Mary Phelps Jacob

The bra you’re wearing was invented by a 19-year-old at a party.

In 1910, Mary Phelps Jacob was just another 19-year-old New York socialite.

Private schools. Equestrian lessons. Balls. Debutante luncheons.

Everything about her life was designed to be proper.

But the corset she was wearing wasn’t.

It poked out beneath her sheer dress on the night of a high-society ball.

So she grabbed two handkerchiefs and a pink ribbon.

With her maid’s help, she stitched together a soft, lightweight undergarment.

Her body could finally move.

By the end of the night, women were begging her to make more.

Four years later, in 1914, she patented it as the “Backless Brassiere”, the first modern bra.

It separated the breasts instead of smashing them together.

It made movement possible.

It was perfect for sports.

It was revolutionary.

She built a small business. Secured orders from department stores. Opened a workshop.

But her second husband, Harry Crosby, came from money, and detested business.

He told her to shut it down.

So she did.

She sold her patent to the Warner Brothers Corset Company for just $1,500.

They made over $15M on it in the next three decades.

With Harry, she founded the Black Sun Press, a hand-crafted, fine-art publishing house that became the launching pad for the Lost Generation.

They published early works by: James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Kay Boyle, Paul Éluard, and more.

Their books were letterpress printed on handmade paper, in tiny runs.

They lived exactly as they published: wildly, scandalously, unapologetically.

Their Paris apartment had a red canoe.

Caresse would row Harry to work each morning.

They wore custom silk robes.

They smoked opium.

They hosted naked parties and bathed with guests.

They renamed their pet whippets Narcisse and Clytoris.

Caresse even showed up to the annual Beaux-Arts Ball topless, in body paint, a turquoise wig, and nothing else.

But the glamour masked darkness.

Harry had affairs with teenage girls.

They had a mutual suic*de pact for 1942.

They joked about death, but he wasn’t joking.

In 1929, Harry Crosby died in a murder-suicide with his 20-year-old lover in a New York hotel bed.

Caresse was devastated, but not defeated.

She expanded the Black Sun Press.

Started a paperback imprint, Crosby Continental Editions.

Opened Washington D.C.’s first modern art gallery.

Funded and published the first U.S. editions of Albert Camus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Had an interracial affair with actor-boxer Canada Lee, risking everything in the Jim Crow era.

Lived with Salvador Dalí and Gala.

And ghostwrote 400 pages of erotica for an oil baron who paid $1 per page.

She died in Rome in 1970.