KEY POINTS:
The bra was invented by an engineer of German extraction called Otto Titzling in 1912.
He was living in a New York boarding house and one of his neighbours, a voluptuous opera singer called Swanhilda Olafson, complained that she needed a garment to hoist her vast bosom aloft every evening - so Titzling obliged, using some cotton, elastic and metal struts.
Unfortunately, he failed to patent the device and, in the early 1930s, a Frenchman named Philippe de Brassiere began making a suspiciously similar object.
Titzling took him to court but the unscrupulous Frenchman won the day.
And that's why the garment all the ladies are wearing is called a brassiere, not a titzling.
Bette Midler sang about this court case in the film Beaches, so obviously it's true, isn't it? Don't be ridiculous.
It's a total fabrication, based on a spoof 1971 history by Wallace Reyburn, and is just one of a thousand tales and myths that punctuate the history of the small double-dome of cloth that encases the female chest.
The bra is a thing of wondrous variety. It has been called the Hemispheres of Paradise and, less flatteringly, the Over-the-Shoulder Boulder Holder.
Its function has been, paradoxically, both modest concealment and brazen revelation.
It has been praised as a revolutionary garment that freed women from constriction, and has been burned in public as an emblem of oppression.
It's available in a riot of forms, including lacy, push-up, sporty, plunge-line, strapless, pointy, Cross Your Heart, conical, and Wonder.
It's a billion-pound industry in Britain and a $15 billion mega-industry in America.
No other garment has so closely shadowed the history of the status of women. No other garment has had the power to reduce intelligent, rational men to drooling boys and awestruck slaves.
In 1907, the word "brassiere" was used in Vogue for the first time. But its evolution goes back three millennia.
Historians have found that while Roman women sometimes wore a band of cloth over their breasts, to restrict their growth or conceal them, the Greeks favoured a less uptight approach.
Some enterprising designer realised that such a belt worn under the breasts might accentuate them, to pleasing effect. (In the hierarchy of ideas that have made the world a better place, this is up there with light bulbs and indoor plumbing.)
The brazen Minoans were streets ahead of the Greeks, however: women in Crete wore material that both supported and revealed their bare breasts, in emulation of the snake goddess - 3000 years before the invention of glamour modelling.
While the French Revolution freed women from the corset (it was outlawed because of its fatal association with the aristocracy), elsewhere its rule continued.
The big change came in the early 20th century, as women played more sport, and the corset divided into the girdle and the "bust bodice", like a really scary bikini.
Early feminist organisations, such as the National Dress Reform Association in America, had warned against the health risks of corset-wearing and called for "emancipation garments".
By 1900, several proto-bra experiments had been conducted.
Henry Lesher of Brooklyn offered ladies a rigid metallic structure, like a dustbin, to hold their bits in place. Clara P Clark's "improved corset" came up with shoulder straps in 1874. Olivia P. Flynt's "bust supporter" offered to hold each breast in a "fabric pocket" supported by wide straps.
In 1885, Charles Moorhouse romanced lady customers with his "inflatable breast-enlarging garment", with its rubber straps and cups. And in 1889, Herminie Cadolle invented the "soutien-gorge" (the name meant "throat-support") as part of a two-piece undergarment, patented her idea and showed it off at the Great Exhibition. It was 1905 before she thought of selling the upper section separately.
The word "brassiere" was once a military term meaning "arm protector" (le bras being French for arm), and, by extension, "breastplate". It was first used in the sense we understand it during the 1890s. Manufacturers used it in 1904, but it took a mention in the pages of Vogue in 1907 to make it a milestone in fashion history. It first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1911.
Credit for the first brassiere usually goes to Mary Phelps Jacob, a 19-year-old girl-about-Manhattan who, in 1910, bought a sheer evening gown for a party.
The whalebone corset that was supposed to define her figure actually poked out of the plunging fabric. What was a girl to do? She and her maid dug two silk hankies out of a drawer, sewed them on to a length of pink ribbon, added some string and tucked her breasts in place.
Girlfriends asked if she would make a similar device for them. Then somebody paid her a dollar to do so and she took the hint, and the "backless brassiere" was patented on November 3, 1914.
Ms Phelps Jacob didn't do well out of her invention. Disappointed by sales, she flogged the patent to the Warner Bros. Corset Company for a measly $1500. It was later valued at $15 million.
World War I saw more and more women abandoning corsets as they found themselves in uniform and factory garb. The bra began to take off - not that the fashions of the time gave it much to work with. The flat-chested "flapper" look required breasts to be flattened and bound rather than lifted and defined.
The next bra revolution was the Maidenform breakthrough in 1922. In a New York shop called Enid Frocks, a seamstress, Ida Rosenthal, spotted that women with the same chest size didn't necessarily look right in the same bra, because the breasts were different shapes; and so cup size was born. In accentuating and lifting the bosom, rather than trying to flatten it, they bade farewell to the flapper, and paved the way for the future glamourpuss.
In the next two decades, a combination of Hollywood starriness, ever-bolder advertising, and the lure of department stores saw a colossal boom in women's products; and the bra was, so to speak, at the forefront.
Maidenform was joined by Gossard, Triumph, Spirella and Teilfit, manufacturers who fought tooth and nail to invent refinements: better fabrics, patterns, straps, cups, fibres, padded sections. As the technology became more abstruse, the garment's name was simplified, in the 1930s, to "bra".
World War II helped, with the Forces' insistence that low-rank military women should wear bras and girdles "for protection", especially the ludicrously conical "Torpedo" or "Bullet" bras. Step, or rather wiggle, forward the Sweater Girl, whose tight jumper was meant to show off the artificial jut of her breasts, like twin artillery shells.
The 1950s saw the pointy bra give way to a more shapely, maternal look (probably helped by the huge post-war baby boom), and the market rose exponentially, with ever-greater choices of bra, new styles, paddings, even functions: the zip-up nursing bra and the 24-hour "Sweet Dreams" model were born.
The 1960s saw the biggest upset in the history of the garment, when Germaine Greer declared, "Bras are a ludicrous invention", and her sister feminists insisted that they reduced women to sex objects.
The key moment was the 1968 demonstration by 400 women against the Miss America beauty show at Atlantic City Convention Hall. Somebody put a "Freedom Trash Can" on the ground and encouraged protesters to throw into it girdles, nylons, bras, curlers, high-heeled shoes and other emblems of enslavement.
When the can was full, someone suggested setting fire to it, but no one could obtain a permit. and the plan was, rather weedily, dropped. However, the idea of "bra-burning feminists" remained a potent image in the public mind.
In the late 1960s, the head of the Canadian Lady Corset company died and his son, Larry Nadler, a Harvard-educated MBA, conducted some intensive market research. Women, he discovered, didn't hate their bras as symbols of oppression. Rather, they considered them a means to looking beautiful.
Nadler targeted the bra market with something new: it would be seamless, sexy and flattering, and would appeal to teenage girls. His invention was called the "Dici (by Wonderbra)". Of the two names, the former was later ditched and the latter went on to change the world.
In underwear history, the Wonderbra was the Great Liberator.
Bras would no longer lurk unseen behind a lady's blouse. They would no longer be "unmentionable" or a defence against prying male eyes. On the contrary, they'd be the main attraction.
Rather than "lift and separate" (the Playtex tagline), the Wonderbra would yank the breasts together and shove them in your face. Rather than a purely functional garment, they would be seen as a means of attraction, marketed as a luxury item.
In 1991, Gossard took on the brand under licence and hit a wave of popular uplift. British women in the early 1990s became fixated by plunging lines and spilling cleavages.
Vogue carried articles on the return of the padded bra, Vivienne Westwood brought out a range of outrageous corsetry, and Jean Paul Gaultier began his cheeky experiments with lingerie worn as outerwear - a trend that reached its apogee with the conical breastplate worn by Madonna on her Blond Ambition tour.
The Wonderbra, now owned by Sara Lee, the parent company behind Playtex, scored a bullseye with its 1994 poster campaign showing the model Eva Herzigova gazing at her pushed-together breasts, and the words "Hello Boys".
In British cities cars mounted the pavement or crashed into bollards as motorists tried and failed to drag their eyes away from Ms Herzigova's frontage. The image was later voted No. 10 in a "Poster of the Century" contest.
Rigby & Peller, corsetiere to the Queen since 1960, opened its flagship store in London in 1994. It is prized by its well-heeled clients for its expert fitting service - it claims that 80 per cent of women who walk through its door are wearing the wrong size and fit of boulder-holder (and need constant refittings, every six months or so).
The company has had a huge influence by insisting that a bra is far from a one-size-fits-all clothing item, that it's something unique to the individual, like a second skin.
While sales of functional Marks & Spencer cotton bras are still high in Britain and the world bestseller remains the sturdy Triumph Doreen, as worn by millions of ladies over 50, many women are happy to spend $100 on a pure-silk number as a caressing indulgence.
It has to be silk, though, not cotton, or lace, or nylon or polyester.
Strangely similar, in fact, to the twin silk handkerchiefs sewn together with some pink ribbon by Mary Phelps Jacob's enterprising maid, a whole century ago.
- INDEPENDENT
