99% Invisible - 278- The Athletic Brassiere

Episode Date: October 4, 2017

Among the most important advances in sports technology, few can compete with the invention of the sports bra. Following the passage of Title IX in 1972, women’s interest in athletics surged. But their breasts presented an obstacle. Bouncing breasts hurt, as women getting in on the jogging craze found out. Then some friends in Vermont had an idea to stitch a couple jock straps together to build a contraption to keep things in place. This featured story was produced by Phoebe Flanigan and edited by Peter Frick-Wright, with music by Robbie Carver and Dennis Funk. XX Factor: How the Sports Bra Changed History was originally aired on the Outside podcast, a production of Outside Magazine and PRX. The Athletic Brassiere

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Hey, this is starting up. What I'm gonna have you do when you get on? I'm gonna have you just stand for a few seconds, and then when I tell you to run. That is the sound of producer Phoebe Flanagan jogging on a treadmill. She's been observed by LaGene Lawson, one of the world's leading experts on sports bras. Lawson uses all kinds of fancy equipment, like a 3D imaging machine, to understand the

biomechanics of breasts and how they move when women exercise. The breasts will rise up and then it has to go down again. It changes direction constantly, the accelerations, which is either speeding up or slowing down where the nipple is changing direction. It can be very high. I did a little research and I said, you know, a 30, 60 nipple can go from 0 to 60 faster than a Ferrari. Really? Much faster. Okay, let's see. For the past 30 years, Lawson has worked as a researcher and consultant to champion athletic wear.

She specializes in sports broad design. Sports bras are a piece of clothing that women might take for granted today, but they were totally revolutionary when they were first invented. They opened up whole new realms of sports and exercised women. Not just because I've spent 33 years studying it,

do I say this? I know from conversations with literally thousands of women that this is a game changer for that. Today we're going to feature a story from our friends at the outside podcast from Outside Magazine and PRX. They did a whole episode dedicated to the design and history of the sports bra. We'll start back in Lawson's lab with reporter Florence Williams. Beyond the lab, the jeans also got a sports bra museum. Okay, here. It's filled with decades worth of vintage models. Some are more mystifying than others.

There are so many straps. This could not be any weirder. This is called the Damon jogger, which I call the Damon jogger. And there were instructions on how to get this on, which I don't know if I can do this. You put your legs through it. Yeah, you put your legs through it. And you pull it up. Looking at all the options around the room, it's crazy to think that the modern sports broad didn't even exist when LaGene was growing up. Actually, when I started high school, we weren't allowed to run full court

because it was the assumption that girls were too weak. And we couldn't run any races longer than like 400 meters. So, women participating in sports and having needing a sports bra is so recent. Recent and surprisingly controversial. When Lijin started doing her research back in the 80s, she actually got some serious pushback, like this one letter that turned up at her office. This letter said, if God had intended women to run, he would not have put breasts on them. So it's sort of like, there was a whole sociocultural

stereotype of how women should behave, and it wasn't vigorously and badly. It was, it was to be more calm and sweet and have a comport yourself with more steadiness and not the sort of enthusiasm and passion that we see with sport. To understand how the sports brought changed all that, we need to go back to 1977. It was the same year that James Fix published his blockbuster bestseller, The Complete Book of Running.

And it was just a few years out from Title IX. Women were finally wanting in on the sports action after being told for generations and generations that their bodies just weren't built for sports. I started walking. And gradually as I got in shape, I began to run. Now I run three days a week. My family and friends say how healthy I look. You know, my whole generation started

Exercising. This is Lisa Lindahl. She got caught up in the craze and I had a friend who introduced me to What was then called jogging? And was it a new term? It was. I have to say. I went out and started jogging up at the University of Vermont indoor track. And just to get around that track once was painful. And I remember the day that I got around that track four

times and completed a mile. And you would think I had one in Olympic medal. I was so proud of myself. Lisa broke a mile. Then two, then three. She started running outside. But the more she ran, the more she realized she had a new problem. Actually, two problems. her 36-sees.

When you have a t-shirt over bouncing nipples, you get chafing. So the answer to that is to put a bra on. And because I did try running without any bra on, and then of course I got a lot of comments from passing motorists and certain male runners. Things haven't changed much over the years. Unfortunately not.

So you wear a bra of some sort and then that poses new and different problems like the straps that slip off your shoulders, so you're always jigging them back up, hardware that can dig into your back, and they're hot and sweaty. Lisa's sister started running, too, and one day she called her up. And she said, what do you do about your boobs, actually, is what she said. I am so uncomfortable when I'm running.

What she said when I was talking about the fact that I had no great solution was, why isn't there a jock strap for women? That's when we really laughed. We thought that was hilarious. Lisa couldn't let the idea drop. She started working the problem. What would that bra have to look like?

What would it have to do? And I sat down at my dining room table and wrote out a list that was, all right, the straps shouldn't fall off. They should be wide enough that they don't dig in. Ideally, I was hoping that it could be modest enough that I could take off my t-shirt on really hot summer days because I had a running partner who would do

that. He would take off in the middle of the run his t-shirt over his head and tuck it in the back of his shorts and I was so jealous. Yeah because I couldn't do that. But I didn't hold that a lot of hope for that in the beginning. And then somehow your husband became involved, your husband at the time. Yeah. Also had a role here. He did, because what happened is,

I mean, part of the irony of this story, Florence, is that I don't so. But living with me at the time was my good friend, Polly, who had become a costume designer, and so boy did she so. And I went to her and said, Polly, help me make this. And so we started making prototypes and having difficulty because really, bras are an engineering proposition. Yeah, things need to be cantilevered. Yes, it's like building a bridge. Right, but we didn't know that at the time.

So we were sitting in the living room, Polly and I, bemoaning the latest prototype that I had gone running in and was not cutting it. And my then husband came down the stairs and he had pulled one of his jock straps on over his head and across his breast and said, Hey ladies, here's your new jock bra. And we just thought that was very, very funny and rolled on the floor. And I got up and took it off of him and tried it on because I had to get in the act and pulled it over my chest that actually had breasts. And went, oh, I went running the next day in this jockstrap contraption and knew that it was, this was the product that was going to work.

And Polly went to New York City and found good elastic, found a new fabric that would work for the cups. And voila, we had a working prototype. How did you come up with a name jog bra? Well, there was no such term as sports bra at the time. And so we were calling it joc bra. I like that. And we heard from some people in the south that joc was not such a nice word. And we didn't want a name that offended some people. So we changed Jock to Jock, and it became Jogbra. So Lisa started shopping her new Jogbra around to different sporting goods stores.

Most of the buyers looked at her like she was crazy. After all, why would a running store sell women's underwear? I was very clear from the beginning that this was not gonna go into lingerie. It didn't look like lingerie, it was considered ugly. And so it needed to go into sporting goods so that when a woman went in to buy her shoes, she could also get this bra. And so I had to contend with men who were the buyers. Or because women's

undergarments had never been sold outside of the context of lingerie. Correct. To put it in lingerie would be to be minimizing its importance, minimizing its functionality. It so was not about lifting and separating and making a woman more attractive according to some fashionistas' standards. It wasn't about the bullet-pro-alook. No. And it was about functionality. I mean, it smushed the breasts, I guess, it's the chest wall. Well, there was a little bit of a uniboo fishy, right? Yes, absolutely. There was a uniboo issue. And of course, now you can have a very sexy sports bra now.

Right. But back then, it was really about function. 100%. And it took off. And it was immediately successful. Our average growth rate was like 25% per year. And we just kept growing and growing and growing. By the mid to late 80s, everywhere she looked,

Lisa was seeing runners and others wearing sports bras. But it wasn't until the 1999 women's world cup that she realized just how far her vision had traveled. Go! Go! Remember, that's when the US soccer team had just beat China with a winning goal by Brandy Chastain.

What a day this was and it continues from the Rose Bowl and Pasadena. The United States is one. The women's world cup. I was home in Vermont, and all of a sudden my phone started ringing. I ran to the TV set, and of course they were replaying the moment, and I went, oh, my word. And that moment, let me just describe it.

She made the final winning goal. She did. As soon as that goal hit the net, she ripped off her shirt and she was wearing a black jog bra. And she pumped her fists and she showed her muscles and she was swarmed by her ecstatic teammates. And it was really the jog bra that was seen around the world. Right. The jog bra that was heard around the world. Right. The jog bra that was heard around the world. Exactly.

And I think what she said was it was her confidence and her preparation and the long journey that came to fruition in that moment. And that is just perfect because that's exactly what I could say about my journey in my life, really, but also the jog bra. Well, in a way, that moment also really represented the culmination of your dream. That one day, women could run around with their shirts off. Exactly, exactly. And in fact, women do. I see it all the time and I chuckle to myself. You'd see women running down the running path or the greenway here and they're in their

running shorts and their sports bra. And that's it. So the jog bras were revolutionized women's participation in sports, but they were still geared toward women with small to medium-sized chests. What about the subset of women who were the most discriminated against of all in sports? The women with really big bezongas and often plus-sized bodies. Back at the Champion Braw Lab, Lijin Lawson says the coming up with products for large breasted women was the obvious next step. But it also required some next level engineering.

When you're running, there are ground reaction forces coming up through your body that are two to three times your body weight, and those impacts are transmitted to your breast tissue. Our skeletons are pretty bony. They react in a certain way. The breast is sort of viscoelastic and can respond even more to the impact, stretch and distort out of shape. The larger the breast, the more mass of the breast, the more impact can affect it and create very large displacements. But yeah, mass is a big factor.

That was certainly proving to be true for Renelle Broughton. Oh, I would try doubling up on sports bras. She was a hairdresser in Montana, and she'd been playing volleyball and running track with triple Ds. When you start getting up in the CD, double D triple D area, you gotta have a lot more going on there to contain those. Give us a sense of how big triple D breasts are.

Do you know what they weigh, for example? Oh, not really, but a lot. Yeah. I mean, if I were looking at a triple D breast, in front of me, what would it look like? So apparently you don't have triple D's, is that what you think? I so do not know. I'm a B. You don't know how lucky you are.

I tell you what, they can be very annoying because every time you want to do anything move or, you know, I remember when I was playing volleyball, you know, the ball would roll out of the court, and I'd just stand there and let somebody else go after it because I wasn't running after that thing. Rinelle was fed up, and eventually it occurred to her to just try to hack the jog bra and make it a much sturdier feat of engineering.

That was in 1985. And I tell you, the first bra that I made for myself was not pretty. We just used we just used my mother's left over fabric from different things and but I really didn't care. I didn't get that's that's the thing with me is I don't I don't really care what it looks like. I just want it to work. And what were the big innovations in in your bra? What made it different from the jog bra? It was more, there's more fabric.

There's less stretch in the fabric. Because if you, what I always say, if you can take a sports bra and stretch it out enough to pull it over your head, it's only gonna stretch when it gets there. And so we knew we had to do something that had a closure in it, and I wanted the closure in the front to make it easier to get on and off. So it looks like a vest, basically. So you were able to kind of distribute the weight a little bit through this design.

Exactly. Well, Renault, why do you think large breasted women had been so ignored until this point? You know, I think it's probably a couple different things. There probably wasn't as many of us out there. I think there's getting to be more of us. So you think that breasts are actually getting bigger now? Yeah, I think they are. I think people are getting bigger.

Breasts are getting bigger. Feet are getting bigger, breasts are getting bigger, feet are getting bigger. I mean, if you look at an antique pair of shoes from way back when, they're tiny. I mean, really tiny. So yeah, I think people are getting bigger. Yeah. Well, I've certainly heard that anecdotally. I know it's kind of, it's not something that's really easy to quantify. I think it's not really measured in your annual doctor's visit. No. And also, I think when girls start to develop, if they develop like starting in junior high,

early high school, and they're playing sports, and all of a sudden they've got these boobs that are causing problems, a lot of them will more quick. What do you think behind that? I don't know. I'm not a scientist. I'm just a big booed blonde. Renelle may not be a scientist, but we did find a woman who actually studies the stuff. Hi, Michelle.

Hi, can you first say your name and briefly what you do? My name is Michelle Larsh and I'm a senior research associate in the Department of Sport and Ex-Liscience here in the University of Portsmouth. We called up Michelle because we wanted to see if her nails instincts were right. In spite of all the innovation in sports broad technology, boobs could still be causing girls to drop out of sports. This something certainly is. Yeah, this is a really big issue, I guess, worldwide, just the general participation levels in sport.

And we've looked at it in school girls in the United Kingdom. And as it is about 12% of 14-year-old girls are achieving kind of exercise guidelines. We know that as a nation, we're getting moral b since having massive health implications. So we need to try and combat that and we actually found that breasts are one of the barriers of why these girls might be dropping out or not reaching exercise guidelines. Wow, so what did you find in your research?

Yeah, so we find that kind of in relation to, the biggest reason for lack of participation in excurs, I guess, is this breast bounce. So this kind of excessive movement in breast, that girls are very self-conscious of it. After this, again, it was changing in front of each other. So in school, they weren't comfortable, in case their breasts might be exposed to their friends. This was, again, more prevalent in larger breasts or girls.

This is interesting to me. I mean, it's not necessarily that it's sort of a physics problem as much as it is almost a psychological problem. Yeah, definitely. In terms of the physics, I mean, having a good sports brow, we know we'll reduce the amount of that breast move during high or low or any kind of activity. So we can easily alter the physics of breast moving, but it's the psychological effect that they probably need

education on that can kind of have a bigger impact maybe. As well as I found that nearly 50% reported that they never wear a sports bra during sports. And for us, this is kind of one of the main educational aspects that we can kind of come in with. Well, if you get a good sports bra, you can reduce this bounce during sport. And we might be able to keep school girls engaged in sport. Then do you think there's an economic piece to this as well? Possibly, but I think that we see a lot of good sports bras now that are not necessarily very expensive. So I think that it's becoming more accessible for people to have sports bras in general

and well performing sports bras. Huh. And this is really sort of an under-sung area in looking at access to health. We need to get these girls in the right equipment. Yeah, definitely. Definitely gets overlooked. We also found that they actually had massive concerns about their breasts. So, 7 to 3% reported having one breast-specific concern in sports,

and that they were looking for education, that they'd be happy to take in breast education, but it just wasn't there in the schools, far of them. in breast education, but it just wasn't there in the school as far as them. I think it's still a taboo subject talking about breast, and we really want to make it out that this is not a taboo. There's something we should all talk about freely, and that we can kind of educate them further on. It's been 40 years now since the first Jacques Brae hit the market. Annual retail sales of the sports bra are in the billions worldwide and growing. And it's all continuing to track

with the phenomenal growth of women's athletics overall. The next 40 years will likely offer better materials, smart bras that keep track of your vitals, ever cuter, sturdier, and flashier designs, and hopefully more education to make these genius contraptions of structural engineering more accessible to the girls who could use them. Because girls need to run and play and move, even if they don't want their breasts to move quite so much.

So here's to the basement sewing session, the high-tech boo-blabs, the dedicated enthusiasts who made it all possible. From all of us, happy 40th anniversary. That was Florence Williams. This story was produced by Phoebe Flanagan and edited by Peter Frick Wright with music by Robbie Carver and Dennis Funk. The story originally aired on the outside podcast, a production of Outside Magazine and PRX.

On the 99PI staff, Delaney Hall brought this piece into us and Sean Real made the music. Our senior producer is Katie Mingle Kirk-Colstead is the digital director, Shreef Yusuf, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taren Mazza, and Avery Truffman round out the plucky ensemble along with me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. 99% of visible is part of Radio Topia from from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by the night foundation and coin carrying donors, just like you. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook.

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