by Anne de Courcy
Every now and then, when writing a biography or social history, a character crops up who is so intriguing that one longs to know their backstory. When I was researching Nancy Cunard’s life in Paris in the 1920s, there were plenty of these original and impactful personalities. From James Joyce in his dirty white tennis shoes sponging off everyone he could find to Ernest Hemingway, Nancy’s tennis partner, so alienating the friends whom he portrayed in his first novel that when it came out he had to drink at a different bar.
But the one who stuck in my mind was Caresse Crosby. I first ‘met’ her as she rowed her husband Harry up the Seine to the bank where he worked in a bright scarlet bathing suit that highlighted her voluptuous figure. She rowed back to a storm of whistles from the workmen on the banks, who had previously been held in check by the sight of Harry in his business suit.
The Crosbys had come to Paris in large part to escape the cloud of disapproval that hung over them in their native Boston. Both haut Wasp, they had met at Harry’s 21st birthday party in 1920. Caress, then known as Polly, married and six years older than Harry, had been asked as chaperone for the single girls in the party. But Harry paid no attention to these young women (later he deplored ‘Boston virgins who…wear canvas drawers and flat-heeled shoes’) focussing so successfully on Polly that within a fortnight the pair were lovers. Boston was scandalized by their open affair and when Harry finally persuaded Polly to divorce her alcoholic husband and marry him, the couple left for Europe two days after their wedding (in 1922). There they planned to lead a life of freedom, poetry, and excess on Harry’s trust fund income of $12,000 a year. With the franc sliding almost daily, they would be rich indeed.
The Paris in which they arrived was a seething ferment of new ideas in art, literature, and music, and of sexual and other excesses. Although France had been ravaged by World War I—almost one in five of her fighting men killed and many more crippled, and many of the houses, farms, crops, churches, and factories of Northern France destroyed—her capital had quickly regained its position as the center of all things brilliant and fascinatingly new. Those who could afford it still hired a French chef; chic women came to Paris for clothes by new couturiers such as Coco Chanel and Paul Poiret; young men crossed the Channel for a night in one of its luxurious brothels; numerous small presses printed the latest and most innovative writing. Into this life of pleasure, decadence, artistic endeavor, and freedom the Crosbys wholeheartedly flung themselves. It was in Paris that Harry persuaded Polly to change her name to Caresse.
As neighbors of Nancy Cunard on the Quai d’Orsey, they were of interest to me. What I found out about Caresse showed the originality, enterprise, and determination that not only enabled her to carry on her public romance with Harry in the teeth of the formal Boston society to which she belonged, but produced something for which many women have cause to be grateful.
In short, she had invented the bra.
In the days when, as a blue-blooded young Bostonian debutante, she went to balls almost nightly, she found that while she loved dancing she hated the constriction of movement forced by the tight, whaleboned corsets of those days. One evening she determined to do something about it. She sent her lady’s maid, Marie, to fetch two handkerchiefs, folded them diagonally into triangles so that the material was on the cross, and told Marie to stitch two of the points together and added lengths of pink ribbon as fastening and shoulder straps. ‘That night at the ball I was fresh and supple,’ she recorded, ‘and in the dressing room afterwards my friends came flocking round.’ Soon all her girlfriends had produced handkerchiefs for Marie to make up into bras for them, but it was only when a stranger sent her a dollar with a note requesting this new garment that Polly realized ‘I had something to exploit.’
Using the sort of business acumen that was not considered ladylike in her circle, she found a patent lawyer, registered her discovery as ‘the Backless Bra’ and launched into business, renting a room and two sewing machines and hiring a couple of workers. All this had to be done in secret too- no Bostonian lady, let alone a young unmarried girl—ought to put their hands to such a task. But although there was not enough take-up from the big stores to sustain the business, when Warner Brothers Corset Company became aware of the Backless Bra, and the fact that Polly held the patent, they offered her $1,500 (approximately $45,000 today) for both patent and pattern. For Polly, this was riches indeed and she accepted at once.
It is, perhaps, fitting that when she and Harry attended the 1927 Quat Z’ Arts Ball in Paris and Polly (now Caresse) topless and in a turquoise wig, won the prize for beauty for their atelier, she put her victory down to her sizeable breasts. For if they had not brought her fortune in one way, they had certainly brought her acclamation in another.
Anne de Courcy is the author of several widely acclaimed works of social history and biography, including Chanel’s Riviera, The Husband Hunters, Margot at War, The Fishing Fleet, The Viceroy’s Daughters, and Debs at War. She lives in London and Gloucestershire.