It was the end of the 19th century, the period that followed the Second Empire in France and is often known as ” La Belle Epoque” or ” The Beautiful Era“. Paris led the way in fashion in all the courts of Europe. The full crinolines and French taffetas were all the rage, from the salons of Saint Petersburg to the most exclusive balls in far off Lousiana. It was the period of great scientific discoveries and the Industrial Revolution. It was also the time of a new wave of emigration from Europe to the far off New World.

The year of 1889 marks a lingerie history as the year when the first modern bra was invented by Herminie Cadolle. Born in 1845, she was a woman of action and the thought of adventure did not frighten her. Argentina was one of the new nations of rapidly expanding South America. She decided to pack her bags and leave for Buenos Aires where she opened a lingerie boutique.

Herminie was not only a woman of action but also a businesswoman, exceptionally rare at that time. Very quickly her boutique became the meeting place for the most fashionable women ofthe new capital. Herminie made many trips backwards and forwards to France and brought back French seamstresses to train the local workers. Her business grew rapidly. She extended her premises and opened new boutiques.

An energetic and enterprising woman, she never missed one of the Great Universal Exhibitions, which were regularly held throughout the world. She patented her invention and showed it at the Great Exhibition of 1889 (for which the Eiffel Tower was built). Herminie had had a simply ingenious idea. For women’s comfort she had cut in two the traditional corset. She had invented the first bra which she patented and initially called the “corselet gorge” and later “le bien-être“. The first images of the bra appeared as a two-piece undergarment in a corset catalogue. The lower part was a corset for the waist, the upper supporting the breasts by means of shoulder straps. Her description reads “designed to sustain the bosom and supported by the shoulders”.

Herminie Cadolle’s ”le bien-être” Bra (above) 

Herminie was also the first to encourage the spinners of Troyes to incorporate rubber into the threads of the fabric. The time was right, with the development of cultivated rubber trees. The elastic thread (at the time called the “rubberthread”) would take over from whalebones and lacing.

Herminie found the time between trips to open a boutique in Paris at 24 Rue de la chaussee d’Antin. It was left under the direction of her daughter-in-law Marie, who would take over for the second generation.

Cadolle Boutique in Paris at 24 Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin (above)

Herminie worked hard to develop her business. Two hundred people were employed in the Parisian workshops to manufacture and prepare her designs which were already being exported to the far corners of the earth. Herminie had seen the success of a certain sales method that was already in use in the USA – sale by mail order. It was demonstrated to the customer how to take their measurements, and how to place an order for what we would now call “demi-mesure” – these clothes were adapted to fit the customer’s measurements. This method proved successful, there was no other company in the market offering products that could rival them, and the awards reflected this success : medals from Saint-Petersburg in 1904, Chicago in 1906, Saint-Louis in 19O7, Paris in 1910 etc…

In 1914 world war 1 commenced. Accompanying her three sons who where going to enlist in the french army, she returned to Paris. Herminie would never return to Argentina. This first world wide conflict would radically change the trade of the corset maker. The men had gone to the war, and women were called upon to work in the factories; the corset was out, and the bra was the essential undergarment,mass-produced for the manual workers.

Herminie Cadolle understood the importance of a retail boutique to sell this type of garment. The area of the Chaussée d’Antin in Paris was the centre of fashion at the end of the 19th century . It was there that the Galeries Lafayette was established and, logically, it was there that Herminie set up her first boutique. During the decade 1910-1920, the Madeleine-Concorde district became the new fashion “capital”.

The Cadolle company, still family-owned, claims today that Herminie ‘freed women by inventing the first Bra.’ Her garment was probably more comfortable than the original corsets. By 1905 the upper half was being sold separately as a soutien-gorge, the name by which bras are still known in France.  Herminie became a fitter of bras to queens, princesses, dancers, and actresses. Mata Hari was among her customers. Herminie Cadolle died in 1926 in France.

Mata Hari (above)