Secrets From Your Sister

Artist Emily Duffy created a giant bra ball reminiscent of the popular rubber band ball as an art project.

The amazing ball, which was completed in 2003, grew to be over five feet tall, weighs 1800 pounds and contains an amazing 18 085 bras. To create the ball the artist hooked the bras together end-to-end and began rolling them up. As the ball grew, it began to resemble an egg, then a globe, and perhaps even an ovary or breast. Women began to donate their bras to the project, and soon the ball was more than twice its originally planned size!

In the artist’s own words, “Breasts are often a source of conflicting emotions for women. Our personal body experiences are rarely reflected in media images we see. A woman may feel ashamed, proud, annoyed, and sexual about her breasts during just one menstrual cycle, or even a single day. Almost every woman has a bra story to tell. Some are traumatic, others joyful. A first bra is one of our culture’s rites of passage for women, yet it’s often a secret, mumbled between teenaged girls and their mothers in store dressing rooms.

Using bras as an art medium (something I’ve been doing for several years now) is a way of disrupting some of the longstanding taboos surrounding them.”

Learn more about the Bra Ball project at www.braball.com

A customer mentioned the other day that she’d heard that a man invented the bra. I didn’t really agree except to the statement that, men perhaps capitalized on the invention. The fact is that it is too hard to say WHO first invented the bra because women have always had breasts and have always been resourceful enough to find a way to best work with them.

One of the first known garments to have actually covered the breasts to control movement was called the “apodesme” later to be known as the “mamillare”, worn by Greek women who wanted to reduce breast movement in 450BC-285AD.

The newest form of the bra was originated in the late 1800’s by Herminie Cadolle. Her ‘corselet gorge’ premiered at the Grand Exposition in Paris and later the company became known as Cadolle Lingerie.

The first patent for a brassiere, a backless one, was granted to Mary Phelps Jacobs from the USA in 1914.

The history is fascinating and how the times affect how we hold up our bosoms will no doubt be an ongoing adventure!

I was excited to find a fun twist on the ‘male’ inventor… ‘Otto Titzling is a fictional character who is apocryphally described as the inventor of the brassiere.
The name, a pun on “tit-sling,” was invented by humorist Wallace Reyburn in the 1970s.’