Caresse Crosby - Patent For The Brassiere

Patent For The Brassiere

She filed for a patent on February 12, 1914 and on November that year the U.S. Patent Office granted her a the first U.S. patent for the 'Backless Brassiere'. Polly related her invention to corset covers which were worn to cover the bosom when a woman wore a low corset. It had shoulder straps that attached to the garment's upper and lower corners, and wrap-around laces attached at the lower corners which tied in the woman's front, enabling her to wear gowns cut low in the back.

Polly wrote that her invention was "well-adapted to women of different size" and was "so efficient that it may be worn by persons engaged in violent exercise like tennis." Her design was lightweight, soft, comfortable to wear, and naturally separated the breasts, unlike the corset, which was heavy, stiff, uncomfortable, and had the effect of creating a single "monobosom". In the U.S., patents for various bra-like undergarments had appeared as early as the 1860s. The modern brassiere was invented and popularized by Paris couturier Herminie Cadolle as early as 1889 and was a sensation at the Great Exposition of 1900, becoming a fast seller among wealthy Europeans in the decade that followed.

After she married Richard Peabody, Polly filed a legal certificate with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on May 19, 1920, declaring that she was a married woman conducting a business using separate funds from her husband's bank account. She founded the Fashion Form Brassière Company and located her manufacturing shop on Washington Street in Boston, where she opened a two-woman sweatshop, that manufactured her wireless brassière during 1922. The location also served as a convenient place to go for trysts with Harry Crosby, who would become her second husband.

In her later autobiography, The Passionate Years, she maintained that she had "a few hundred (units) of her design produced." She managed to secure a few orders from department stores, but her business never took off. Harry, who had a distaste for conventional business and a generous trust fund, discouraged her from pursuing the business and persuaded her to close it. She later sold the brassiere patent to The Warner Brothers Corset Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut for US$1,500 (roughly equivalent to $21,000 in current dollars). Warner manufactured the "Crosby" bra for a while, but it was not a popular style and was eventually discontinued. Warner went on to earn more than US$15 million dollars from the bra patent over the next thirty years.

In her later years, she wrote,

I can't say the brassiere will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it."