Date: November 1952
Brand: Exquisite Form, published in the Ladies’ Home Journal
Technical innovation was extremely popular in brassiere design after the Second World War and patented or unusual features were often used to differentiate brands in their advertising. Exquisite Form launched in New York around 1945 and introduced a bra with patented wiring in 1946, once war-time restrictions on the use of metal had ended.
Their CIRCL-O-FORM bra is spiral stitched, available with or without the ‘amazing floating action’ – which, it claimed, distributes shoulder strap pressure – and, at this time, came in cotton broadcloth, acetate satin, or nylon, in A, B and C cups. They also have ‘self-adjusting sections for perfect fit’, although it’s not clear from the According to this advert, a woman can bend, stretch and twist wearing this bra and it will stay comfortably in place.
Textile and clothing historians Jane Farrell-Beck and Colleen Gau reported in their book Uplift: The Bra in America that ‘Exquisite Form was one of the earliest major brassiere companies to advertise in Ebony, a magazine of fashion and social features for African Americans first published in 1945.’
From the collection of The Underpinning Museum
