It all started with one woman, two handkerchiefs, and the desire to finally breathe freely.
It all started with one woman, two handkerchiefs, and the desire to finally breathe freely.
November 3, 1914
It all started with one woman, two handkerchiefs, and the desire to finally breathe freely.
In 1913, twenty-one-year-old New York socialite Mary Phelps Jacob stood in front of her mirror, frustrated. The sheer gown she had bought for a debutante ball looked elegant - until her whalebone corset poked stiffly beneath the delicate fabric. The “boxlike armour of whalebone and pink cordage,” as she later called it in her memoir, The Passionate Year, felt utterly wrong for the fluid silhouettes of the new century.
So, Jacob did what every ingenious woman does when fashion fails her: she improvised. With two silk handkerchiefs and a length of pink ribbon, she stitched together a soft, lightweight undergarment that offered support without the suffocating structure of a corset. It was light, soft, and most importantly - allowed her to move. That night, she wore it to the ball and was showered with compliments, not only for her dress but for how free she looked.
Her friends soon wanted one too. Within weeks, she was sewing “backless brassières” for curious women across New York. One even offered her a dollar for a custom piece. Realizing she might be onto something, Jacob filed for a patent. On November 3, 1914, the U.S. Patent Office officially recognized her creation: the first modern bra. She was also the first to patent the “Brassière” - a word borrowed from Old French meaning “upper arm."
Still, Jacob - who later rebranded herself as Caresse Crosby - never made a fortune from her invention. She sold the patent to the Warner Brothers Corset Company in Connecticut for a mere $1,500 (about $21,000 today). Warner would go on to earn over $15 million from the bra in the next three decades. “I can’t say the brassière will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it” she once said wryly.
Ironically, the bra’s big break came not from ballrooms but from World War I. As metal was redirected to the frontlines, women were asked to give up corsets, freeing some 28,000 tons of steel, enough to build… two battleships! The timing could not have been better: women entering the workforce needed practicality, not whalebone.
And so, a frustrated debutante’s quick fix became one of fashion’s most liberating inventions. A century later, that daily sigh of relief at unhooking the bra is still a quiet tribute to Mary Phelps Jacob - the woman who stitched freedom into fashion.
