The bra – short for the French word brassiere, literally 'bodice, child's vest' – is complex in fabrication. Early designs – often bulky, elaborate contraptions, or “boulder holders”, to borrow a phrase from Bette Midler’s satirical song Otto Titsling – were worlds away from today’s sophisticated, high-tech, high-stretch bras. An excerpt from the book Uplift: The Bra in America describes the scene back in the 1930s, the decade in which the large-scale production of bras began. “Mature customers and women of all ages with large pendulous breasts were offered long-line brassieres, built-up backs, firm bands under the cup, wedge-shaped inserts of cloth between the cups, wide straps, power Lastex and light boning.” According to the tome, it was SH Camp and Company that pioneered the chart relating the “size and pendulousness” of breasts to letters of the alphabet, A to D (a scale that today stretches to infinity). Prior to that, “companies had relied on stretchable cups to accommodate different depths of breast”.

“It’s a highly technical garment, made of lots of tiny pieces of fabric, with so many sizes to consider for the different cups, etc. It’s a garment you wash every day, so the seams and structure need to be extremely robust. It’s very different from a piece of clothing; it’s in direct contact with the skin, it needs to be super solid,” Thomass explains, who recalls the impact Lycra had on the industry when it became big in the 1980s. “It brought new comfort and design possibilities. I had always loved Vargas’s paintings of pin-ups in underwear as the pieces looked like second skin and we were only able to do that when Lycra came along.”

It’s impossible to pinpoint when the bra was first invented, with early depictions of bra-like garments going back all the way to ancient Greece. The modern-day bra has often been presented as a successor to the corset, though the theory is sometimes challenged. During a dig at an Austrian castle in 2008, archaeologists unearthed four tattered bras remarkably similar to the undergarment’s modern form. A chicken-or-the-egg-style debate ensued.