Herminie Cadolle

The corselet-gorge, patented in Paris in 1889 by Herminie Cadolle, split the corset into two pieces, and its upper half is widely treated as the ancestor of the modern bra. Cadolle, a corsetiere born in 1845, founded the house that still carries her name, Maison Cadolle, and died in 1926.

Exile in Buenos Aires after 1871

Cadolle was a close friend of Louise Michel, the schoolteacher and anarchist who became the best-known woman of the Paris Commune of 1871. After the Commune was crushed, Cadolle and her family left France for Buenos Aires, fearing repression. The house's own history is careful on this point: she went into exile for safety and was not deported.

In Buenos Aires she worked as a corsetiere, and in 1887, with her husband and her son Alcide, she opened the first Maison Cadolle there. Earlier versions of this page said she fought on the barricades and called her a communist revolutionary. The sources checked here establish the friendship with Michel and the exile, not combat or party membership.

The two-piece corselet-gorge

Back in Paris, Cadolle opened a workshop on rue de la Chaussee d'Antin and in 1889 filed a patent for her invention. The lower part was a corset that shaped the waist. The upper part supported the bust from the shoulders with straps, instead of pushing it up from below with a rigid busk.

The house dates the design to the Exposition Universelle of 1889. Other accounts say it was shown at the Exposition Universelle of 1900. By 1905 the upper half was being sold on its own, and that separate bust support is why Cadolle appears in every history of the brassiere. She is also credited with being the first to use elastic woven fabric in lingerie, which allowed a garment to move with the body.

Herminie Cadolle's rue Cambon successors

The business stayed in the family. By 1911 her daughter Marie had moved it to rue Cambon in the first arrondissement, the street where Coco Chanel would also set up. Mata Hari is named among Cadolle's customers. Later generations made flattening bras for the boyish line of the 1920s, the guepiere waist cincher with Marcel Rochas in 1947, and a modern corset revival in 1989, the centenary of the patent. The house is still run by her descendants and makes bespoke corset-style bras and corsets from 4 rue Cambon.

Competing claims to the first bra

Cadolle was not the only person to patent a bust support. Mary Phelps Jacob received an American patent for a backless brassiere in 1914, and other bust bodices circulated in Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century. Cadolle's claim rests on two things: the 1889 patent, and the fact that within sixteen years her upper half had become a separate garment sold under its own name. Few inventors in this field can point to a shop that still exists. She can.

Last updated October 7, 2026