The brassiere is one of the most well-known undergarments in the world. Before bras became popular in the 1920s and 1930s, women used corsets to keep everything in place and offer the fashionable silhouette of the day, whether it was the inverted triangle form of the 1600s or the S-shape corsets of the Edwardian era. According to legend, the bra was conceived when women first shed their constricting corsets.
Recent discoveries in an Austrian castle, however, place a series of early bras between 1390 and 1485 AD, roughly a century before William Shakespeare was born.The Lengberg Castle was built in the 12th century in Austria’s East Tyrol region and has been modified and renovated over the ages. In 2008, a secret vault on the second floor was discovered during modernization of the structure.
Inside the vault, archaeologists from the University of Innsbruck’s Institute of Archaeology discovered a range of waste objects, including various garments of clothing. On-site, 2,700 clothing fragments were discovered. Clothing from ages past does not often survive into the current era as consumable pieces that get used hard and then (historically) reused as scraps, patches, and quilts. So it came as a surprise when so many articles of clothes were discovered in the castle, both relatively entire and as fragments.
The debris was part of a fill layer and was made up of mud, straw, and these old clothes.Leather shoes, a pair of men’s linen underwear (similar to a string bikini in today’s words), and four bras were among the discoveries. The bras were radiocarbon dated to the 14th or 15th century, and reports from the time on the many extensions and restoration projects on Lengberg Castle back up these dates. During these construction eras, the artefacts were placed in a long-forgotten part of the castle.
The linen bras resembled early twentieth-century brassieres, which were composed of silk and cotton. There were fragments of lace trim along the borders of one bra, a characteristic that most people assumed didn’t appear on women’s undergarments until much later in history. Because padding, cups, foam, and underwires were not employed in bra construction until far into the twentieth century, this form would be referred to as a bralette today.
The garment provides less support without these structural features.Writings regarding women’s clothes from the time show that these early bras were not termed bras at the time. Instead, they were dubbed “bags for the breasts,” a rather less distinguished moniker. We can see why the name didn’t catch on. Bindings, long strips of cloth, were other known bosom apparel, but bras were not identified by that word until around 1900.
No tangible evidence of bras from the late Medieval or early Renaissance periods had ever been uncovered prior to the discovery of the vault at Lengberg Castle. The term brassiere first appears around the start of the twentieth century, however they were not widely used until many years later. Cupped slips abolished the necessity for any other upper undergarment for many women between the 1920s and 1940s, supplanting both corsets and bras.
All of that changed in the 1950s, when the fit and flare New Look silhouette reigned supreme in popular women’s fashion. These early bras, on the other hand, show that this form of supportive underwear existed long before any modern conceptions of how to support women’s breasts.Two of the bras discovered at Lengberg Castle appear to have had short shirts attached to the bottom hems at some point, making them look more like bra/camisole combos or even earlier versions of the longline bra, a popular 1950s garment that extended to the belly button and frequently featured boning for support and posture.
The early bras’ shirt-like features make sense when we realize that the term brassiere is derived from a Norman word that means “child’s shirt” or “small shirt.” A skirt attached under the breast, laced up at the sides, like a more supporting form of a chemise, is one reconstruction of what the garment may have looked like in its entirety.Fine instances of tailoring not found in other clothes from the era were also discovered in the Lengberg discoveries.
Bias-cut garment linings demonstrated considerable understanding of how to manipulate textiles to best effect, a skill that did not resurface until the 1930s. clothes of this caliber are uncommon, but one has to ask if the family who lived in the castle just had a gifted tailor (or tailors), or if clothes of this caliber were more widely worn. Bras, whether you like them or not, have a definite position in fashion today. However, they have a much longer history than most people realize.