Fashion 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, the
flapper aesthetic involved flattening 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. As outerwear, bras in the form of bikini tops in the 1950s became an acceptable public display. 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. From that point forward, sports bras were increasingly worn as outerwear.
Madonna was one of the first to start showing her bra straps, in the late 1980s. A corset she wore as outerwear during her 1990
Blond Ambition World Tour sold for US$52,000 in 2012 at the Christie's Pop Culture auction in London.
Versace's autumn 2013 couture collection featured fashions that were open in the front, revealing underwire bras. It became fashionable from the early 1990s to wear clothing that showed bra straps. Wearing clothes that reveal the bra or straps became so common that
Cosmopolitan created guidelines in 2012 on how to expose them. Advice included avoiding plain, flesh-toned, smooth-cup bras, so that the exposure does not appear accidental; making sure the bra is in good condition; and wearing a style that either matches the colour of the outerwear or is dramatically different. Amy Winehouse f5048439 (cropped).jpg|
Amy Winehouse with a visible bra strap at a 2007 performance in France File:Woman skimboarding on mud at festival.jpg|Woman wearing a bra as a top while
skimboarding on mud at the 2011
Woodstock Festival in Poland Young woman with tattoos, bralette and wrap skirt in Madison, Wisconsin 2019.jpg|A black
bralette, United States, 2019
Decreasing Western usage While a few women have a medical and surgical need to wear a brassiere, informal surveys have found that many women began wearing bras to be fashionable, to conform to social or maternal pressure, or for physical support. Very few cited comfort as the reason. In fact, many women experience so much discomfort that they remove their bra as soon as they can. Being seen in public while not wearing a bra has become more acceptable since then, encouraging more women to go without. In 2016,
Allure magazine fashion director Rachael Wang wrote, "Going braless is as old as feminism but it seems to be bubbling to the surface more recently as a direct response to
Third Wave moments like
#freethenipple hashtag campaign, increased trans-visibility like
Caitlyn Jenner's
Vanity Fair cover ... and
Lena Dunham's show
Girls (which features young women often without bras)." Surveys have reported that 5–25 per cent of Western women do not wear a bra. A National
No Bra Day was first observed in the United States on 9 July 2011. Women posted on Twitter about the relief they felt when taking off their bra. More than 250,000 people expressed an interest in "attending" the day on a Facebook page. No Bra Day is now observed internationally on 13 October.
Usage in the developing world Bras are not universally worn around the world; in some developing countries bras may cost up to 10–30 hours of a woman's wages, making them unaffordable to most of the population. Bras are highly prized at second-hand markets in
West Africa. The Uplift Project provides recycled bras to women in developing countries. Since 2005 they have shipped 330,000, including to Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga, and Cambodia. In 2009 Somalia's hard-line Islamic group
Al-Shabaab forced women to shake their breasts at gunpoint to see if they were wearing bras, which they called "un-Islamic". A resident of
Mogadishu whose daughters were whipped said, "The Islamists say a woman's chest should be firm naturally, or flat."
Economic impact Consumers spend around $16 billion a year worldwide on bras. That increased from 2006, when the average American woman owned six, one of which was strapless, and one in a colour other than white. British women in a 2009 survey reported that they owned an average of 16 bras. The average bra size among North American women has changed from 34B in 1983 to a 34DD in 2012–2013, and from 36C in 2013 to 36DD in the UK during 2014–2015. The change in bra size has been linked to growing obesity rates, breast implants, increased birth control usage, estrogen mimicking pollutants, the availability of a larger selection of bras, and women wearing better fitting bras. Bras are made in Asian countries, including Sri Lanka, India, and China. While there has been some social pressure from the
anti-sweatshop and
anti-globalization movements on manufacturers to reduce use of
sweatshop labour, most major apparel manufacturers rely on them directly and indirectly. Prior to 2005, a trade agreement limited textile imports to the European Union and the US. China was exporting US$33.9 billion in textiles and clothing each year to the EU and the US. When those quotas expired on 1 January 2005, the so-called Bra Wars began. Within six months, China shipped 30 million more bras to the two markets: 33 per cent more to the US and 63 per cent more to the EU. , an average bra cost £29.80. , Africa imported US$107 million worth of bras, with South Africa accounting for 40 per cent. Morocco was second and Nigeria third, while Mauritius topped purchasing on a
per capita basis. In countries where labour costs are low, bras that cost US$5–7 to manufacture sell for US$50 or more in American retail stores. , female garment workers in Sri Lanka earned about US$2.20 per day. In 2009, residents in the textile manufacturing city of Gurao in the
Guangdong province of China made more than 200 million bras. Children were employed to assemble bras and were paid 0.30
yuan for every 100 bra straps they helped assemble. In one day they could earn 20 to 30 yuan.
Western feminist opinions In 1968 at the feminist
Miss America protest, protesters symbolically threw a number of feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can". These included bras, which were among items the protesters called "instruments of female torture" and accoutrements of what they perceived to be enforced
femininity. A local news story in the Atlantic City
Press erroneously reported that "the bras, girdles, falsies, curlers, and copies of popular women's magazines burned in the 'Freedom Trash Can. Individuals who were present said that no one burned a bra nor did anyone take off her bra. Feminism and "bra-burning" became linked in popular culture. The analogous term
jockstrap-burning has since been coined as a reference to
masculism. While feminist women did not literally burn their bras, some stopped wearing them in protest. The feminist author Bonnie J. Dow has suggested that the association between feminism and bra-burning was encouraged by individuals who opposed the feminist movement. "Bra-burning" created an image that women were not really seeking freedom from sexism, but were attempting to assert themselves as sexual beings. This might lead individuals to believe, as
Susan J. Douglas wrote, that the women were merely trying to be "trendy, and to attract men." Some feminist activists believe that
anti-feminists use the bra burning myth and the subject of going braless to trivialize what the protesters were trying to accomplish at the feminist 1968
Miss America protest and the feminist movement in general. The
trope of feminists burning their bras was anticipated by an earlier generation of feminists who called for burning corsets as a step toward liberation. In 1873, American novelist
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward wrote: Some feminists began arguing in the 1960s and 1970s that the bra was an example of how women's clothing shaped and even deformed women's bodies to male expectations. In 1964, Professor
Lisa Jardine described her dinner with Australian writer and public intellectual
Germaine Greer during a formal college dinner in
Newnham College, Cambridge:
Germaine Greer's book
The Female Eunuch (1970) became associated with the anti-bra movement because she pointed out how restrictive and uncomfortable a bra could be. "Bras are a ludicrous invention," she wrote, "but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression."
Susan Brownmiller in her book
Femininity (1984) took the position that women without bras shock and anger men because men "implicitly think that they own breasts and that only they should remove bras." The feminist author
Iris Marion Young wrote in 2005 that the bra "serves as a barrier to touch" and that a braless woman is "
deobjectified", eliminating the "hard, pointy look that phallic culture posits as the norm." Without a bra, in her view, women's breasts are not consistently shaped objects but change as the woman moves, reflecting the natural body. Other feminist anti-bra arguments from Young in 2005 include that
training bras are used to indoctrinate girls into thinking about their breasts as sexual objects and to accentuate their sexuality. Young also wrote in 2007 that, in American culture, breasts are subject to
patriarchal American media-dominated culture [that] objectifies breasts before such a distancing glance that freezes and masters." The academic Wendy Burns-Ardolino wrote in 2007 that women's decision to wear bras is mediated by the "
male gaze". ==Health==