Few garments have made as much news. A run through the moments — some real, one largely mythical — that turned an undergarment into a cultural flashpoint.
At the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, roughly 200 feminist and civil rights protesters threw bras, girdles, false eyelashes, high heels, and copies of women's magazines into a "Freedom Trash Can" on the boardwalk, denouncing the pageant as objectifying. No bras were actually burned — organizers were denied a fire permit. The "bra-burning feminist" image nonetheless stuck for decades, most likely a media conflation with the era's very real draft-card burnings.
Bras were thrown away, not set on fire, at the 1968 protest. The phrase "bra-burning" became shorthand for the entire women's liberation movement despite describing an event that never actually happened.
Lisa Lindahl, Polly Smith, and Hinda Miller stitched two jockstraps together in a University of Vermont costume shop to build the first "jockbra." Renamed the Jogbra, it arrived just as the 1972 Title IX legislation was reshaping women's access to athletics in the U.S. — giving the new category an eager, and growing, market.
Designer Jean Paul Gaultier built a structured pink satin cone bra for Madonna's Blond Ambition Tour, worn over a suit rather than under it. The look deliberately referenced 1950s bullet-bra style while flipping its meaning — from private foundation garment to public statement piece — and became one of the most recognized costumes in pop music history.
The cone bra reappeared on Madonna's own archival Instagram decades later, and versions of the silhouette have resurfaced on runways and in music videos ever since.
Though the push-up Wonderbra had existed since a 1955 trademark, its UK "Hello Boys" billboard campaign — starring Eva Herzigová — turned it into a full-blown media event, reportedly blamed for causing traffic accidents as drivers gawked. It's one of the most cited examples of lingerie advertising crossing into mainstream pop culture.
Through the 1990s and 2000s, the televised Victoria's Secret Fashion Show and its "Angels" turned bra marketing into full-scale entertainment programming, cementing an aspirational, celebrity-driven image of lingerie that dominated the category for two decades.
Bragel International's adhesive, strapless NuBra offered an answer to backless and strapless fashion trends — support with no visible garment at all, a direct counterpoint to a century of increasingly elaborate structural engineering.
Soft, wireless bralettes moved from loungewear into everyday and even eveningwear, part of a broader athleisure and comfort-first shift. Alongside it, size-inclusive direct-to-consumer brands and a more visible "going braless" conversation — echoing, if not repeating, the symbolism first (mis)attached to 1968 — reopened public debate about whether the garment is a daily requirement at all.