Fashion Theory

The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

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High Fashion: The Women's Undergarment

Industry and the Foundations of American
Spaceflight

Matthew H. Hersch

To cite this article: Matthew H. Hersch (2009) High Fashion: The Women's Undergarment
Industry and the Foundations of American Spaceflight, Fashion Theory, 13:3, 345-370, DOI:
10.2752/175174109X438118

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.2752/175174109X438118

Published online: 21 Apr 2015.

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Fashion Theory, Volume 13, Issue 3, pp. 345–370
DOI: 10.2752/175174109X438118
Reprints available directly from the Publishers.
Photocopying permitted by licence only.
© 2009 Berg.
Matthew H. Hersch
Matthew H. Hersch is a PhD
Candidate in the University of
Pennsylvania’s Department of
History and Sociology of Science,
and was a 2007–8 Guggenheim
Fellow of the Smithsonian’s
National Air and Space Museum.
He specializes in twentieth-century
American technology and is
presently writing a labor history of
astronauts.
mhersch@sas.upenn.edu
High Fashion:
The Women’s
Undergarment
Industry and
the Foundations
of American
Spaceflight
Abstract
In the years that followed the end of World War II, Americans turned
to synthetic fibers to transform their bodies to meet the challenges of a
new era: for women, the pinched waists and thrusting bustlines of
Christian Dior’s “New Look;” for men, the physiological demands of
high-speed, high-altitude flight. The story of foundation garments and
pressure suits is not simply one of government-developed “spin-off”
technologies invigorating the civilian market; rather, new techniques for
the manufacture of civilian apparel infused pressure suit development.
Inspired by each other, the two industries revolutionized “high fashion”
346 Matthew H. Hersch

with a series of radical new garments as “dangerous” as they were beau-

tiful. Considering the two as complementary technologies may illumi-
nate both the ways in which the consumer market enriched American
innovation during the twentieth century, and the resonances these two
kinds of garments have as iconic representations of postwar American
modernity, beauty, and power.

KEYWORDS: advertising, corset, girdle, New Look, spacesuit

Learning to live and move within ... nylon and rubber garments ...
was like trying to adapt to life within a pneumatic tire.

This New Ocean (Swenson et al. 1966: 92)

This comment, describing an article of clothing that made its first ap-
pearance in 1950s America, was not addressed at one of the constrict-
ing women’s undergarments popular in the period. Rather, it begins a
discussion of America’s first spacesuit in the 1966 history, This New
Ocean. In the years that followed the end of World War II, Americans
turned to synthetic fibers to transform their bodies to meet the challenges
of a new era: for women, the pinched waists and thrusting bustlines of
Christian Dior’s “New Look;” for men, the physiological demands of
high-speed, high-altitude flight. At a time when women’s fashion again
celebrated the severe lines of the corset, pilots relied increasingly upon a
variety of tightly laced garments to compensate for forces and pressures
placed on the body during flight. Throughout the postwar period, con-
straining garments of Nylon were a fixture of both women’s high-end
fashion and men’s space exploration; to meet the accelerating demands
of their customers, firms specializing in the manufacture of corsetry and
pressure suits were transformed as each sought to reach dynamic new
markets for their products.
The story of foundation garments and pressure suits is not simply
one of government-developed “spin-off” technologies invigorating the
civilian market; rather, new techniques for the manufacture of civilian
apparel infused pressure suit development. While tire manufacturers
were well-represented among the companies making high-altitude avia-
tion apparel in the 1950s and 1960s, several others were corsetieres: the
corporate parents of underwear makers Playtex, Inc. and the Spencer
Corset Company won contracts for aviation pressure suits; the David
Clark Company parlayed its aviation experience into the manufacture
of brassieres as it continued to supply the United States Air Force and
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with new types of
spacesuits. Inspired by each other, the two industries revolutionized
“high fashion” with a series of radical new pressure garments as “dan-
gerous” as they were beautiful. Often, the women’s variants were the
best available, and occasionally, the distinctions between women’s cloth-
ing for cocktail parties and men’s clothing for spaceflight ­disappeared
 High Fashion 347

entirely. Considering the two as complementary technologies may illu-

minate both the ways in which the consumer market enriched American
innovation during the twentieth century, and the resonances these two
kinds of garments have as iconic representations of postwar American
modernity, beauty, and power.

Writing about Fashion Technology

Neither women’s undergarments nor spacesuits have been neglected by

historians. In discussions of underwear, cultural and gender analyses
are more common and technical analyses more rare; in aerospace tech-
nology, impressively detailed engineering accounts predominate and
cultural critique is limited. Each type of garment can benefit from the
analysis lavished upon the other. Modern discussions of 1950s women’s
foundations, for example, frequently place them within the context of
a regressive, conformist postwar consumer culture that acknowledged
female sexuality but constrained it, requiring women to become, fore-
most, “sexually desirable” partners for their husbands (Maynard 1995:
47; Steele 1997: 29). Expensive, unwieldy dresses turned women into
“passive sex objects” while male-dominated advertising and media
­outlets sold corsets and girdles as a salve for female “narcissism, insecu-
rity and sexual frustration” (du Plessix Gray 1996; Kunzle 1982: 269,
273). Technical studies about how undergarments garments were con-
structed and worn (and why they proved so popular among their wear-
ers), though, are less common. Pressure suits, by contrast, have largely
escaped broader cultural analysis, lumped into a larger historiography
that concentrates on the design, testing, and operational details of space-
flight. As soldiers in a national campaign of exploration, though, astro-
nauts were the epitome of American manhood, exuding an “aura of
competence” reflected in their high-tech apparel (McCurdy 1997: 84).
While pressure suits were never true consumer items (they filled a gov-
ernment procurement contract), their wearers—astronauts—had sub-
stantial input in their design and insisted upon various modifications.
Though seemingly unconnected, both corsets and spacesuits shared a
great deal in common: they were among the most complex garments of
their day. In 1950s, for example, the Warner Brothers Corset Company
introduced the waist-cinching Merry Widow as women’s fashion yielded
to a style that promoted a waist so narrow that even slender women
could not achieve it without a new kind of undergarment. To provide
breathable air at safe pressures in the vacuum of space, meanwhile,
America’s first astronauts wore a variant of the custom-fitted Mark IV
pressure suit manufactured by Akron, Ohio tire maker ­BFGoodrich.
Both the Merry Widow and the Mark IV exploited the potential of new
design techniques and synthetic fibers to enhance their wearers in aes-
thetically striking, often uncomfortable, and unusually intimate ways.
348 Matthew H. Hersch

Like the new corsetry, spacesuits were grudgingly tolerated by the wear-
ers as awkward but necessary apparel. Occasionally, the markets for
foundations and pressure suits overlapped, with women’s foundations
in one instance serving as a substitute for aviation apparel during a
1961 centrifuge test. The manner in which both corsets and spacesuits
were worn “behind closed doors” is, in many cases, poorly understood,
and issues of sexuality and personal hygiene surrounding these half-
century-old garments remain shrouded in embarrassment, even today.

Managing Pressure: Corsets in Aviation

While known principally as an era of the munitions factory, the radio,

and the automobile, the early years of the twentieth century were also
marked by humans’ increasing ability to manage pressure. As fashion-
able women laced themselves into boned undergarments that squeezed
their midsections into an “hourglass” shape, explorers struggled to sur-
vive the pressures of the deep and the vacuum of the skies, using the
same combinations of materials: cotton, rubber, and metal (Figure 1).
Foundations of the 1920s sought to eradicate the hips and flatten the
bust; in the 1930s, a more rounded shape predominated. Each season,
Vogue declared, a woman’s body would be “taught to conform to the
new line” (Probert 1981: 54). Style mavens viewed such foundations as
“necessary for the well-groomed look” (M. J. M. 1950: 76–8) and girls
as young as thirteen might wear some form of shapewear (Fogarty 1959:
66). The most restrictive of these garments squeezed their wearers liter-
ally from head to toe: shoulder straps supported an all-in-one “corselet”
ending in garter clasps held that the wearer’s stockings in place.1 One
popular foundations maker—the Spencer Corset Company—sold such
undergarments through a network of retail stores at which women were
sized for finely crafted but unyielding foundations custom-fabricated to
their measurements (Perry 2006).
If women needed pressurized garments to mold them underneath
clothing, pilots needed such garments to survive in the near-vacuum of
the stratosphere. High-altitude aircraft of the 1930s exposed aviators to
partial vacuums sufficient to kill within minutes; ascending pilots risked
hypothermia, dizziness, organ trauma, dehydration, and a host of other
potentially fatal ailments engendered by oxygen scarcity and insuffi-
cient pressure to support bodily tissues (Catchpole 2001: 187). The first
reference to a spacesuit appeared in turn-of-the-century American sci-
ence fiction but it was Goodrich that built the first such garment.2 In
1934, aviator Wiley Post, working with Goodrich engineer Russell Col-
ley, developed a pressurized suit for Post’s record-breaking high-altitude
flights in the Winnie Mae. As a high-school student in Massachusetts,
Colley had hoped to become a women’s fashion designer but a shocked
teacher steered Colley instead to mechanical design (Thimas 1996: B14).
 High Fashion 349

Figure 1
Berger Brothers’s adjustable
corset for obtaining measurements
for custom-fitted foundations,
US Patent 2,283,108 (May 12,
1942). United States Patent and
Trademark Office.

Not surprisingly, Colley’s exquisitely tailored suit succeeded where oth-

ers had failed. Sewn on Colley’s wife’s sewing machine (a theme that
would be repeated with later suit designers), Post’s suit was made of
a double-ply, rubberized parachute fabric, with pigskin gloves, rubber
boots, and an aluminum helmet with a large, off-center, forward-facing
porthole for Post’s “one good eye” (Kozloski 1994: 34; National Aero-
nautics and Space Administration 1990: 20). While wearing the suit,
Post enjoyed breathable air at safe pressures; achieving altitudes of up
to 50,000 feet, he discovered the high winds of the jet stream, enabling
his aircraft to achieve a speed over the ground twice that of what it was
normally capable and anticipating the age of modern air travel. With
the exception of the copious use of rubberized fabrics, though, little
about Post’s suit resembled women’s undergarments of the period. The
model was, instead, the deep sea diver’s suit—intended to keep pressure
out rather than in—explaining, perhaps why the suit ultimately proved
so unwieldy (Mohler and Johnson 1971: 79). In the coming years, pres-
sure suits were made lighter through the use of new designs and syn-
thetic fabrics that had already revolutionized the foundations business
(Chenoune 1999: 92; Ewing 1989: 160).
350 Matthew H. Hersch

The arrival of war in Europe and the Pacific at the end of the 1930s
brought international interest in new pressure suits for high-altitude
bombing. Submarine metaphors continued to predominate in this era:
some of the earliest pressure suit designs were semi-rigid containers with
mechanical limb joints. Thinner, lighter suits inflated awkwardly when
pressurized and proved cumbersome to the wearer; limb joints—knee,
elbow, and shoulder—caused particular concern, as any movement that
changed the internal volume of the suit increased the pressure within it
and diminished the suit’s range of motion (National Aeronautics and
Space Administration 1990: 20). Post’s suit, for example, had to be con-
structed in a sitting position, as the suit was difficult to bend in when
inflated (Mohler and Johnson 1971: 82). To be practical, pressure suits
would need to be constructed with the human body in mind—they would
need to contain terrestrial pressures while still affording their wearers a
clean “line” and a certain amount of freedom of movement. Women’s
foundations increasingly proved the model for these garments.
The immediate postwar years were the last in which fashionable
American women routinely wore highly structured foundations; this
period also saw the first widespread use of a range of garments using
mechanical pressure to protect elite pilots from acceleration and depres-
surization in flight. Not coincidentally, the same companies produced
both garments—companies with experience manufacturing corsetry
found themselves well-equipped to produce pressurized clothing for oth-
ers kinds of consumers. Like many American industries during World
War II, undergarment makers survived an era of shortages and reduced
consumer spending by contracting to produce items necessary to the war
effort—undergarments for women service members, but also soldiers’
equipment like parachutes, tents, and “aviation suits” (Farrell-Beck and
Gau 2002: 94). This diversification would continue after the war.
Like fashionable women of the period, pilots of the 1940s demanded
support and expected to be squeezed uncomfortably by their clothing
(Ewing 1989: 155). The airplanes of World War II challenged human
physical tolerances in new and potentially deadly ways that only wom-
en’s foundations could address. A pilot could turn an airplane sharply by
rolling and pulling the nose into the direction of the turn; the centripetal
acceleration generated (“gs”) caused blood to empty from the head and
pool in the legs, inducing unconsciousness. Beginning in the 1940s, pilots
began wearing garments that squeezed the lower torso and legs to pre-
vent the “dreaded Blackout;” with their unique materials and manufac-
turing processes, foundation manufacturers were able to assist in efforts
to manufacture this apparel (Clark 1992: 14, 19). Some early “anti-g”
suits were virtually indistinguishable from corsets; in the place of stock-
ings, laced pant legs provided constant mechanical pressure to resist
g-induced swelling, eventually supplemented by inflatable rubber blad-
ders. One design from Berger Brothers (corporate ­parent of the Spencer
Corset Company) was adopted by the United States Navy during World
 High Fashion 351

Figure 2
Berger Brothers’s anti-g suit,
US Patent 2,397,710 (April 2,
1946). United States Patent and
Trademark Office.

War II (Clark 1992: 14; Mallan 1971: 99–100, 128–9) (Figure 2). The
earliest design for an anti-g suit by David Clark’s Worcester, Massachu-
setts-based knitting company was based upon a prewar men’s girdle, the
Straightaway, augmented by a football bladder; David Clark eventually
replaced the bladders with layered, rubberized cells contoured around
the wearer’s anatomy, the forerunner of the anti-g suit that remains in
use today. While struggling to produce successful anti-g suits, designers
realized that while pilots needed support, they also demanded comfort;
criticisms about heat build-up paralleled those lobbed at the women’s
corsets the earliest anti-g suits closely resembled (Clark 1992: 144; Wood
1993: 4). Emboldened by its success in refining corsetry for pilots, Clark,
in 1947, parlayed his experience with the “weight-supporting problem”
into a brassiere manufacturing business (Mallan 1971: 100).

Nylon, the New Look, and NASA

While the space program yielded a number of technologies that later

proved useful in the consumer market, Nylon was not one of them—it
was already a household name when NASA found it in 1959. DuPont
352 Matthew H. Hersch

introduced the fabric in 1938 as a silk substitute for women’s hosiery,

although the “miracle” fabric found immediate wartime use, especially
in parachutes (Fogarty, 1959: 67). Despite the arrival of new synthet-
ics in the late 1930s, women’s underfashions of the immediate postwar
period continued to be dominated by prewar girdles and corsets made
from a variety of natural materials, including cotton, rubber, and silk
(Chenoune 1999: 100; Probert 1981: 45). Soon, though, Nylon was
freed from wartime rationing and exploded into both the aviation world
and the women’s undergarment industry (Carter 1992: 123; Chenoune
1999: 92). Gauzy and, as Vogue declared, “so enchantingly pretty,”
“feather soft’” Nylon was easy to color and could be knitted to re-
semble any common form of lingerie fabric: tricot, lace, crepe, taffeta,
or voile, and it would wash “quick-as-a-wink” and “look sparkling-
new without ironing” (Tailored Woman 1955: 89; Probert 1981: 55;
Best & Co. 1952: 31). Nylon and materials like it—including DuPont’s
synthetic rubber Neoprene, developed in 1932—did not themselves mo-
tivate the exploration of space or the triumph of a new fashion style, but
they made transitory enthusiasms permanent by proving that each new
“line” was readily achievable.
Nylon would face its greatest test not in space, but on women’s
bodies. Women’s fashion of the 1950s mated the geometric modern-
ism of a new technological age with a nineteenth-century feminine
ideal facilitated by new high-strength, lightweight fabrics (Probert
1981: 55). Often interpreted as a rejection of austere wartime fashion,
French fashion designer Christian Dior’s 1947 Corolle collection—
later dubbed the “New Look”—emphasized an exaggerated silhouette
matching snug bodices with pinched waists and long skirts supported
by ruffled petticoats made from dozens of yards of fabric (Kunzle 1982:
273; Melinkoff 1984: 23; “Petticoat Craze Continues to Rage” 1953:
30; Seeling 2000: 212; Tailored Woman 1955: 89). While earlier Dior
dresses incorporated built-in foundations to encourage this shape, later
versions required corsetry designed for this purpose (Steele 2001: 158).
By 1947, the corset, boned and laced in the back to slim the midsection,
had been largely discredited as old-fashioned and unhealthful (Mendes
and de la Haye 1999: 129–30; Seeling 2000: 235–40). Dior and other
fashion houses revived the undergarment as a “cincher” to be worn
over other foundations: often a brassiere and an elasticized “panty” or
“open-bottom” girdle extending from the waist to the thighs, to which
stockings were affixed with garter clasps (Cunnington and Cunnington
1981: 167; Kunzle 1982: 273; Ewing 1989: 159). Despite initial skepti-
cism, though, “college girls of the early nineteen-fifties enthusiastically
capitulated to the Dior style,” and “laced themselves, groaning, into the
torturous waist cinches” (du Plessix Gray 1996).
Fashionable women became test pilots of the New Look. Under the
weight of the severely tailored fashions, backs arched, shoulders dropped,
waists vanished, and hips protruded provocatively. This “Dior slouch”
 High Fashion 353

soon became the standard deportment in fashion advertisements; even-

tually, Dior, like Colley, sewed the posture into his outfits (Martin and
Koda 1996: 107). To prevent a “jutting rear,” Good Housekeeping sug-
gested that readers thrust their pelvises forward as if “flinching from a
spank”; to perfect this posture, women were encouraged to lay down
with their knees bent and waists pressed against the floor, mimicking the
stance astronauts later adopted to survive high g-loads in space capsules
(Murrin 1947: 183; Vaughan 2005). New Look foundations were so
awkward that one University of Illinois physician suggested that such
garments be tested on monkeys to ensure their safety; ironically, primate
testing would become pivotal to the evaluation of life support systems
aboard space vehicles (“The Dangerous Look?” 1947). In the United
States, though, the continued success of the New Look into the 1950s cre-
ated a market for more comfortable undergarments that approximated
Dior’s vision. Attuned to the latest French fashion trends but reluctant to
sacrifice so much for them, American women demanded “torso-without-
torture:” foundations that would “lure” the waist in “with the greatest
of ease” (Kunzle 1982: 274; Tailored Woman 1955: 89).
Like BFGoodrich, Bridgeport, Connecticut-based Warner’s® was a
long-established American company with a history of innovation: in
1935, one year after Goodrich built the first pressure suit, Warner’s®
introduced the first bra with letter-sized cups (Chenoune 1999: 73–4).3
In the 1940s, combination waist-cinchers with bra cups began to ap-
pear in Europe; in 1951, Warner’s® introduced the back-lacing, waist-
squeezing Cinch-Bra, which combined three foundations (bra, cincher,
and garter belt) into a single lightweight garment (Chenoune 1999: 84)
(Figure 3). In 1952, Warner’s® replaced the back lacing with two rows
of hook-and-eye closures, in a new foundation named to reference the
latest corset-laden film adaptation of the operetta The Merry Widow
(Field 1990: 76). Available in black or white Nylon, the Merry Wid-
ow’s built-in half-cup bra, inelastic mesh panels, and slender steel bones
squeezed the wearer’s bust and torso, creating the “concave middle”
that was the hallmark of New Look style. From the bottom edge of the
garment, four long garter straps descended over the pelvis and seat to
hold the wearer’s stockings in place. Unlike many previous undergar-
ments, the Merry Widow left the wearer “completely free through the
bust and shoulders” for the strapless dresses that became popular in
August 1950 (Carter 1992: 113; Warner’s® 1953: 58).
Though an expensive consumer item (a typical model cost about
US$125 in 2008 dollars, ten times the price of a regular bra), the
Merry Widow sold extremely well (Farrell-Beck and Gau 2002: 132).
­Warner’s® managers hoped that evocative print advertising would help
sell the foundation and rehabilitate a corporate image associated with
control garments for larger women. Under the leadership of former
Young and Rubicam president Chester J. LaRoche, Warner’s® mar-
keters paired humorous copy with “boudoir” photography of stylish
354 Matthew H. Hersch

Figure 3
Warner’s® Cinch-Bra, rear view with back
lacing, US Des. Patent 166,760 (May 13,
1952). United States Patent and Trademark
Office.

young women lounging in their underwear in moments of seeming in-

timacy (Field 1990: 74). The new ad campaign bypassed traditional
taste-­makers (corsetieres, department store fitters) and appealed directly
to the consumer, but Warner’s® underestimated the potency of both
the Merry Widow and the much-celebrated ads that hocked it, and the
company soon found itself unable produce corsets fast enough to satisfy
customer demand (Field 1990: 75–6). Even as competitors flooded the
market with cheaper copies, by 1956, Vogue reported, Warner’s® was
selling US$6,000,000 worth of the cinchers per year (Field 1990: 76;
Steele 2001: 161). “For a number of years,” Farid Chenoune writes,
“the bare shoulders of wealthy American heiresses ensconced in the
hourglass ‘merry widows’ burst out of their bustier dresses like full-
blown flowers” (Chenoune 1999: 92).
While Warner’s® introduced and refined the Merry Widow (Fig-
ure 4), American pilots of the 1950s adjusted to a similar new ward-
robe, now made much lighter through the use of the same synthetic
fabrics employed in women’s underwear. Ironically, the feeling of
wearing women’s foundations of the 1950s was so often likened to
flying—“tempting gravity as well as men”—that advertisements for the
 High Fashion 355

Figure 4
Advertisement for Warner’s®
Merry Widow, Cosmopolitan,
October 1959, p. 6. © Warnaco®
Inc., used with permission.

garments could just as easily have referred to spacesuits (Kunzle 1982:

274; Melinkoff 1984: 48). One ad for the Merry Widow featured a
blissful woman carried aloft by her corset, accompanied by copy en-
couraging consumers to “[t]ake flight from the tyranny of inches ...”
(Warner’s® 1959: 26). Pilot’s pressure garments and foundations were
often so alike that, not permitted to wear an anti-g suit during a 1961
centrifuge test, one female astronaut-hopeful, pilot Wally Funk, secretly
wore her mother’s “worst Merry Widow and girdle” beneath her flight
suit (Funk 1999: 8).4 With the garment squeezing her torso, Funk as-
tounded onlookers by shrugging off five times the force of gravity.5
The anti-g suits of the 1940s had increased human tolerance for
sharp turns, but the increasing altitudes achievable by the new jet and
rocket aircraft required garments that could support bodily tissues at
high altitude. The advent of the high-altitude jet bomber in particular
required a new kind of flying suit that could remain comfortably on
its wearer’s body for hours at the edge of stratosphere, but the most
successful full pressure suit of the 1940s—Colley’s corrugated rubber
“tomato-worm” suit—was still too bulky for airborne use (Mallan
1971: 149). The lightweight corset, and not the diver’s suit, seemed to
356 Matthew H. Hersch

serve as the model for postwar “partial pressure” suit designs. The first
successful suit, completed in 1946 by the University of Southern Cali-
fornia’s Dr James Henry (with assistance from David Clark), substituted
the squeezing of thin panels of porous, inelastic fabric for the pressure
of an artificial atmosphere contained within a rubber bladder (Henry
1959; Jenkins 2007: 133) (Figure 5). Covering the body from ankles to
wrists and incorporating gloves, laced boots, and a separate face mask
and helmet, the Nylon–cotton partial pressure suit remained uninflated
when worn inside a pressurized cockpit (Mackowski 2006: 138). When
the suit pressurized, though, rubber tubes (“capstans”) filled with air,
pulling cords that constricted the suit and compressed the wearer’s torso
and limbs. Unlike full pressure suits, these garments actually became
smaller when activated, and they soon became the standard attire for
American jet and rocket plane pioneers. David Clark again took the lead
in manufacturing these suits for the Air Force; for the 8% of Air Force
pilots unable to fit into David Clark’s standard sizes, Berger Brothers,

Figure 5
Test Pilot Joe Walker in his David Clark MC-3 partial pressure suit, 1958. NASA.
 High Fashion 357

with its long-standing experience in custom-made undergarments, pro-

duced outsized units (Mallan 1971: 119).
Postwar scientists defined “space” as an altitude 50 miles above
Earth’s surface below which virtually all of Earth’s atmosphere resided;
by the 1950s, rocket planes were fast approaching this barrier, and
would eventually break it. Partial pressure suits were not intended for
extended use at such altitudes, let alone the vacuum of space or the
Moon’s surface. While functional at altitudes of up to 25 miles, these
garments were uncomfortable when pressurized and lacked protection
from the extreme heat and cold found beyond the bulk of Earth’s at-
mosphere, where temperatures could vary between 200 and minus 200
degrees Fahrenheit. When the United States began human spaceflight
research in earnest in 1959 with NASA’s Project Mercury, it sought new
full pressure suit designs from a variety of manufacturers.
NASA’s Space Task Group under spacecraft designer Max Faget, in
conjunction with the Air Force Aeromedical Laboratory at the Wright
Air Development Center in Ohio, and the Navy’s Air Crew Equipment
laboratory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, examined proposed suit pro-
totypes for Project Mercury. Competitors included Goodrich, David
Clark, and government rubber supplier International Latex of Dover,
Delaware. Small and little-known, ILC Dover was a subsidiary of the
same corporate entity that spawned Playtex, the manufacturer of a pop-
ular range of rubber girdles sold throughout the 1950s in rocket-like
tubes. Goodrich’s Mark IV, though, eventually emerged as the winner,
and the company became the prime contractor for the Mercury pressure
suit, though the suit would need to be modified to interface with the life
support systems of the Mercury capsule (Figure 6).
While in the safety of the Mercury spacecraft, the astronaut’s unpres-
surized spacesuit would need to offer the wearer complete freedom of
movement to operate spacecraft flight controls; like an unfastened cor-
set, the uninflated suit posed no impediment to motion. Design difficul-
ties centered instead on the need to provide an astronaut with sufficient
range of motion during the relatively brief periods when the suit might be
exposed to the vacuum of space, when the pressure differential between
the suit’s interior and the external environment would cause it to balloon
awkwardly.6 Spacesuit designers, like foundations manufacturers, sought
to balance “flexibility” and “adaptability,” protecting the wearer from
exposure while still providing adequate freedom of motion (Swenson
1966: 228). Size and weight limitations of the Mercury spacecraft fur-
ther constrained design options. If the Merry Widow-clad young woman
needed to be both slender and graceful, the astronaut would need to be
able to undertake useful, even lifesaving labor unobstructed by his cloth-
ing, which would have to be made as light and slim as possible.
Like American women of the late-1940s, astronauts approached the
new “line” warily at first. NASA assigned “Original Seven” astronaut
and naval aviator “Wally” Schirra to help develop the Mercury pressure
358 Matthew H. Hersch

Figure 6
Airlock testing of BFGoodrich pressure suits, c. 1966. NASA.

suit; he found early models constricting and poorly fitting, as the suit
fabric tended to stretch with each pressurized wearing. “Because space
suits are personalized garments,” Schirra later recounted, “you need to
make more alterations on one of them to make it fit properly than you
do on a bridal gown” (Carpenter et al. 1962: 148). Work continued, and
after a “gripe session” in May 1960, “the astronauts and their tailors es-
sentially agreed on what the well-dressed man should wear into space”
(Swenson 1966: 231). Custom fitted from a paper-maché body mold of
each astronaut, the Mercury suit incorporated a “two-ply” design: in-
side, a layer of Nylon impregnated with Neoprene maintained pressure;
outside the pressure bladder, an aluminized Nylon “restraint layer”
kept the pressurized suit from ballooning (Figure 7). Along joints, fabric
“break-lines” enabled some bending, but when pressurized, the inflated
garment still limited movement. Astronauts entered the suit through a
long, zippered opening that corkscrewed around the torso. (Goodrich
had announced its invention of a rubberized, watertight zipper in 1944.)
Corset-like lacing at the arms and down the back of the suit ensured a
close fit and helped to reduce ballooning. To prevent snags, zippered
Nylon panels concealed the laces, as on many women’s foundations.
 High Fashion 359

Figure 7
Astronaut “Gordo” Cooper in his
Project Mercury spacesuit. NASA.

A removable, airtight helmet with an openable, transparent front panel

protected the head, facilitated eating, and held built-in microphones and
earphones. Oxygen piped into a connector on the suit’s waist flowed over
the body and into the helmet, where an exhaust valve removed waste
gases, piping them through a separate tube back to the spacecraft’s envi-
ronmental control system (Catchpole 2001: 190, 193). Unlike later space-
suits, the Mercury pressure suit lacked a separate cooling system; instead,
the astronauts wore long, waffled underwear beneath the suit, which of-
fered nominal ventilation as oxygen passed through it. Like Post’s suit
and Dior’s 1952 La Cigale dance dress, the Mark IV’s gloves were sewn
with a built-in curve so that, even when pressurized, they would allow the
astronaut’s hands to grip the flight control stick (Martin and Koda 1996:
106–7). The middle finger of the left hand was not curved, to enable the
astronaut to more conveniently flip switches—when inflated, the astro-
naut’s glove was locked in a permanent foul gesture (Catchpole 2001:
194). As the outer layer of early variants of the suit ended at the ankle,
astronauts wore laced boots over the pressure bladder.
The aesthetic of the suit that emerged was as self-consciously mod-
ern as any garment worn at the time. The aluminized outer suit layer
shone like liquid metal poured over each astronaut’s body, seemingly
360 Matthew H. Hersch

shorn, like that of a child’s “action figure,” of any protruding genita-

lia. The bright blue NASA “meatball” insignia and the orange rubber
neck lining provided the only splashes of color. Gray and white canvas
straps crisscrossed the suit in every direction to prevent ballooning. The
white fiberglass helmet obscured most of the wearer’s face; in group
photographs, astronauts were indistinguishable. Nevertheless, the suits
became instant icons of the space program, prominently worn in pub-
lic relations images. Mercury pressure suits cost US$4,700 each (about
US$33,000 in 2008), but while each astronaut had three (one for flight,
one for training, and one for backup) the suits never became mass-
production items and did not significantly impact Goodrich’s finances
(Blackford and Kerr 1996: 284–5; Catchpole 2001: 189).

“Positively Breathtaking:” The Merry Widow

and the Mark IV

Carefully fitted and pricey, corsets and pressure suits of the 1950s were
relied upon but never entirely trusted by those who wore them. Intended
to enable their wearers to confront dangerous environments, both op-
erated under great stresses, could be expected to fail occasionally, and
literally took their wearer’s breath away. But while Warner’s® designers
had engineered their product with the “real” user so much in mind that
a Merry Widow-clad bride could return from her honeymoon having
never removed her foundation, the Mark IV spacesuit practically denied
the humanity of its wearer.
If engineers had developed spacesuits in the hope of protecting pilots
from perilous environments, women’s foundations of the 1950s were not
intended to make a woman feel any safer. The typical consumer of the
new “unmentionables,” marketers believed—“the bride, the vacationer,
the smart girl about town”—secretly wanted more danger in her life, not
less (Arnold Constable 1954: 13). With “no visible means of support,”
the strapless, nearly transparent, and often backless Merry Widow would
garner “daring” young women “admiring looks” at “important occa-
sions,” enabling them to “look outright naughty, yet feel downright nice”
(e.g. Bloomingdale’s 1955: 14; Read’s 1955: 25). One much-promoted
feature of the Merry Widow was its half-cup underwire bra; the mesh
upper halves of the cups were designed to be folded down for a bit of
“deviltry” (Warner’s® 1952b: 18). Underclothes marketers of the 1950s
“openly eroticized” such garments, coaxing women to submit to the
stimulation they supposedly provided (Kunzle 1982: 273–4). The Merry
Widow—likened to a “gentle hug”—was intended to be worn directly
against the skin, the first article donned and the last removed (Ewing
1989: 146; Farrell-Beck and Gau 2002: 132; Maynard 1995: 46–7).7 In a
1951 photograph by Lillian Bassman for Harper’s Bazaar, a nude young
woman, photographed in profile against a black background, lunges
 High Fashion 361

f­ orward, practically held aloft by a snug white Cinch-Bra (Bassman 1997:

endpaper). The finger-like garter straps graze her derriere and dangle pro-
vocatively between her parted thighs. “Let the Merry Widow have its
way with you!” one advertisement teased (The Broadway 1952: 9).
Marketing materials described the Merry Widow as a potent man-
getter that packaged a woman’s body for physical gratification: at once
seductively dressed and sexually accessible. The garment exposed the
pelvis, while its back hook closures (as many as twenty) made it difficult
to remove, discouraging the wearing of underpants beneath it (King
1993: 3–4; Peacock 1993: 138, 149). Advertisers suggested the joys of
being romanced while corseted; the Merry Widow was the ideal choice
for “honeymooning brides,” college co-eds, and other sexually active
women who, if they chose to “give in” to their “wickedest inclinations,”
could use the garment to put a man “in that champagne-from-a-slipper
mood”—at least until “daytime” (Bergdorf Goodman 1957: 97; War-
ner’s® 1955: 5C, 1956: 115; Webers 1953: 11; Peril 2006: 132–3). The
presence of such foundations, Warner’s® assured consumers, would not
go unnoticed; an inelastic strip of fabric sewn across the Merry Wid-
ow’s waist (often in telltale pink) compressed the abdomen and gave
wearers what Warner’s® promised would be “handspan” waists readily
grasped by their partners (e.g. Maynard 1995: 46). Encircled in rib-
bon and “chased” “through glittering ballrooms,” the “lady wearing
Warner’s® Merry Widow®” would be a “gift to behold” and “a joy to
be held”; “fashion’s darling—and his …” (Warner’s® 1952a: 20; 1956:
115; Webers 1961: A7). While a near-obligatory addition to a young
woman’s wardrobe, such foundations required a certain vigilance. Jan
King, in Killer Bras: And Other Hazards of the 50s, recalled that while
the Merry Widow slimmed “even the plumpest of teenage figures into a
perfect hourglass silhouette under prom gowns,” it was tight enough to
make high-school girls swoon (King 1993: 3–4; Melinkoff 1984: 105).
Squeezed breathless by their foundations, King writes, prom-goers of
the 1950s draped their arms around their dates’ necks to prop up their
exhausted, “dishrag bodies” (King 1993: 17). These undergarments
could also fail, with serious consequences. On the dance floor, the Merry
Widow remained firmly anchored to a woman’s waist even as her torso
spun and twisted; at best, the demi-cup bra barely contained a woman’s
bust, which often exploded out of the garment (King 1993: 3–4).
Like Merry Widow-clad women, astronauts, too, feared their support
garments might pop at any moment. Nervous astronauts atop the most
sophisticated rocket technology America could produce, astronaut John
Young noted, were still dependent upon a suit fitted and sewn by a female
seamstress employed by the suit manufacturer—some “little old lady ...
and her glue pot” (Hacker and Grimwood 1978: 241). Of all of the pres-
sure suits, it was astronaut “Gus” Grissom’s that came closest to actually
killing him—after his Mercury spacecraft splashed down in the Atlantic,
its hatch mysteriously blew open, forcing Grissom to scramble out of the
362 Matthew H. Hersch

capsule before it sank. While the rubber dam prevented water from spilling
into the neck joint, Grissom had neglected to seal the oxygen inlet valve on
his suit before disembarking, and his suit flooded (Catchpole 2001: 193;
Slayton and Cassutt 1994: 100). Water-tight, the suit filled rapidly, nearly
drowning Grissom before a helicopter retrieved him. Even when the Mark
IV worked properly, though, it threatened its wearer in other ways.
When properly worn, the suit was physically intrusive, studded with
awkward biomedical sensors taped to the astronaut’s body, with wire
leads that plugged into connections on the interior of a panel on the
suit’s waist. (Connections on the exterior of the suit enabled the trans-
mission of sensor data to the spacecraft, which would radio the data to
physicians at ground control stations.) Some astronauts, including Alan
Shepard, even allowed themselves to be literally objectified by tattoo-
ing the locations where the sensors should be affixed (Catchpole 2001:
191). The least appreciated physiological monitoring device, though,
was the rectal thermometer, resented by pilots and mocked by Tom
Wolfe as a “wire up the kazoo” (Wolfe 1979: 78). Unlike the indignities
the Merry Widow foisted upon fashionable women, nothing about this
form of penetration was intended to be pleasurable; space medicine pro-
tocols seemed designed to mock the fiercely masculine pilots’ collective
fear of being sodomized.
Likewise, while frank consideration of personal sexual matters
seemed to have infused the design of women’s foundations, when it
came to pressure suits, designers ignored basic hygiene. The first two
American astronauts to fly, Shepard and Grissom, would experience
space in 1961 on 15-minute “suborbital” flights that left little time for
bodily processes, and so on Shepard’s flight, no provision was made for
urine collection. Stalled on the launch pad by technical delays, Shepard
was reluctantly forced to urinate in his pressure suit while lying on his
back in the spacecraft, a fact discussed in classified memoranda but left
out of public accounts of his flight (National Aeronautics and Space
Administration 1961: 46). Trapped inside the rubberized pressure layer,
the liquid collected at Shepard’s lower back and compromised some of
his biosensors (Catchpole 2001: 282).
It was a kind of women’s foundation enjoying surging popularity in
the 1960s—the panty girdle—that ultimately provided a solution for
the Mercury suit’s lack of hygiene equipment, and provided the first
occasion in which an off-the-shelf women’s undergarment was flown
in space. Made of latex rubber or Neoprene, the panty girdle (similar
to today’s elasticized bicycle pants), had long been a staple of women’s
fashion, but found renewed popularity with DuPont’s introduction of
the lightweight synthetic elastic Lycra in 1959 (Ewing 1989: 167). The
night before Grissom’s scheduled flight, Grissom and astronaut John
Glenn fabricated devices to collect urine using modified condoms, tub-
ing, and plastic bags (Glenn and Taylor 1999: 240, 256). To stabilize
the apparatus, Grissom secretly wore a panty girdle over the ­equipment,
 High Fashion 363

purchased by NASA nurse Dee O’Hara at the request of flight surgeon

William Douglas (Boomhower 2004: 183). Shepard and Chief ­Astronaut
“Deke” Slayton wrote that Grissom was “aghast” at the last-minute
addition to his flight uniform, but the stolid, plain-speaking engineer
was circumspect. “Oh, what the hell,” Grissom is reported to have ex-
claimed while donning the foundation, “I’ve dealt with worse make-do
crap before” (Shepard and Slayton 1994: 141).
Eventually, NASA was forced to acknowledge the bodily functions
of its astronauts, and by making private hygiene public, Debra Shaw
writes, spacesuits (like many popular women’s foundations) encouraged
their wearers to accept and even revel in “their own bodily degrada-
tion” (Shaw 2004: 141). Of course, Grissom’s wearing of the panty
girdle, like Funk’s use of the corset, had nothing to do with fetishism;
women’s foundations were, instead, simply some of the most techno-
logically advanced control garments available in 1961. The panty girdle
was one of the few articles of clothing likely to fit beneath Grissom’s
custom-sized pressure suit; unlike the costly suit, though, it was pur-
chased off-the-rack from a store in Cocoa Beach, Florida (Shepard and
Slayton 1994: 141).

From Corset to “Comfort Layer”

The Mark IV revealed its design flaws just as women’s undergarments

were undergoing a period of transformation. The New Look represented
the high-point of modernist women’s fashion; weeks after Sputnik’s
launch, Dior died suddenly of a heart attack; the subsequent underwear
revolution emphasized elastics over boning and ease of movement over
geometric silhouettes. By 1957, the Merry Widow’s rigid panels and
hook-and-eye closures were already being replaced with stretch fabrics
and zippers (Kunzle 1982: 274). Even with these improvements, though,
enthusiasm for the corset did not persist. No sooner had Glenn orbited
the Earth in 1962, than Helen Gurley Brown, in her groundbreaking
feminist classic Sex and the Single Girl, pronounced the death, not only
of 1950s sexual mores, but of “the much-boned and stayed strapless
style of five years back” (Brown 1963: 173).
The ascendance of Lycra in the 1960s marked simultaneous shifts
in both women’s foundations and spacesuit design (Steele 2001: 161).
Liberating the waist from the upper torso, the Lycra panty girdle enabled
much greater range of motion and was far more forgiving of varying
body types; women gravitated to it (e.g. King 1993: 11–12; Wilson 2003:
99–100). Like women’s foundations of the 1960s, spacesuits of the era
underwent continuous improvement. Women’s undergarments seemed
to have inspired one noteworthy series of suits employing layers of
panty girdles intended to, like the Air Force’s partial pressure suits, com-
press bodily tissues with mechanical force in lieu of an air-filled rubber
­bladder (e.g. Thomas 2006 and McMann: 167–69). More successful
364 Matthew H. Hersch

suits, though, matched fashion-forward fabric choice with ingenious me-

chanical design. For Projects Gemini and Apollo, NASA needed a suit that
could remain pressurized for extended periods of time and that provided
protection from radiation and micrometeorites. By covering the pressure
layer with a web of Dacron and Teflon cords, suit designers at David
Clark produced joints that bent without changing the suit’s internal pres-
sure. For the record-breaking, two-week-long 1965 Gemini VII flight,
David Clark supplied astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell with a
new lightweight pressure suit stripped of “as much corsetry as possible”
(Hacker and Grimwood 1978: 278). The new “soft” G5C suit could be
easily removed even with the cramped confines of the Gemini capsule, a
feature that became standard for all future American spacesuits.
Later, ILC Dover, a subsidiary of International Latex, found itself a
subcontractor for the pressure suit that would take American astronauts
to the Moon and back. International Latex had been selling rubber goods
under the Playtex trademark since its founding in Rochester, New York,
in 1932, and had begun making helmets for pilots in the 1940s. ILC
Dover’s pressure suit for Apollo would be the first optimized for long-
­duration operation in space; though the bulkiest of the American space-
suits to date, it was also the most flexible, and the reduced gravitation
of the Moon offset its heft. To control ballooning, ILC Dover reconfig-
ured suit joints as bellows supported by Teflon restraint cables better able
to maintain the suit’s internal volume. Inside, though, the A7L design
swathed the wearer’s body in two dozen layers of fabric: the innermost
undergarment was a white, porous, lingerie-like Nylon “comfort layer;”
on top of this, a girdle-like white Lycra bodysuit held flexible water tubes
connected to an environmental control system that that heated or cooled
the suit as needed. Over this sheath, multiple layers of Nylon and Dacron
encased the astronaut: a rubber-impregnated layer for pressure retention;
a ripstop layer for tear resistance; jersey for abrasions, marquisette for
control (as in the Merry Widow), and aluminum and Mylar for thermal
reflectivity. The suit’s outer layers were made of a wearable fiberglass in-
vented by Dow-Corning (e.g. Thomas and McMann 2006: 128–9).

Conclusion

For a brief moment during the early 1960s, Americans seemed poised
to conquer space and look great doing it. In 1961, Macy’s department
store even promised that no matter how much they changed the world,
Americans would always do it in “beautiful clothes.” And “just as Macy’s
had more bustles to choose from when women wore bustles,” it would
“have more spacesuits when there’s a spacesuit in every wardrobe ...”
(Macy’s 1961: 5). While Macy’s intended its comment as a joke, the two
kinds of garments were more alike than it realized. Both had been manu-
factured, in many cases, by the same entities from the same materials, a
 High Fashion 365

fact ­concealed behind a complex web of corporate parentage. The corset

and the pressure suit deployed synthetic fibers to do for the body what
no other garment could do nearly as well, and were tolerated despite
their imperfections. Firm foundations like the Merry Widow squeezed,
exposed, restrained, and manipulated a woman’s most sensitive anatomy;
the Mark IV immobilized an astronaut’s body, invaded his most personal
anatomical spaces, subjected him to the risk of drowning and suffocation,
denied him control over excretion, and robbed him of his privacy. Clothed
in the Mark IV and the Merry Widow, the husband and wife of high mod-
ernism were more beautiful than ever, if a little less than human.
In a final bit irony, though, the women’s fashion industry (led by
Richard Avedon and his photography for Harper’s) eventually adopted
the spacesuit aesthetic it had itself created (Baldaia 2005: 172–3). Fash-
ion photo spreads and articles of the late 1950s and 1960s drew a direct
line between spaceflight and new concepts in women’s fashion; Pierre
Cardin’s 1965 “Cosmos” collection of dresses and helmet-shaped felt
hats was said to be based on astronaut “Ed” White’s Gemini IV space-
walk (Mendes and de la Haye 1999: 169–71). One 1965 Avedon photo-
graph even placed the willowy English model Jean Shrimpton inside the
fiercely masculine Mark IV (“The Galactic Beauty to the Rescue” 1965:
144–5). Instead of being jarring, the image feminizes the slinky, shiny,
skintight garment, showing, perhaps, how fashionable it really was.
Spacesuit inventor Russell Colley, no doubt, was pleased.

Acknowledgments

Preparation of this article would have been impossible without the

generous support of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts
and Sciences and Department of History and Sociology of Science, the
Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, and the NASA His-
tory Office. I would also like to thank Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Rebecca
­Herzig, Eric Hintz, Chris Jones, Roger Launius, Jennifer Levasseur,
Susan Lindee, Teasel Muir-Harmony, Kendrick Oliver, Emily Pawley,
Katie Proctor, Roger Turner, Margaret Weitekamp, and Amanda Young
for their advice and encouragement, and Michele Salzman of Warnaco®
Inc. and Shelley Dowell of the Richard Avedon Foundation for their
assistance with images. This paper was presented at the 2008 Annual
Conference of the Society for the History of Technology.

Notes

1. Hosiery, made from silk (or, after 1938, Nylon) was knit flat and did
not stretch (Meikle 1995: 137). Stockings were intended to be pulled
taut; together, these foundations left their wearers almost completely
“encased” (Perry 2006).
366 Matthew H. Hersch

2. The work is G. P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars, serialized in

1898 in the pages of the New York Evening Journal.
3. Warner’s® and the Warner’s® logos are registered trademarks of
Warnaco® Inc. and are used with permission.
4. Though a NASA-affiliated biomedical laboratory briefly examined
thirteen women pilots in 1961, the agency never seriously evaluated
women as astronaut candidates. Early arguments against their par-
ticipation included the unavailability of pressure suits for women, a
specious claim in light of David Clark’s experience fitting the female
body (e.g. Weitekamp 2004: 76).
5. W hile frequently recounted as proof of Funk’s pluck, the foundations
may have made her experience more difficult, by improperly com-
pressing her midsection (Ackmann 2003: 175–6).
6. W
 hen Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov left the safety of his vehicle for the
first ever “spacewalk” in 1965, his pressure suit expanded so much that
he was unable to fit through the hatch on his way back in. Only when
the suit was partially deflated was he able to reenter the spacecraft.
7. O n top of their foundations, women often wore sheath-like slip to
protect stockings from runs and one or more “crinoline” petticoats
to lend outer clothing the proper shape (King 1993: 17–18; Beck-
erman 1995: 78; Cunnington and Cunnington 1981: 167). In most
advertisements, women stood, smiled, and flirted in Merry Widows
worn over their underskirts, but this representation was a concession
to modesty. In such images, the Merry Widow’s garter straps flutter
impractically over the flowing petticoats, an obvious indication that
the foundation could not be worn in this way.

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