Archaeologists Uncover 600-Year-Old Bras

Fiction and video have populated the world well into the 1900s with women in tight corsets. Despite the apparent discomfort women in the cloth and boning devices displayed for so many years, let’s face it: busoms and waistlines looked awesome with those monsters on. For many years, historians and archaeologists have believed corsets were the precurser to the modern Maidenform, Wonderbra, and even La Perla wear. As it turns out, however, corsets were just a strange trend humanity went through for a little while. The things we women will do for fashion…

On Wednesday, a group of archaeologists related to the University of Innsbruck stated they found some unusual items on a dig in 2008. They were made of linen, several of them in bad shape, but they were clearly meant to be some sort of brassiere, with one of them even looking almost exactly like a modern-day bra! The old school bras were found in a 600-year-old dig, but since the bra has always been thought to have been invented after the corset in the late 1800s, research was done for the last few years to determine whether or not the bras were, indeed, awesome artifacts.

The four full linen, cotton, and leather bras were found among 2,700 pieces of fabrics that were eventually carbon dated to the 15th century. According to MSNBC, the bras were also decorated with lace and other frippery, presumably signifying they were meant to get the libido flowing. We now mostly wear bras for support, but back in the day, they seem to have been a part of sexual enterprise.