why this was patentable. There were many garments which looked like it with little bones stitched on elastic. What made the Herbener design patentable was a process for knitting the little bones right into the elastic waistband. The Sta-Up.Top girdles were introduced as just right for the very popular suit skirts because they would not roll over.
One could write a whole book about the patents issued on corset designs. It would include Poirette's "Biaband" feature which also follows the tummy muscles, thus giving a definite lift on the stomach, and the stitched appliqued ribbon trim on Mardi Bra brassieres, extending from the side seam up to the front straps and down to the center front, which actually helps to carry the weight and divide the flesh of a heavy breast. Then there is the patented "Nu-Back" by La Resista which separates the back of a corselet at the waist, making it easier for the wearer to stretch and lean without pulling down on the straps. The Treo Company uses decorative bands of ribbon to flatten the stomach. All of these designs which added comfort, like the Gossard Easy-Legged Panty, helped to change the fashion of foundations. As women became better and more comfortably corseted, they also learned to buy more.
The introduction of rubber fabrics made with extruded rubber thread opened a whole new life for the industry. This thread was made of liquid, bleached rubber, molded into cylindrical threads. The thread was then wound with a clockwise and a counter-clockwise cloth thread so that as the rubber stretched it would remain covered. The composite thread was then woven into flat satins, failles, nets and webbings, and soon one could buy a garment made entirely of elastic fabrics. In the late nineteen-thirties, a woman found she could be just as agile and free in a corset-made with up-and-down stretch, front-and-back stretch, and cut to stretch across the side sections to insure a slenderizing effect-as she could be in her skin. Women were also learning to wash garments frequently in mild soap suds and to dry them away from heat in order not to "kill" or rot the elastic.
The next great change in the industry, both fashion-wise and merchandising-wise, occurred during World War II. The war itself was enough of a shock, but the industry had fabric and rubber shortages. Most materials needed for corsets were rationed to war production and to clothe the armed services. Naturally the extensive use of rubber for defense purposes on automobiles, tractors, Jeeps, etc., created a shortage. This curtailment in the use of rubber, coming so close on the heels of its successful introduction into the industry, was disheartening to say the least. Manufacturers had to go back to producing uncomfortable corsets and American women to wearing them.
It was at this time that I sold Life Magazine on doing a two-page article to help convince both the Government and the American woman that she should have some rubber in her corsets. The article was written under the sponsorship of a company in the industry, but it was so needed at the time that Life Magazine asked to be released from giving the company any credit lines, feeling it was something that would help the entire industry. The fun part of this promotion was the preparation. We took a model in a stiff, boned cloth corset down to the Delehanty Institute in the lower part of Manhattan for a photograph showing her trying to get into the cockpit of an airplane with a riveting gun. As the cab traveled down Fifth Avenue, the model could not sit up straight, so she was stretched out prone in the taxi and looked as if rigor mortis had set in. The photographers got so hysterical they could hardly keep their minds on what they were doing. Since there were no facilities at Delehanty for costume changes, we had to go back uptown by taxi to get the model into an all-rubber fashion garment to show her (back downtown) doing her wartime job with great ease. In the process we used up more wartime-scarce gasoline proving our point than we should have. In all difficulties there is some humor. It would be hard to determine how much was accomplished by the article in Life magazine, but the government did, under War Production Board order L 90, award the corset industry a minimal amount of rubber.
The need for an elastic material, which became so acute during the war, resulted in the discovery of a synthetic rubber called neoprene. Some companies in the industry had contracts to make girdles and brassieres for the WACS and for women in the Navy and the Marine Corps. Others were making human and flare parachutes as well as other war equipment. Consequently, contracts had to do with war material and so, suddenly, women working at the machines in corset factories had to have birth certificates, proof of citizenship, and as much data available about them as any man working on secret equipment.
It was during this time that the great strength of nylon, and its potential for peaceful use, was proven. I remember going one day to visit a rubber company in New England to watch them weave rubber. A member of the firm asked me if I would like to see the nylon parachute cords that they were manufacturing for the war effort. He put a fifteen hundred pound tension on a narrow cord and there was no breakage. You can imagine what this meant to the future of the corset and brassiere industry. Everyone realized that immediately following the war foundation garments could be made for women-even heavy women-that would weigh only 3 1/2 ounces and yet hold the figure firmly and beautifully.
Good things came from these shortages. Until this time the corset industry suffered from a hangover of the Victorian era and the Victorian way of thinking. A woman would not talk about her corset. It was an "unmentionable." The war brought the corset industry to public notice, and it made store management aware of a terrific profit which, up until this time, they had taken for granted. The corset department in an average department store or fine women's specialty shop was in the corner of the floor, usually away from the ready-to-wear section. Shopping was almost like going into a speakeasy of the prohibition era-except that you didn't have to give a name or password to enter. The average woman shopper sneaked into this department, where no one would see her, and carried on her business of the day. It seems rather laughable to us now-and certainly to the young women coming into this industry-to find how modest women were about intimate apparel and that the stores themselves were just as self-conscious. Rarely would you ever see a corset display window-and if you did, the mannequin was usually so draped in negligees that you merely got a peek at the corset. Corset display was usually limited to a departmental grouping or a tiny wall cabinet in the side entrance-way of the store.
At this time, Vogue Magazine had just begun running photographs of corsets in place of the traditional drawings. For the benefit of you who know little about fashion photography: a model photographs at least two sizes larger than she actually is, so corset models have to be very thin and sometimes must be padded in the breast in order to be photographed well in a garment. It was my great fortune to be the publicity agent with whom Vogue decided to work. One of these first photographs was of a garment made at Strouse Adler's on a special pattern, smaller than a size 32 corselet. Even then it was necessary to retouch the photograph to make the figure look lithe and beautiful. This was a definite step forward. Today almost every magazine uses corset photography editorially.
The "no photograph" policy also held in the women's pages of the daily newspapers around the country. Previously the news media would accept a photograph of a corset in paid space but editorially it was detro. One of the most forward-thinking women involved in this was the late Marion Stixrood of the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Of all the editors around the country, she probably used the most exciting pictures and stories about the corset and brassiere industry. As a result of her fashion efforts, Seattle women are among the most well-informed and best corseted women in the U. S.
Nylon, by this time, was not only used in panels of fabric in the garments but also to wind latex and rubber threads. It was used in net and beautiful lingerie-type laces for brassieres and in sections of the corselets.
This had quite an effect on the fashion significance of the garments themselves. They no longer looked like something medicinal or corrective but were glamorous and beautiful. Difficulties in using nylon for production necessitated a special effort from the technical staffs of the corset and brassiere manufacturers. They had to learn to use nylon thread which would slip more easily in the sewing operation. They had to learn to cut and sew a little differently than they had. But they succeeded, and the industry expanded because of this. Soon E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Inc., introduced another new fabric-Dacron. Dacron is a little more absorbent of body moisture and a little more resistant to damage by body heat than nylon and consequently was used in literally millions of garments.
At the same time these improvements in corset construction were coming into play, other experiments were taking place-some with humorous results. One of the first artificial bust pads tried was made with little wire frames that looked like miniature bird cages. Whenever a big company introduces a new product, it is usually tested by an employee. A flat-chested girl was selected to wear this new brassiere, and unfortunately she wore it on an important date. Her report read that every time her escort let go of her she felt as if she were bouncing off of his chest. As you can imagine, this new bra was not included in the line.
The first padded brassieres were filled with cotton batting, and this cotton was tucked into a pocket of satin, under the outer bra. When foam rubber came into its own in many other industries, padded bras were designed using this new material. The rubber was molded to resemble the shape of the human breast. It was not as porous as the foam rubber used in pillows or upholstery, but neither was it a firm rubber. The manufacturers actually tried to make it the texture of human flesh and succeeded in doing so. These pads also could be put into the pocket of a bra and taken out for laundering purposes. Soon manufacturers were putting permanent pads into some of their bras. Many of them realized that there were girls who were normally what we could call an "A" cup with some breast depth but who wanted to look like an average size breast in their outer apparel. The average in this industry is, of course, a ''B" cup. Manufacturers then started to line the bust sections with a partial or padded cup. They also realized that some of these stiffening fabrics, when used under the breast for accentuating purposes, would help to support a pendulous or heavy, muscular type of breast. Today you find that many large-size bras and the cups of corselets are lined underneath with one of these stiffening fabrics for additional support. Before leaving the subject of padded bras entirely it might be mentioned that one of the very first ads written about padded bras had the caption "We Fix Flats." It does not sound glamorous to compare a woman's figure with a tire, but it sold brassieres.
Historically we have now reached the fashionable 1950's. By this time women were aware not only of the grooming benefits of good foundation garments but were, at long last, thinking of corset wardrobes. A really well-dressed woman owned panty girdles to wear under her active sports clothes, high waisted garments to wear under her suit skirts and elongated corselets to wear under her sleek apparel. She was beginning to realize that the longer she looked between her bust and her hips, the taller she looked. The taller a woman looks, the thinner she appears., so the well-dressed woman was buying corselets in abundance. She also felt she should have practical cotton bras for every-day use and luxurious lace bras for dress. She could keep this wardrobe clean by laundering it as often as she would her other intimate apparel. Strapless bras, which had only been shown in high-fashion departments until the fifties, also became best sellers because women were wearing strapless evening clothes and boat-neck or off-the-shoulder necklines for daytime.
The 1950's brought many more exciting fashion changes. During the war years fashion stories and illustrations featured corsets and brassieres and outer apparel for the defense worker, the Red Cross worker and tile service girl.
These were published in daily newspapers throughout the country and in magazines illustrating how the correct foundation could be worn under each kind of outer apparel. I gave lectures at private schools and colleges on posture and its relation to fashion and also told the school girls the coordination story. These were schools such as the Chicago School of Design, The Virginia Polytechnic Institute of Blacksburg, The Pratt Institute of Brooklyn, The Traphagen School of New York, and many more.
The most important fashion news of the late 1950's was spandex. This new fiber called for experiments and design changes just as nylon in the T940's. Once spandex was woven into a stretch fabric, 1)0th the cloth and elastic designs had to be changed to accommodate the different stretch and the different weight. Spandex allowed reduction in the minimum weight of corsets and provided firm control. It called for a whole new approach in merchandising and advertising, giving the corset industry the lift it needed to go on to new fashion and profit heights.
1960 brought several innovations: molded brassieres, with new ideas for comfort (without outside seams, for instance) and sleep bras, designed to mold the breast comfortably into a beautiful line under night apparel and negligees and to make the heavy-breasted woman who has muscle strain or pain at the sides of her breast more comfortable while sleeping. Until sleep bras were introduced, the heavy-breasted woman usually slept in a worn out daytime bra or in a new bra, two sizes larger than she would wear for daytime.
As we go forward to more and more discoveries which will enhance, beautify and improve our fashions, we wonder what our great grandmothers with their 18-inch corseted waist lines, our grandmothers with their "Rust Proof" corsets, or our mothers with their bras which looked like wide bandages, would think of all these changes in fashion and comfort. Just imagine the woman of 1860, wearing a garment which weighs less than 3 ounces, feeling well corseted! There is no other industry in the whole women's fashion field which has more excitement and has made more real progress.
Continue to History Of Corset And Brassiere Merchandising
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Last updated January 30, 1998