The Sports Bra

The decline of foundation garments is the main underwear story of the 1970s: lighter, softer bras, fewer girdles, more women going without. But the decade also produced one new piece of underwear that was genuinely innovative, and it came from a practical problem rather than a fashion trend. Women had started running, and ordinary bras weren't built for it.

The 1970s saw a jogging boom in the United States, and huge numbers of women took up running and other sports. That was helped by Title IX, the 1972 American law banning sex discrimination in federally funded education, which opened up school and college sport to far more girls and women. But the bras of the time were designed for everyday wear, not for bouncing. Straps slipped, hooks dug in, seams chafed, and there was little real support.

In 1977, Lisa Lindahl, a runner in Vermont, was complaining about exactly this with her sister, who joked that what they needed was a jockstrap for the breasts. With the costume designers Polly Smith and Hinda Miller, Lindahl set out to design something better. The famous prototype was made by sewing two men's athletic supporters - jockstraps - together, which gave a garment with broad straps, no fastenings, and firm, compressing support that held the breasts close to the body instead of lifting them. They called it the "Jockbra," soon renamed the Jogbra, and began selling it in 1977. Original Jogbras are now in the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 2022 the three women were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

What made the sports bra different was its whole approach. Instead of shaping the bust into a fashionable outline, as the bullet bra did, it was designed purely for movement and comfort: compression rather than uplift, wide bands, no hardware, and stretch fabrics. That fitted neatly with the decade's move toward softer, less structured underwear, and with the idea - central to second-wave feminism - that women's clothes should serve their own lives rather than an ideal shape.

The sports bra went mainstream in the 1980s alongside the aerobics boom, and eventually it became outerwear in its own right, worn on its own for exercise. I love this story because it's so practical and so modern: three women identified a problem that bra manufacturers had ignored, solved it with two jockstraps and a sewing machine, and changed how millions of women exercise.