It started in a sorta silly way. Yesterday I said to my son Doug, “I like your Calvin Klein sweatshirt.” It is black with a big white cK logo and the words, “Calvin Klein jeans.” Greyfox either found it in a dumpster or bought it at a bag sale. Too big for Greyfox or me, it went to Doug. He had put it on Tuesday when he cleaned up to go vote in the local election.
I went on to tell him that I also like my Calvin Klein jeans. What I didn’t say at the time was I don’t like them for their comfort, but because they function as well as any old girdle to enhance this saggy baggy old figure of mine. (That’s the downside of losing a hundred pounds: more skin than I need right now.)
The jeans I like for fit and comfort (as my loyal readers already know) are GV: Glorious Vanderbutt jeans. As those thoughts were running through my head, perhaps the kid caught the thought, because he said, “I’m wearing Gloria Vanderbilt jeans right now.”
I said, “What?!? Those have to be my jeans! You don’t have any Gloria Vanderbilts.”
He replied, “They fit me perfectly. I found them in my pants shelf.”
Then I said, with some heat, “Get out of my pants! Go change your jeans. I don’t know how they got into your room.” [It had to have been me who put them there. I'm the only one around here who puts away the clean laundry. I must have been asleep.]
When he stood up, sure enough, there on the watch pocket was the embroidered swan. But that “perfect fit” wasn’t quite. The bottoms of the pants rode somewhere a few inches above his ankles. The kid has absolutely no fashion sense. If he can button a pair of pants around his waist and they don’t fall off his hips, that’s a perfect fit for him.
He went off to his room and put on a pair of Dockers. He seemed a bit bemused that he and I now wear the same size pants. Last week when we were discussing who would climb up on top of the bookcase to tape the plastic sheeting over the window, he said it should be him because he’s lighter. I sent him off to step on the bathroom scale. He was incredulous to learn that he now outweighs me by fifteen pounds.
It’s all in height, and in those long arms, apparently. I was the one who risked the shaky little white resin bookshelf. It survived and so did I.
Anyhow, as I lay in bed this morning, the amusing thought crossed my mind, “Doug went to vote in my Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.” That triggered an association with the old Maidenform bra, “I dreamed…” ads.
One of the sillier ones, in my opinion, was the, “I dreamed I was an Eskimo in my Maidenform bra” ad from the ‘fifties, but in the twenty years of that ad campaign there were more than a few silly pictures, as well as some that were quite memorable for their ability to evoke longing in a more youthful me for a glamourous lifestyle I’d never achieve. One of those in that latter category for which I couldn’t find an image today was, “I dreamed I flew to Paris….”
Others, such as, “I dreamed I won the election…” inspired a generation of women who were struggling to break out of their restrictive sociocultural gender roles. Advertising Age magazine named the “I dreamed…” campaign to the #28 spot in its top 100 ad campaigns of the twentieth century.
It was in the early 1950s, in Life and Look magazines, that I first recall seeing those ads. They were different and caught my little-girl fancy, making me want to wear a bra. They were controversial, too, especially after they switched from artists’ renderings to showing photos of live models showing their underwear in public places. It was a time when most bra ads were understated tasteful drawings or just pictures of the bra alone or on a mannequin .
Another difference was that the ads were selling “lifestyle”, and not the product itself. Ad copy did mention features such as circular stitching and stretch fabric, but not prominently. What the ads were pushing was a glamourous fantasy world. By the time the, “I dreamed I walked a tightrope…” ad came out in the ‘sixties, many women felt the ads, and bras themselves, were passé. One of the places my googletrip took me today was to Hotel Satire, where a woman’s purpose is to serve and service men. That episode of the satirical Zmag series is mostly about a new Maidenform ad campaign, Maidenform Unhooked, that features:
…a rainbow coalition of gals posing in their bras, unhooking their bras, and out of their bras (and wearing only sarongs with their bras) next to statements like “Most men don’t notice my eyes are hazel” and “No one lays a hand on them without loving me first” and “they crave passion” and “They changed before the baby, and after. I wonder what they’ll do for an encore” and “The way my husband looks at me, you’d think I was twenty.”
In reference to the previous Maidenform campaign, the satirist sums it up succinctly:
“As many of you older gals may recall, the most famous Maidenform campaign, that ran from 1949 to 1969, depicted gals enacting fantasies of accomplishment and purpose, i.e., gals who stopped traffic, or starred on television, while proudly showing off their Maidenform bras. These ads, say our Hotel gals who favor them, are excellent because they show gals doing important things—in their dreams, and in their underwear.”
Unless we possessed enough dignity, nobility or clout to be called ladies, we were all girls or gals (or chicks or broads or femmes or cuties or coeds) back then, in the 1950s.
I think that to be called a woman was, to most of us, a mild insult. There were “loose” women (which I learned on my googletrip today was derived not from sloppy morals but from the jiggly, bouncy effects of not wearing bras and girdles — a definite no-no when I was a child), fast women (who would **horrors** kiss on the first date), “other” women –adultresses, mistresses, “kept” women– and old women (which nobody wanted to be — “crone” was synonymous with “witch”), but
Time Magazine hadn’t even considered naming a
Woman of the Year. Not until the 1960s did it become widely acceptable to outgrow girlhood and be a woman, and to throw away your bras.
At ebrasetc.com, I encountered the old misinformation about the infamous “bra burning” in Atlantic City at the Miss America Pageant of 1968. Men were burning draft cards around that time, and the Women’s Liberation Movement was gaining momentum. When a bunch of feminist women were picketing the “meat market” beauty pageant one of them brought out a trash can and the picketers started tossing their bras into it. Nobody ignited it, but some reporter apparently thought “bra burning” had more pizazz than “bra trashing” and it went out over the wire services that way. 
I recall watching video of the event, seeing women removing their bras without taking off their shirts or exposing themselves. My mother taught me that trick: unhook the bra in back, reach up one sleeve and pull the shoulder strap down past your elbow, then work your arm out of it and pull the bra out the other sleeve. Neat trick, and I’ve seen men stand amazed as they watched me perform it.
Once I even won a few bucks from some guy who had never seen it and was fool enough to take my bar bet that I could take off my bra without removing my shirt. Ah, the olden days! 
The “painted the town red” dream ad is apparently an oldie, predating the switch to black and white photos. Looks to me like right after WWII, when the campaign began.
The Smithsonian Institution’s archives contain a collection of documents and artifacts from Maidenform. The physical portion of The Maidenform Collection (in addition to the digital data) takes up 35 cubic feet of museum space. In the Smithsonian website’s historywired section is a wealth of information about Maidenform and its founders:
Illustration below is from
Maidenform’s patent application.
The history of Maidenform, Inc. began at Enid Frocks, a small dress shop in New York City owned and operated by Enid Bissett. Ida Rosenthal was a Russian Jewish immigrant and seamstress at Enid’s shop. In 1922 Ida and Enid decided that the fit and appearance of their custom-made dresses would be enhanced if improvements were made to the bandeaux style bras then in vogue. They gathered the bandeaux in the middle in a design modification that provided more support in a manner they believed enhanced, rather than downplayed, a woman’s natural figure. Ida’s husband, William, added straps and further refined the style. The called their bras “Maidenform”, in counterpoint to the “Boyish Form” brand then in vogue. Initially, the bras were given away with each dress they sold. As the bras gained popularity they began selling them, and eventually the bras became so popular they stopped making dresses altogether and shifted to full-scale brassiere manufacturing. The first Maidenform plant opened in Bayonne, NJ in 1925. After World War II, the company began marketing heavily in Europe and Latin America. Eventually, Maidenform operated plants in West Virginia, Florida, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
Documentation for the development and manufacture of a “pigeon vest” is also included in the collection. The pigeon vest allowed troopers to carry homing pigeons with them as they parachuted behind enemy lines. During World War II, Maidenform manufactured these pigeon vests and silk parachutes for the war effort.
Given that eBras, etc. had that floater about the bra burnings, I’m not sure how accurate the rest of their history of bras is, but here is some of it anyway, FYI.
Lift! Separate! Cross Your Heart! Full Coverage and Busting Out! How ladies have been containing themselves through the ages.
In 1863, Luman L Chapman patented a corset substitute with breast puffs and shoulder-brace straps that tied in back. The first bra was born. Then in 1893, Marie Tucek patented the “Breast Supporter” – the first garment similar to the modern-day bra that used shoulder straps with a hook-and-eye closure to support the breasts in pockets of fabric.
In 1904, the Charles R. DeBevoise Company first labeled a woman’s bra-like garment a ‘brassiere’. It was a actually a lightly boned camisole that helped stabilize the breasts.
By 1907, the term “brassiere” began to show up in high profile women’s magazines and eventually, around 1912, it appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary.
In 1913, Mary’s Secret appeared. Mary Phelps jacob, a new York socialite, made a ‘backless brasierre’ from two silk handkerchiefs and some ribbon. Her friends were sold on this innovative idea and encouraged Mary to apply for a patent for her “Backless Brassiere” design. Within a short time, Mary lost interest in the garment business and sold her patent to Warner Brother’s Corset Company for $1,500.00. Today, Warner Brother’s are a leading name brand manufacturer of bras.
By 1928, entrepreneurs William and Ida Rosenthal took the bra to its next stage by introducing cup sizes and bras for all stages of a women’s life. Several year’s later, Warner added the A to D sizing system which became the standard in 1935.
In 1943 Howard Hughes, famous billionaire and genuine lover of cleavage designed a cantilevered bra to better show off Jane Russell’s cleavage in the movie ‘The Outlaw’.
In 1947, Frederick Mellinger, founder of the Frederick’s of Hollywood, began selling intimate apparel in his Los Angeles stores.
[Maidenform's "I dreamed..." ad campaign's beginning in 1949 is chronicled, and then the history continues.]
By 1959, Warners and Dupont had produced Lycra, the renown stretchy fabric. The result was the true appreciation for jiggle decrease! But then by the late 60s, women were burning their bras. In fact, one such bra burning was staged near the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1968!
The 1970s saw the development of the Ah-h Bra (1972) from Sears, and the sports bra in 1977 created by Lisa Lindahl and Polly Smith who sewed two jockstraps together and named it the Jogbra!
And then in the 1990s, the bra industry leaped to a new level in the quest for cleavage by utilizing water, air and silicone pads. Improvements in these developments take us on into the 21st century with companies like Fashion Forms which are mostly about breast management and enhancement. 
PBS, in its They Made America series, profiled Maidenform’s founder.
Brassiere Tycoon
An outspoken Russian Jewish immigrant sold American women on the first undergarment that uplifted and conformed to their shape — the brassiere.
Socialist Dressmaker An 18-year-old immigrant from Tsarist Russia in 1904, Ida Kaganovich held socialist ideals and believed in women’s rights. After breaking with an aunt and uncle in Hoboken, New Jersey, strong-willed Ida Americanized her last name to “Cohen.” Two years later, she married the beau she had followed to the U.S., William Rosenthal. Unwilling to work for others, Ida bought a Singer sewing machine on the installment plan, and hung out her shingle as a seamstress. William, plagued with poor health, took up sculpting.
Change for Women
Rosenthal’s business grew during World War I, and by 1921, she opened a dress shop in Manhattan with a partner, Enid Bisset. William soon joined them. Jazz Age women were living through a cultural sea change; they won the right to vote and went to work in new jobs in factories, department stores, and offices as urban economies expanded. The Flapper look made women wrap their chests in bandeaux for a flat-chested “Boyish Form.” Buxom Ida deplored the fashion. “Why fight nature?” she asked.
Separation and Uplift
To make women look better in their dresses, Enid and William designed a built-in bandeau with cups that separated and supported the breasts. Customers loved the brassieres, and quickly demanded them separately. By 1922, the small dress shop had registered the name Maiden Form and hired a salesman. Word of mouth brought more success, and in 1925, at Ida’s urging, the partners stopped dressmaking to focus on their hot product. In 1928, they sold 500,000 bras. The company survived the Great Depression and Enid’s retirement, and by the end of the 1930s Maiden Form products were sold in department stores across the nation and around the world.
Finally, firefighter Therese Floren, Executive Director of Women in Fire Service, Inc. in her article, An Unmentionable Measure of Progress, describes her Maidenform dream.
The earliest connections I’ve seen between bras and firefighting are in old underwear advertisements. The best-known is a Maidenform ad that dates from the mid-1960′s. I have a framed copy of it on my wall, as some of you probably do on yours. It
features a non-NFPA compliant “woman firefighter” (in reality, a pretty, pale and un-muscular model with lots of red lipstick and black mascara) leaning off the side of a fire engine, hanging onto a ladder with one hand and waving with the other. She wears a red helmet, shiny black patent-leather boots, red satin hot pants amply trimmed with rhinestones, satiny white gloves, and (of course) a Maidenform bra. “I Dreamed I Went to Blazes in my Maidenform Bra,” the caption reads.
It’s an informative article, worth reading in its entirety to get the picture of what life has been like for female firefighters. It ends up with the latest in state-of-the-art underwear for lady smokeaters:
“But if the item I found at WFS’ Los Angeles conference is any indication, things have come around to a reasonable resolution. One of the booths in the vendor area was selling Los Angeles Fire Department shorts, sweatshirts, ball caps and other clothing. And there, right next to the cash register, was a big stack of Los Angeles Fire Department jogbras. Now, these aren’t, precisely speaking, department-issued items, but they do have “LAFD” embroidered in big letters on the front and back. When I inquired, I was told by one L.A. City firefighter that she occasionally strips down to hers when taking a cooling-off break on a fire scene, behind the rig or in some other area appropriately sheltered from the view of the general public.
…Of course, I promptly bought a bright red one, and will wear it proudly on all suitable occasions. It certainly beats hanging off the side of a fire engine in rhinestoned hot pants.”
I’ve surely said this before, but here it is again: I don’t wear bras. I threw them away in 1969, as soon as I got away from my biker ol’man who didn’t want me jiggling and bouncing for anyone but him. They are, to me, torture devices in the same category as the Iron Maiden and the chastity belt.
The obsession with confining women’s bodies has ranged from Chinese foot-binding (to cripple women and make it impossible for them to run from their abductors and rapists) through the entire range of “foundation garments”. The latter have been touted for purposes as various as “improving” appearance (and who can improve on Nature?) to curing “weak back” as in the ad for Electric Corsets here.
Women have not been the only victims. Binding weakens rather than strengthening, as has recently come out in a number of personal injury lawsuits surrounding some employers’ insistence that their workers wear elastic “back belts” on the job. You’d think they’d have learned a thing or three from the Chinese foot-binding business.
My mother was a victim of corsetry. Her pendulous abdomen and uterine prolapse were the direct result of abdominal muscles weakened from years of binding. I think of that every time I suck it in and zip up those tight jeans. When I take off those jeans, though, I do a few sets of crunches. Mama never knew about crunches.
And that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
It’s final… my diagnosis: definitely NPD!
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