In the early twentieth century, it was still something of a novelty to encounter mass-produced undergarments at all—or clothing that was specific to children. Before then, middle-class children in Europe and North America essentially wore kid-sized versions of adult clothing. “From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century,” the museum curator Anaïs Biernat wrote in the 2015 collection Fashioning the Body, “like their parents, children’s bodies were constricted by a hidden frame consisting of whalebone stays or a corset that formed a rigid structure around the torso.”
According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), patents for softer, less restrictive alternatives to corsets were filed in the late nineteenth century and developed in the 1910s. The idea of separate undergarments for young girls developed in parallel. By the 1920s, a “junior” market for youth clothing was in full swing, as corset makers deliberately sought to turn young girls into lifelong consumers. According to the historian Jill Fields:
It wasn’t only corsets. Girdles and brassieres became part of the burgeoning youth market, with the Warner Brothers Corset Company selling a “Growing Girl” brassiere in 1917. The trend led a fashion buyer to report in the 1920s that “[s]mall sizes sell best—even the little girls wear brassieres now.”
In the 1930s, a knitted version, called a “mouldette,” aimed at 10- to 15-year-olds, was advertised in Corset and Underwear Review. And the 1930 patent application for the Malnick brassiere mentioned: “the provision of a brassiere that shall be especially suited… to afford the necessary support for insuring correct bust development of adolescent wearers.” Other physiology-based justifications for training bras persist, such as the idea that nipples on developing bodies are raw and need extra protection (or extra camouflage).
The 1930s also saw the rise of cup sizing and a transition away from the breast-flattening flapper styles of the 1920s. “Uplift” bras were sold to even “the tiniest, flattest youngsters,” as the junior market segmented into “debs” (17- to 19-year-olds) and “sub-debs” (13- to 16-year-olds).
By the 1950s, bustiness was big business. This period was a watershed moment for training bras, which tapped into post-war anxieties about appropriate femaleness. These worries were medicalized at the same time that they were culturally ingrained. The cultivation of an attractive, well-groomed self became a project everyone, including preteen girls, was urged to embark on. Undergarment sellers essentially transformed the collective pressures of wartime sacrifice into a kind of personal duty to be presentable—and appropriately gendered.