ABSTRACT
“The history of the chest is as much about its suppression as it is about its augmentation.” Just as the ideal feminine figure witnessed various transformations over the past century, so too has the ideal breast. From the 1900s until World War I, the monobosom, a pigeon-like breast, remained fashionable as a result of straight-front corsets. Large-breasted women became fashionable only after World War II. Helping to usher in this new feminine ideal were the pen and colors of Esquire illustrator Albert Vargas, whose calendar art popularized a slightly muscular female figure with rounded breasts. The popularity of breasts served as a reaction to the growing assertiveness of American women. In 1950s mass media, as a woman’s breasts got larger, her IQ presumably became smaller. Mass culture’s obsessive focus on women’s breasts and their symbolic and erotic import inspired a variety of entrepreneurs to cash in on the country’s mammary madness.
