Cadolle
Herminie. Parisian corset maker at the end the 19th and in the early 20th century. She was an ancestor of Poiret in her desire to free women from the constraints of bust and whalebones. At the end of the 1800s, the S body shape was in fashion, obtained thanks to the use of a torture-corset, a real piece of armor which emphasized the breasts and bottom and compressed the waist to the extreme. At the Paris Exposition of 1900, Cadolle was daring enough to present a corset cut in two, a progenitor of today’s bra. Of course, the idea caused a scandal and was rejected, for obvious financial reasons as well, by the industry. With women going to work, changes brought by World War I, sports, and new fashion trends, the 1920s brought the end of the corset and the liberation of the female body. Cadolle designed the first bra which reduced and flattened the figure for Chanel‘s dresses à la garµonne.