MARY PHELPS JACOB

Abstract

The inventor of the first modern bra, was a poet, publisher, peace activist, and a New York socialite.

MARY PHELPS JACOB

(1891 – 1970)

The inventor of the first modern bra, was a poet, publisher, peace activist, and a New York socialite.

Born in 1891, in New York, “Polly” as she nicknamed herself was the daughter of a prominent New England family. She was the oldest daughter of William Jacob and Mary Phelps Jacob. Her family divided its time between estates in New York, Watertown, Connecticut, and Long Island. She enjoyed the advantages of an upper-class lifestyle, including private school, formal balls, Ivy League school dances, horse riding school, and a garden party hosted by the King of England in 1914. Her ancestry included William Bradford, the Plymouth Colony’s first governor, and Robert Fulton, developer of the steamboat.

In 1910, at age 19, Mary Phelps Jacob had just purchased a sheer evening gown for her New York society debut. At that time, the only acceptable undergarment was a corset stiffened with whalebone. Polly found that the whale bones visibly poked out around the plunging neckline and under the sheer fabric.

Dissatisfied with this arrangement, she worked with her maid to fashion two silk handkerchiefs together with some pink ribbon and cord.Polly’s new undergarment complemented the new fashions introduced at the time. Family and friends almost immediately asked Polly to create brassieres for them, too. One day, she received a request for one of her contraptions from a stranger, who offered a dollar for her efforts. She knew then that this could become a viable business.

In 1914, the U.S. Patent Office issued a patent to Mary P. Jacob for the ‘Backless Brassiere’. The modern brassiere was invented and popularized by Paris couturier Herminie Cadolle as early as 1889 and was a sensation at the Great Exposition of 1900. Jacob’s patent was the first to be filed in the new category “Brassiere”, derived from the old French word for ‘upper arm’. Polly’s design was lightweight, soft, and naturally separated the breasts (or more accurately, did not force them together). While a definite improvement in terms of lightness and visibility, her brassiere did not offer breasts any support.

Running the business that she had christened with the name Caresse Crosby either was not enjoyable to Polly or she failed to properly market the product, for she soon sold the brassiere patent to the Warners Brothers Corset Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for $1,500 (roughly equivalent to $25,600 in 2003). In her later autobiography, The Passionate Years, Caresse maintained that she had “a few hundred (units) of her design produced” when Warner bought her patent. Warner went on to earn more than fifteen million dollars from the bra patent over the next thirty years.

In 1915, Polly Jacob married Richard Rogers Peabody, son of one of the three great New England Peabody families. After Polly sold her brassiere patent, she had two children: a son, and a daughter.The catalyst for Polly Jacob Peabody’s transformation was her introduction and eventual marriage to Harry Crosby, a wealthy scion of a socially prominent Boston family and another veteran and victim of the recent war.

In 1927, she founded a publishing company, first called Éditions Narcisse. She was instrumental in publishing some of the early works of important authors including James Joyce, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, Rene Crevel, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.

Suffering from heart disease, she died in relative obscurity from complications from pneumonia in Rome, Italy in 1970, aged 78. But she lived long enough to see the bra go through a number of transformations and become a standard undergarment for women all over the world.