Uplifting Centennial

You may want to raise a toast for Harvard’s tri-sesquicentennial or Trailways’ golden jubilee. Tastes differ. I want to say a few words in praise of a neglected centennial; It was just 100 years ago that an anonymous British folk sculptor devised that emblem of female liberation that became for women a detested symbol of male containment. Gentlemen (and ladies), let up praise the brassiere, in whose cups have stood some of the most delectable flesh man is heir to.
 
It seems odd indeed that this uplifting centennial is going largely unremarked. Indeed, if a compassionate but poorly educated fellow Trailways traveler had not taken pity on my yawns during a particularly desolate stretch of I-10 between Deming, New Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, she never would have handed me the National Enquirer that contained the full scoop.
 
The melioristic British described it at first as a “bust improver,” a contraption of silk and wire that looked like two strainers attached. The motive was to free female flesh from the civilized torture of a corset. It was patented the next year and made its American debut—where a Philadelphia firm (ahem) sold them mail order for 75 cents a pair.
 
The American magazine Vogue is credited with introducing the term “brassiere” in 1907, the word deriving from an old French word for arm protector. That neologist must have foreseen generations of fumbling American adolescents hungering for manhood by trying to psyche out the mind-numbing array of diverse fasteners. A young man can be undone by the shame of such incompetence easily.
 
The device, however, was still a marginal amenity until the arrival of the energetic Mary Phelps Jacobs on the bra scene in 1913. She didn’t want wire strainers; she wanted midriff freedom with soft, soft materials. Her French maid filled the breach with two silk hankies linked by a ribbon. The device was assuming some character at last. She patented that improvement in 1914, but she couldn’t get it going commercially by herself—so she sold it to Warner’s, the undergarment people.
 
Not until 1926 did the shaped cup fine tune the idea. Rosalind Klim, the Polish-born director of Kestos Corporation, decreed that two handkerchiefs be crossed and overlapped in front and suspended by shoulder straps. We were beginning to get somewhere.
 
John Field, Warner’s president, set up a special bra department in 1930s, and things began to move. Sizing (as in A, B, C and D—this is not to be confused with grading, as only American male boobies confuse quantity with quality) was established in 1935, thereby giving underendowed (in the gray matter department) comics like Nora Ephron and Joan Rivers a chance to take pot shots at themselves, or more precisely, at presumed lacks in themselves.
 
But it was only after World War II that Warner bra sales outreached those of girdle and corset. (Thank you, once more, Rosie the Riveter, and all your working sisters, for putting convenience over convention.)
 
Alas, in the blandness of the Eisenhower era, this led to the pseudo-rise of Jane Russell and all those other cashmere cuties that gave thinner sisters nightmares about their putative absence of charms. From such gross malpropping of the female anatomy, it was inevitable that some conniving European savant of sales, say Rudi Gernreich, would dream up the no-bra swimsuit, thereby triggering the liberationist frenzy of burning the bra, as foolish a political maneuver as ever our sisters undertook to extricate themselves from the unfair patriarchal yoke.
 
For, sisters, listen: Bralessness brings out the latent beast even in the most domesticated of males. You don’t have to wet your T-shirts, sisters, to trigger lust even in the casual passer-by.
 
I know that’s our problem. But as we celebrate the centennial of a commonsensical device to contain the more errant parts of your anatomy from random diversions, please have mercy on the male of the species. Unless you’re on the uninhibited make, please confine your bralessness to garments that diminish the bobbling about of your boobs. Concupiscence must be nipped in the bud.
 
From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, September 8, 1987