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Anna Kournikova
In 2000, the toned tennis star had van drivers swerving all over the road when her scantily clad form appeared on billboards advertising Berlei’s ” shock absorber” range of sports bras. The slogan: “Only the ball should bounce.”
Bra-less
More than 90 per cent of women are thought to wear bras, but a dedicated minority prefer the freedom of an unbolstered bosom. Several studies have cast into doubt the belief that bras prevent sagging; almost all 250 participants in one French study, in which the women agreed not to wear a bra for a year, showed signs of improved firmness and elevation.
Cup size
According to the 2001-02 government-sponsored National Sizing Survey, the average bust size for females in the UK is 38.5 inches (compared to 36 inches in 1951). Other surveys have put the average UK bra size at 36C.
Dudou
The Chinese silk dudou (“stomach cover”) was employed as a bust-flattening undergarment during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and has appeared more recently on high streets as a kind of oriental boob-tube.
Etymology
Bra comes from the French brassière (child’s vest), a derivation of the Old French word bracière, which was an arm protector in military uniforms and, later, a chest plate and a type of women’s corset. The word “bra” appeared in Vogue in 1907 and in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1911.
Feminists
The popular image of feminists burning brassieres is an urban myth. During a protest against the 1968 Miss America beauty pageant, a group of women filled a “freedom trash can” with bras, high heels and girdles, but they never set fire to it. The phrase “bra burning” was the invention of a New York Post reporter.
G-cup
About 70 per cent of women wear ill-fitting brassieres. Good fits are calculated thus: measure around the chest directly under the breasts and add four inches to the number if it is even and five inches if it is odd. This is the bra size. To determine cup size, subtract the bra size from the bust size (around the fullest part of the bosom). Differences of 0-3 inches equate to, respectively, cup sizes A to D, while 10 inches give you a G-cup.
Howard Hughes
In breaks from designing aircraft, the Hollywood tycoon Hughes moonlighted as a lingerie designer. For his 1943 film The Outlaw, he created a steel underwire push-up bra for leading lady Jane Russell (above). The star reportedly failed to wear the garment because of a poor fit.
Injury
In 2002, the British Journal of Plastic Surgery reported that a 27-year-old man required surgery after catching his finger in his girlfriend’s bra strap. In response, a team at St George’s Hospital, south London, led by Dr Andrew Fleming, said: “[We] advocate patient self-education (during the adolescent years) on the mechanism of external female mammary support, and postulate that it may be important in reducing the incidence of other such injuries.”
Jean Paul Gaultier
The enfant terrible of French fashion hit the headlines in 1990 when pop queen Madonna (right) thrust her bust into his iconic conical bra during her Blond Ambition tour. The black satin brassiere was snapped up by a Chilean textiles museum for five times its asking price at a Christie’s auction in 2001.
Klum, Heidi
In 2003, the 34-year-old German supermodel posed in the world’s most expensive bra. Comprising more than 2,500 carats of diamonds and sapphires, the Victoria’s Secret Fantasy bra, designed by the jewellers Mouawad, took more than 370 man-hours to make and was valued at $10m (about £5m).
Lesher, Henry
The New Yorker Henry Lesher invented a bra-style garment in 1859. His patent for “combined breast pads and armpit shields” detailed how the inflatable rubber and cloth device, which never caught on, would ” prevent the arm-pits of [ladies'] dresses from becoming saturated and stained by perspiration, give a symmetrical rotundity to their breasts and a more comfortable and graceful support to the skirts of their dresses than heretofore”.
Men’s brassieres
The American company Enell is one of many online firms offering custom-fitted “male support vests” designed to “minimise bounce” for men with overdeveloped chests, or “moobs”. In one survey of more than 5,000 men at misterpoll.com, a surprising 97 per cent of respondents admitted to a desire to wear a bra.
Northumbrian Water
In June, engineers at Northumbrian Water retrieved a bra from a sewage pipe in a village near Darlington. Heavy rain, together with a build-up of grease behind the offending article (at least a 36C), had caused a pipe to burst and a road to collapse, costing the water company £15,000 in repairs. The owner’s identity remains a mystery.
Outlaw, The
Howard Hughes’s seamless cantilevered bra designed for his leading lady in the 1943 western The Outlaw never appeared in the film, but its invention, as well as the regular appearance of Lana Turner’s cone-shaped ” projectiles” in films such as They Won’t Forget and Ziegfeld Girl, heralded the heyday of the push-up “bullet bras”.
Portuguese
The Portuguese for bra is sutiã, while the Spanish say sugetador (from sujetar, to hold). The French prefer soutien-gorge (throat-support) and the Germans, Swedes, Danes and Dutch all use “BH” from, respectively, büstenhalter, bysthållare, brysteholdere and bustehouder (bust-holder). In Esperanto, the bra is called a mamzono (breast-belt).
The Queen
Since 1960, the London corsetieres Rigby & Peller have had the honour of lifting and separating the royal bust. The Queen has never revealed the size of her bosom, but celebrity bra-size websites put it at an above-average 36B, which puts HRH in the same league as Carly Simon, Claire Danes and Doris Day.
Rosenthal, Ida
The inventor of the uplifting Maidenform was a canny businesswoman. With her husband William and partner Enid, she became a management and marketing genius, managing the company’s finances and sales and building the brand name with racy ads featuring photos of women in bras. The “I dreamed… in my Maidenform bra” campaign ran for 20 years.
Slang
Considering the abundance of colloquial terms for breasts, alternatives for ” bra” are surprisingly rare. Some cockney rhyming slang dictionaries list ” Master McGrath”, the name of a champion 19th-century Irish greyhound, while the online Urban Dictionary offers only “over-shoulder boulder-holder” and “upper-decker flopper-stopper”.
Tit tape
First spotted on celebrity breasts belonging to Geri Halliwell and Jennifer Lopez in 2000, tit tape quickly became a discreet alternative to bras. First employed by Donatella Versace, the double-sided adhesive has become a must-have accessory for those seeking to prevent Janet Jackson-style wardrobe malfunctions.
Ultimo
The cleavage that threatened to upstage Julia Roberts in the 2000 film Erin Brockovich (below) owed much to the supporting role played by a gel-filled push-up bra. Launched in 1999, the Ultimo bra made its creator Michelle Mone a multimillionaire and has also reportedly graced the bust of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.
Vogel, Thomas
The Guinness world record for the most bras unhooked in one minute using one hand is 56, a feat achieved by the German Thomas Vogel in Cologne on 9 September 2006. A YouTube video featuring a bearded and bespectacled Vogel wearing a white coat offers a step-by-step guide for speedy unfastening.
Wonderbra
In an internet poll hosted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Wonderbra (advertisement above) ranked fifth in the 50 greatest Canadian inventions, losing out to insulin and the light bulb but beating the pacemaker and the electron microscope.
XXXL
The largest off-the-shelf brassiere (sold only in America) is thought to be a 54LL, but the Japanese branch of lingerie firm Triumph International holds the Guinness world record for the largest bra ever produced, with an underbust measurement of 24 metres (78ft 8in) and a bust measurement of 28 metres (91ft 10in).
Year
According to official statistics, every year the UK imports more than 100 million bras. A 2006 survey by the market analysts Mintel showed that we spend £1.2bn on bras and pants every year. Out front on the high street is Marks & Spencer, which claimed a 38 per cent share of the underwear trade in 2005.
Zwart, Piet
In 2005, the designer Wendy Rameckers unveiled a wall of breasts as part of her design for a lingerie shop in Rotterdam. Rather than comparing wives’ or girlfriends’ busts to those of embarrassed staff, clueless men would ponder different-sized fake silicon breasts. Rameckers said: “Men know all about their car, but never seem to know their wife’s bra size.”
