Shaping Ladies, A History of Bra

Directed by

Sandra Rude

March 2020, the world is closing in under the brutal intrusion of Covid 19. Women stay at home like anyone else and many of them drop artifices that become useless without the pressure of the outside gaze. Some of them give up wearing a bra as a form of reappropriation of one's body. However, when Herminie Cadolle presented her first bra prototype a century earlier, this former Communard, wanted to free the woman's body from the shackles of the corset. A Western invention, it conquered all continents: exported by the colonizers, then by the GIs, it was adopted by all the women in the world. Today 1.46 billion bras are produced every year. The film traces the history of this piece of cloth by revisiting its role in society. Both an object of desire and a constraint, the bra tells the story of women’s liberation.