Ninety years ago, in 1914, Mary and her maid Marie of USA, trussed up a pair of hankies to invent the first bra. In the decades since this female undergarment has evolved into a multi-billion dollar piece of merchandise. Each year now, more than two hundred innovations in the bra design are filed. The wispy two cup textile miracle, has some a long way. Today engineers are fashion designers, tearing their hair in the effort to produce the ideal bra. 

Ask them and they’ll tell you more; That the sewing together of four to eight triangles or quadrangles into spherical or conical form with supports is no easy exercise. In fact the very mathematical and engineering principles that are required to construct a cantilever or suspension bridge are applied in manufacturing the bra. The bra has to balance the upward vertical forces to counter the downward and tangential ones. While the strapped bras incorporate the cantilever tenets, the strapless one uses the suspension bridge formulae. Wire strips or plastic moulds, or the figure of ‘8’ strap supports, convert the downward tug into diagonal or opposing forces. A double ‘U’ wiring Act as structural props in designing of the ideal strapless.

The housing cup itself demands precision mathematics. For the spheroidal hemisphere the equation used is, Volume is equal to Diameter cubed multiplied by .5236 divided by two, or alternately, volume is arrived from the cube of the Radius multiplied by 4.1888, divided by two. Where the cup incorporates a conical mould then the Volume is arrived by Squaring the Diameter of the base and multiplying the product by the height of cone into .7854, the whole now divided by three.

In the early years though, the bra was designed to flatten not augment breast contour and shape. It took Howard Hughes and his unit of aeronautical engineers unit team quality research to conjure up a bra that would uplift actress Jane Russel’s natural assets. For the less endowed, inserts and padded bras are best friends.
 
Statistics say that an average American woman possesses half a dozen bras, including one non-white. In late sixties, women’s liberation movement, saw bra burning as a symbol of the crusade for gender equality.
In India, the bra, is more symbolic of sex appeal than female emancipation. Plunging necklines of blouses, exposing a healthy slice of cleavage, is a ‘page three’ staple. Sexy too is the mischievous exposure of the strap from under the blouse. Transparent tops, add much to male ‘tit’illation (pun unintended!); accentuated by black, pink, lacy or even the ‘x’ back-strap bra. Rain sequences, a must for the lovers on screen, and the viewers in front of it, have reached such ‘lows’ that a connoisseur of bras can pick out the brand of manufacture with alacrity - Maidenform, Triumph or Victoria’s Secret, or even some native ones like those churned out by Naidoo Hall. The steady hi-rise in choli’s back, coupled with the alarming downfall in its neck-nape line, just a narrow ribbon of spanning the bra’s backband and hooks. 

The Indian male has an eternal fascination for bras (and certainly more for its contents). The voyeur in him is wide awake to shape, colour and make. And the Indian woman knows it. No under-endowed female is ever going to make 'a clean breast of' her dimensions. Much ado, and more 'bra-vado, will make her go any lengths to protect the truth about her brea(d)t(h)s. Exploiting this are cosmetic plastic surgeons who peddle their talents in 'augmentation mammoplasty'. Katie Mirza and Pamela Anderson are in, Twiggy's are passe.

Bras just don’t add allure to assets, or augment its dimensions, they also twenty one times more likely to cause breast cancer. No fancier of bras is Berbel Zumner of Austria, she was struck dead by lightning, her metal wired bra acting as a conductor for the bolt, and for Norma Stitz, bras are no two handkerchief sized pieces sewed as one, her cup size is of twin towels, an enormous 56 WW. On cards are the new paint-on bras, aerosols of plastic peel off spray bras. 'Wardrobe malfunctions' will be history. Spray gun dysfunctions will be the alibi.