Caresse Crosby
Entrepreneur
Socialite and patron of the arts who patented the first widely used brassiere.
She got the idea of making her garment after finding that the whalebone corset in fashion at the time was unfashionably visible in her evening dress.
She named her new invention the Backless Brassiere after the old French term for the upper arm, and she sold her patent for $1,500 to The Warner Brothers Corset Company.
She was born in New Rochelle, New York, the descendant of the original American colonists.
She was not alone in popularizing the brassiere as a garment. Ida Rosenthal, the founder of Maidenform, helped in that she created the first standard sizes for it.