page_title: Bra
section_title: Fashion
hierarchical_section_title: Bra / Culture / Fashion
caption_attribution_description: Publicity photo of Patti Page.
context_page_description: A bra, short for brassiere or brassière, is a form-fitting undergarment designed to support or cover the wearer's breasts. Bras are designed for a variety of purposes, including enhancing a woman's breast size, creating cleavage, or for other aesthetic or practical considerations. Swimsuits, camisoles, and backless dresses may have built-in breast support with supportive bra cups. Nursing bras are designed to facilitate breastfeeding. Some women have a medical and surgical need for brassieres, but most women wear them for fashion or cultural reasons. There is no evidence that bras prevent breasts from sagging and one study even suggests the opposite, with the exception of wearing them during sports exercices.
  Bras have gained importance beyond their mere functionality as a garment. Women's choices about what kind of bra to wear are consciously and unconsciously affected by social perceptions of the ideal female body shape, which changes over time. Bras have become a fashion item and cultural statement that are sometimes purposefully revealed by the wearer or even worn as outerwear.
  Bras are complex garments made of many parts.
context_section_description: Women's choices about what bra to wear are consciously and unconsciously affected by social perceptions of the ideal female body shape, which changes over time. As lingerie, women wear bras for sex appeal. Bras can also be used to make a social statement as evidenced by Jean-Paul Gaultier's designs and the cone-shaped bra Madonna wore outside her clothing on her Blond Ambition World Tour.
  In the 1920s in the United States – the flapper era – the fashion was to flatten the breasts. During the 1940s and 1950s, the sweater girl became fashionable, supported by a bullet bra (known also as a torpedo or cone bra) as worn by Jane Russell and Patti Page. In the early 1960s, smaller breasts gained popularity, and in the late 1990s larger breasts became more fashionable. Iris Marion Young described preferences in the United States in 1990: "round, sitting high on the chest, large but not bulbous, with the look of firmness." This is regarded as contradictory in several ways.
  As outerwear, bras in the form of bikini tops in the 1950s became the acceptable public display in modern times. During the 1960s, designers and manufacturers introduced padded and underwire bras. After the Miss America protest in September 1968, manufacturers were concerned that women would stop wearing bras. In response, many altered their marketing and claimed that wearing their bra was like "not wearing a bra". In the 1970s women sought more comfortable and natural-looking bras.
  Victoria's Secret commissions a fantasy bra every autumn. In 2003 it hired the jeweller Mouawad to design one containing more than 2500 carats of diamonds and sapphires; valued at US$10 million, it was the world's most valuable bra at the time.
caption: Patti Page wearing a bullet bra, 1955
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