Marie Tucek

Marie Tucek of New York City received United States Patent No. 494,397 for a "breast supporter" on March 28, 1893, one of the earliest American patents for a garment that lifts the breasts from below instead of compressing them like a corset. Little else about her is on record. The patent is her whole public biography, and it is enough to place her in the prehistory of the bra.

Patent No. 494,397

Tucek filed her application on January 11, 1893, and the patent was granted eleven weeks later. The device was built around a curved plate of "sheet metal, cardboard or other suitable material," covered in "silk, canvas or other desirable fabric," which sat at the front of the body just beneath the breasts. Two fabric pockets attached to the plate's upper edge, shaped to "bulge outward," held each breast separately from below.

Straps, hooks and lacing

The plate was held in place by two shoulder straps. They crossed at the back and fastened to the upward-curving ends of the plate with hooks and eyes. Where the straps crossed, they were laced together through eyelets, so the wearer could adjust the fit and the tension. Separate cups, shoulder straps and an adjustable fastening are the parts any modern bra still has.

Made for empire dresses

The patent presents the supporter as an alternative to the corset for women wearing loose, high-waisted empire-style dresses, which did not need a corset's long rigid line through the waist. That puts the design in the dress reform period of the 1890s, when a corset-free support for the bust was a practical need rather than a fashion statement.

Where Tucek fits in bra history

Wikipedia's history of the bra describes Tucek's supporter as similar to a modern push-up bra and treats her 1893 patent, with its metal or cardboard plate, as the antecedent of the underwire bra. It was one of several attempts in the same decades. In Paris, Herminie Cadolle patented the corselet-gorge, often called the first modern brassiere. In Dresden, Christine Hardt patented a brassiere in 1899. The patent usually cited as the first for a "brassiere" in the United States went to Mary Phelps Jacob on November 3, 1914, twenty-one years after Tucek's.

What is not known

There is no record that Tucek's supporter was manufactured or sold, and no confirmed details of her life beyond her New York address on the patent. Claims that she worked with an established corset maker, or that her design was licensed, have no source behind them. Her importance rests on a single document: an 1893 drawing of separate supported cups on a curved base, the same idea that underwire bras commercialized decades later.

Last updated October 7, 2026