October 25 is World Milk Love Day, which was established to call more women to care about breast health.
The first step to caring for breast health is to wear comfortable, healthy underwear. However, most women have a common little annoyance: it takes a lot of effort to buy a proper underwear.
Why is lingerie so important?
From development to menopause, underwear is the calmest witness of women's life process, the warmest guardian, and a cruel reminder.
It is close to our bodies day and night, and for women, underwear is a soft and intimate piece of armor that tells more about who you are than outerwear.
Ashin incarnated as a "Friend of Women" today, bringing senior underwear designer Yu Xiaodan's new book "Underwear Lesson", which is a new book with the same theme after 7 years, adding more than 50% new content + 52 hand-drawn illustrations by the author.
Why can a book on lingerie be greatly updated? Because with the development of the times and the advancement of concepts, women's requirements for underwear continue to change, and underwear itself will also progress.
Of course, the concept of underwear is not only bras, but also includes underwear, shapewear, pajamas, loungewear and so on. But since today is World Breast Day, Ashin will talk about the history of bras.
The classical corset is full of women's forbearance, bondage, struggle, and liberation
If you want to talk about the history of underwear, let's start with the classical corset, from which all the foundations of modern underwear were laid.
The so-called classical is relative to the modern corset, which is a familiar element of weaving, tether, (metal) keel, hook-and-eye clasp and so on.
We often see it in movies, such as Vivien Leigh in "Gone with the Wind" and Kate Winslet in "Titanic" both wear classical corsets.
However, the real classical corset in history was not as sexy and beautiful as presented in the movie at first.
According to the research of historians of women's clothing, the corset first appeared in the 16th century.
The Middle Ages had just ended, and the corset was full of requirements for standardizing women's posture.
Today, in a museum in Rouen, Italy, there is a 17th-century corset, made entirely of thick iron bars and assembled with rivets, which looks like the armor of an ancient soldier or the shackles of a prisoner, hard and cold.
17th-century iron openwork corset, now in a museum in Rouen, Italy. This picture is hand-drawn by the author Yu Xiaodan
This corset, made entirely of hard metal, forcibly corrects the female figure, masks feminine features and curves, and completely suppresses the natural beauty of the breasts.
By the beginning of the 19th century, the era of the hard and cold metal corset was over, replaced by a mild cloth corset.
In order to achieve the purpose of support, thin wood and iron pieces are placed in the cloth corset, and an adjustable tether is added to the back.
At this time, the corset more prominent and emphasized the female curve than the metal corset: a thinner waist, fuller chest and hips.
In the 50s of the 19th century, the arrival of the steel age made steel keels popular, and corset making entered the industrialization.
While the industrial corset makes the waist thinner and the chest fuller, the damage to the female body is also very serious, and accidents such as straining the ribs and damaging internal organs occur frequently.
Under the emancipation trend, a doctor named Lucian Warner designed a healthy corset himself, removed the heavy steel bones, replaced it with a plant fiber as a chest brace, and added shoulder straps to assist the support, making the corset much more flexible.
Because it no longer oppresses women's torsos and gives the body room to breathe, Dr. Warner's health corset became popular as soon as it came out, setting a record of 14 million pieces sold in a single country.
But by the beginning of the 20th century, healthy bras were also on the decline: women were out of the house and into the workplace, and at this time, modern bras were needed.
Step by step towards a more comfortable modern bra
We now refer to bras as "bra", which comes from the word brassière, which only appeared at the end of the 19th century, more than 120 years ago.
At that time, the essential change to the classical bra was to separate the long corset into two parts, the upper part became the corset, and the upper part became a clothing similar to today's bra.
But who invented the modern bra? There is no clear answer to this question.
The first well-documented and patented modern bra was invented by Mary Phelps Jacob.
In 1910, 19-year-old socialite Mary was preparing to attend a ball, and she planned to wear a light evening gown, but the restrained corset was like a square box, which made her feel uncomfortable.
So, using two handkerchiefs and a webbing, she sewed a simple breast-wrapping underwear herself.
This soft underwear not only made Mary gain the envy of other women, but also won business opportunities.
The bodice is lightweight, soft, comfortable to wear, and more importantly, it puts the woman's two breasts into separate cups, giving them room to fully develop.
Mary patented a bra she invented, which was approved by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This is an archival record of the time.
Since then, modern underwear has a new concept - to puff up the chest, not to suppress the chest.
But Mary's underwear factory did not succeed, and she designed underwear that was short and soft, suitable only for women with small breasts and firmness.
As a result, women's independent choice and requirements for underwear are closer: everyone has a different body shape and needs different underwear that suits them.
In 1935, the Warner Company of the United States issued the first set of chest size standards represented by letters, using A, B, C, and D to refer to cup models from small to large. This bra size standard is still used today.
While commercial corsets are in full swing, in the 70s of the 20th century, another far-reaching thing happened in the women's underwear industry - sports bras appeared.
In 1977, long-distance running pioneer Lisa Lindell discovered that men had special sports belts, while women did not have suitable underwear when exercising and could only tolerate breast discomfort.
So, Lisa and her own hair small, costume designer Paulie Smith, personally designed a "jogging bra" (jogbra) suitable for women to run.
Jogging bra commercial taken by Hinda and Lisa
With the "jogging bra", Lisa and her partners successfully obtained a commercial loan for this lingerie designed for women's sports, created a women-owned, operated and sold women's goods business, and successfully sold the products to sports goods stores that generally serve men.
This small corset, for many women in the past, present and future, has really made sports possible, and has also led to a significant increase in the number of female athletes in the whole world, directly contributing to the result that women can participate in almost all sports.
Modern bras are still constantly changing cuts, fabrics, and styles, from thin-cushioned bras designed for flat-chested women, deep V-shaped magic bras that show women's sensuality, and post-breast cancer bras that love special women.
In the long history of women's underwear, women have more and more clear claims about their own way of being. They have long ceased to dress themselves according to male likes and dislikes, nor have they been constrained by the requirements of social roles.
Respecting one's own existence, respecting one's need for comfort and comfort, bra design is moving towards this proposition.
A "Underwear Lesson" for All Women
For every woman, underwear is a "centrifugal closest" intimacy.
From the first underwear in adolescence, to the pajamas that accompany one-third of life, and the most comfortable loungewear when getting along with themselves, every underwear that women choose also defines their own space and life.
Yu Xiaodan, the author of "Underwear Lesson", has been living by words for the first 30 years of her life, and she is the translator of Nabokov's masterpiece "Lolita" -
"Lolita, the light of my life, the fire of my desire. My sin, my soul. Lo-Li-ta: The tip of the tongue is up, in three steps, gently falling from the palate down on the teeth. Lo. Beautiful. Tower. ”
This famous opening came from the translation of Yu Xiaodan, who had just graduated from college at that time.
At the age of 30, Yu Xiaodan made a choice that seemed extremely natural to her, but her life turned 180 corners, and she walked on Madison Avenue on the day she graduated from the New York Fashion Institute and began to engage in underwear design.
Yu Xiaodan
When talking about designing underwear, Yu Xiaodan said:
"In my opinion, the most important quality of underwear is comfort, to have a very appropriate relationship with the body, when it should be close, when it should be far. But comfort is not to eliminate differentiation, personalization, not no size, but on the contrary, have a better sense of proportion, the most comfortable state must be the most appropriate state with your body. Therefore, underwear is not to eliminate details, but to have more accurate details, more logical details of the body. In this sense, underwear design and literary creation are connected, and we must respect the complex feelings of each individual. ”
Therefore, she created this "Underwear Lesson" for every woman, she used a professional but inclusive perspective to interpret the origin of underwear development, the original intention of underwear design, the key to applicable scenarios and choices.
The whole book presents the development history and interesting facts of classical bras, bras, underwear, shapewear, pajamas and loungewear, interspersed with various underwear styles, fabrics and other knowledge popularization, as well as practical advice on choosing underwear, forming a complete underwear lesson.
For her, "Underwear Class" should be "a romantic, soft, warm, and highly intellectual book", just like women, with their own gentleness and firmness.
After reading the book, writer Lindbergh wrote:
"The sawtooth of life often makes women like frightened birds, and "Underwear Lesson" writes about the process of women regaining physical comfort and inner confidence through 'underwear' in the past 200 years."
From Hao Sijia's classic corset in "Gone with the Wind", to the bra that meets daily life, to the sports underwear that can carry out high-intensity training, the development history of underwear also carries women's liberation and proposition for their social identity and spiritual life.
The book "Underwear Lesson" contains a meaning that only women can understand: the softer and thinner the thing, the more it has the power beyond the ordinary.