Calkins Corset Co.
A late-Victorian corset advertisement from Ladies' Home Journal — the kind of copy the modern bra was invented to make obsolete just over a decade later.
The Backless Brassiere patent
Not an advertisement but its predecessor: Mary Phelps Jacob's official U.S. patent drawing (No. 1,115,674), the document that made the modern bra a commercial product.
Teenform
A Good Housekeeping advertisement aimed at teenage girls — part of a mid-century push to market bras as a coming-of-age purchase rather than a specialty item.
Sportshape Jogbra
A black-and-white Cosmopolitan print ad for the Sportshape — successor to the original 1977 Jogbra — pitched its patented "baseball cup" construction for "superior support." (Held in the Science History Institute's digital collection.)
Wonderbra, "Hello Boys"
Trademarked since 1955, the push-up Wonderbra hit its cultural peak with a UK billboard campaign starring Eva Herzigová — reportedly blamed, apocryphally, for a string of traffic accidents.
Product-first marketing
Contemporary bra advertising has largely shifted from aspirational illustration to straightforward product photography, sized and fit information front and center.
A note on sourcing
Images on this page are drawn from public-domain or freely-licensed sources, primarily Wikimedia Commons. Some well-known campaigns — including the 1994 Wonderbra billboard photograph itself — remain under copyright and are described in text rather than reproduced here.