Warner's

In 1874 the brothers Lucien C. Warner and Dr. Ira De Ver Warner founded the Warner Brothers Corset Company in New York City, the business behind today's Warner's bra and underwear brand, and two years later they moved it to Bridgeport, Connecticut. The company is remembered for two things: it bought the brassiere patent of Mary Phelps Jacob for $1,500, and in 1937 it put letters on cup sizes. Today the Warners name belongs to BR Intimates, part of Basic Resources, which bought it from PVH in November 2023.

Doctors in the Corset Trade, 1874

The Warners were not dressmakers. Ira De Ver Warner was a doctor, and the brothers' first products were "health corsets" pitched against the tightly laced, heavily boned designs of the 1870s. Their selling point was flexibility. Instead of whalebone or steel, the boning was made from ixtle, a fiber from a Mexican agave, which bent with the body rather than against it.

The business began at 501 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, but by 1876 it had moved to Bridgeport, which became its home for most of the next century. The scale is a reminder of how large the corset trade was. Bridgeport employed about 1,200 people making around 6,000 corsets a day, and the Warner name became one of the best known in American underwear long before the bra existed in any commercial sense.

The $1,500 Patent

The brassiere entered the story through a New York debutante. In 1910, according to her own account, Mary Phelps Jacob, later known as Caresse Crosby, improvised a bra from two handkerchiefs and ribbon because her corset showed under a sheer evening dress. She filed a patent for a "backless brassiere" on February 12, 1914, and it was granted that November as U.S. Patent No. 1,115,674.

Her own manufacturing venture was small, and she sold the patent to the Warner Brothers Corset Company for $1,500, roughly $29,000 at current prices. Accounts differ on the exact year of the sale; the Warnaco history dates it to 1917. Either way, the price was tiny. Warner's is credited with earning more than $15 million from the patent over the following thirty years, and company revenue reached $12.6 million by 1920.

It is fair to add a curator's footnote. Jacob's patent was neither the first bra-like garment nor the design that the industry went on to make. What Warner's bought was a legal foothold and a story, and it used both well. The company had the factories and distribution that turned the bra from a novelty into a stock item in American department stores.

Letters on the Cup, 1937

The second contribution is the one every customer still uses. In 1937 Warner's introduced its "Alphabet Bra," assigning letters to cup sizes so that a bra was sized by both band and bust volume. Earlier versions of this page dated this to 1935, a date that circulates widely; the Warnaco company history gives 1937, and this entry follows it.

The letters were Warner's idea of a range, not a measuring standard, and the system has drifted far from its first meaning. Different countries and brands now grade cups differently, and the alphabet runs well past D. But the principle that a full cup and a shallow one need different patterns at the same band size begins here, and it is the reason a bra size has two parts.

Warnaco, Bankruptcy and PVH

The firm became Warnaco, Inc. in 1968 and spent the next decades as an apparel conglomerate whose interests ranged well beyond underwear. Under chief executive Linda Wachner it ran into serious trouble, and in 2001 Warnaco filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. By then its most valuable asset was a license to make Calvin Klein Underwear.

That license is why PVH, the owner of Calvin Klein, bought Warnaco. The deal, announced on October 31, 2012, valued the company at $2.8 billion in cash and stock and closed in February 2013. For PVH the prize was Calvin Klein. Warners and the sister brand Olga came along with it, and in November 2023 PVH sold both to Basic Resources, Inc.

Warners on the Shelf Today

The modern brand is a value-priced, comfort-first line. Its collections carry descriptive names: Cloud 9, Play It Cool, Easy Does It, Signature Support, So Stretchy So Good, and No Side Effects, a range cut to smooth the area under the arm where a band can dig in. The brand's own copy now talks about "everyday comfort" for "generations," and says nothing about corsets, ixtle or Bridgeport. The ABC cup sizes on every label say it for them.

Last updated October 28, 2026