COVER STORY

Western cultures hide the breast mainly the nipple, while in some African and South Pacific cultures the bare breast has been a non — sexualized everyday sight. Commentators have suggested that the western taboo that has led to the covering up of the breast has stimulated man’s appetite for wanting what he doesn’t have. Going back to 2,500bc in Crete, Minoan women wore clothing to hold up their breasts. However, in ancient Rome and Greece, they let them hang loose under shapeless garments, while the Church of the Middle Ages barely recognized the female form. The contrived fashion for cleavage is a relatively modem idea. It was only around the 15th century that the undergarment was even introduced and artists began to eroticize the breasts, while women were encouraged to use them to bond with their children and their husbands. Renaissance corsets went from flattening the breasts to pushing them up in the long-standing style of decolletage. The invention of the bra by Herminie Cadolle came at the turn of the 20th century, but the breast bucket, over-the-shoulder boulder-holder, booby trap, double-barrelled slingshot, tit hammock, upper-decker — flopper-stopper, call it what you will, was patented in 1913 by NewYorker Mary Phelps-Jacobs, who used two handkerchiefs and a pink ribbon to avoid the discomfort of the corset. In 1914, she sold the rights to the Warner Brothers Corset Company for $1,500. The 1920s saw the rise of the flat chest and boyish figures, while in the 1940s and 1950s breasts were promoted by ‘sweater girls’ such as Lana Turner and Jane Russell, whose assets inspired a Howard Hughes aerodynamic underwire bra. Jayne Mansfield, the ‘working man’s Monroe’, said people were more interested in her 40.21.35 than her IQ. In the 1960s, breasts were shown off when a bra-less fashion movement was led by Yves Saint-Laurent’s sheer blouse and feminists who ‘burned’ their bras. Madonna’s cone bra by Jean-Paul Gaultier and the return of cleavage marked the 1990s and, in the 21st century, new styles, plus silicone gel and the ‘chicken fillet’, arrived to fill up and push out, and augmentation through surgery began.