Game On

THE HUMBLE ORIGINS OF A REVOLUTIONARY GARMENT

BY KAITIE CATANIA

2020 WAS AN INTERESTING YEAR for fashion. Comfort reigned supreme across Zoom meetings far and wide, and pants were optional. For many women, the year brought fraught relationships with the bra to levels of resentment on par with the sixties. But their time-honored frustration is what also made it possible for 2020 to be a pretty great year for the sports bra. “We all want to be comfortable,” says Hinda Miller P’17, who co-created the garment in 1977, known then as the Jogbra. “And it proved to be a comfortable bra.” Last spring—more than forty years after its creation—the sports bra and its inventors Lisa Lindahl G’77, Polly Smith, and Miller were named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF). The revolutionary garment that “enabled women's participation in athletic activities and advanced women's health and well-being” earned its place in history alongside ibuprofen and the hardhat.

However, long before committee members at NIHF recognized the sports bra as a symbol of gender equality, it was the University of Vermont that first paid homage to the feminist design. In 2005, a bronze plaque was cast of the original Jogbra and proudly installed in its birthplace: the costume shop at Royall Tyler Theatre.

CUT, STITCH, REPEAT “I was solving my own problem, and I had no idea that it would have the impact it has,” says Lisa Lindahl, who conceived the concept of a sports bra. “I just wanted to be comfortable when I was running.”

Previous page: Brandi Chastain in the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup Final, Polly Smith's early sketches. This page: the first Jogbra ad featuring cocreators Hinda Miller and Lisa Lindahl.

Lindahl took up jogging in the mid-seventies at the height of the sport’s popularity, averaging thirty miles a week while working and studying education at UVM. “I disliked the job I had at the UVM admissions office, so every lunch hour I would walk up to the fieldhouse where there was a tenth-of-a-mile track, and that's how I started running. On that track. It was terrible because I couldn't even get around it once, and when I finally made it around ten times consecutively, I was elated.” It wasn’t long before she took on Burlington’s formidable hill and established a regular route along Riverside Avenue as an allseason runner (no small feat in Vermont). Driven by the meditative qualities it offered, running worked wonders on Lindahl’s mind, but it took a toll on her body when she did it in a regular bra. She experimented with smaller bras, multiple bras, and even no bras before best friend Polly Smith stepped in with some sewing skills.

A costume designer by trade, Smith joined Lindahl in Burlington for a summer and worked at the annual Champlain Shakespeare Festival, based out of UVM’s Royall Tyler Theatre. It was there, in the costume shop, that Smith began the process of deconstructing two jockstraps (yes; you knew this was going there) and retooling them into what she and Lindahl were then calling the “Jock Bra.” It was also there that they brought in Hinda Miller, an assistant designer at the costume shop and the final piece of the puzzle. “I think I was very much urged by the sisterhood of second-wave feminism,” Miller says. Both she and Lindahl imagined a day in which women could run and exercise with the ease, maybe even toss off a t-shirt just as their male counterparts did.

Together they made prototype after prototype in search of a design that hit all the marks: stable straps, clasp- and hardware-free, comfort, breathable, and minimal bounce. The testing process was anything but expert, Lindahl admits, having been the sole model and tester for the bras.

“I went running in our early prototype and Hinda actually tried running backwards in front of me to see how much I bounced. All I knew was that it felt comfortable and it felt better, and that I wanted to make more of them,” she says.

In the end, the most successful designs all featured straps that crossed over the back, irritant-less seams, and a thick elastic band around the ribs for support, features which still define sports bras today. They built the garment using a new textile that was soft, stretchy, and absorbent—cotton-lycra, known today as spandex—and got a utility patent for the design on November 20, 1979.

The patent reads: “The product is the first athletic supporter for women; it is called the ‘JockBra.’ It is a brassiere that holds breasts firmly against the body to minimize any movement that may cause discomfort. At the same time, it is designed for comfort, has perspiration absorbing properties, and straps that will not slip off the shoulders no matter how vigorous the activity is that the athlete is engaged in.”

When they settled on the name Jogbra (slightly less salacious than Jock Bra), it was off to the races.

THE LITTLE STATUTE THAT COULD Their wholesale retail business boomed immediately, to a tune of 25 percent sales growth over the first few years. And so, too, did opportunities for women’s participation in sports and athletics. Just as Jogbra entered the market, the effects of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 began to materialize for school-aged girls and women in 1975 when it was enforced. "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance," the law states simply, in just thirty-seven words. And that wide rule included sports teams.

“Title IX was a good thing in terms of it saying, ‘You don't get any money, honey, unless you're open to both sexes,’ which is great. But what it didn't do was take away the discomfort and the self-consciousness that girls and women felt,” Lindahl says.

Athletic programs at UVM were better positioned than most other universities of its scale for the drastic changes to come. In 1971—a full year before Title IX passed—former President Ed Andrews established a task force for women’s athletics that looked into all the necessary resources it would take to even-out the playing field for men’s and women’s sports at UVM: time, money, staffing, transportation, scholarships. All of it.

The task force saw the deficit was there. But by 1980, inroads were being made to the robust athletics programs seen today, and they keep building. In 1981, the first year in which the NCAA offered championship women’s sports and began tracking their participation in college athletics programs, roughly 74,000 women athletes participated on fewer than

5,000 sports teams. By 2018, those numbers jumped to nearly 220,000 women on 10,695 teams.

UNLEASH THE GIRLS Out of the gate, Jogbra’s first print advertisement struck a tone that was ripe for its time. It featured a photo of Miller and Lindahl running together in just bras, shorts, and sneakers, with a tagline, “Jogbra. No man-made sporting bra can touch it.” Practical, purposeful, and with a dash of cheek. A while later, they printed another ad of them in the bras, but instead of running, Miller and Lindahl were sitting together, toasting with cocktails. “Last year we couldn’t afford to run this ad,” the headline said, addressing the stigma and resistance they overcame as one of the first woman-owned businesses in the sporting goods industry.

Lindahl and Miller had a successful twelve-year run growing Jogbra—Smith took her costume design talents to The Jim Henson Co. where she went on to design multiple Muppet costumes and earned multiple Emmys. Miller and Lindahl sold their business to Playtex Apparel, where the Jogbra eventually moved into the Champion family brand. Having stayed on through the business’s acquisition, Miller was able to work on apparel for the 1996 Summer Olympics women athletes, including bras for the U.S. Women’s Volleyball team.

On the heels of the Olympics, one watershed moment launched women’s sports into the respected, competitive field it is today: Brandi Chastain’s winning shootout penalty kick at the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup Final. In front of some 90,000 fans packed in the Rose Bowl, Chastain nailed the shot to an eruption of cheers, threw off her jersey, dropped to her knees, and bared her black Nike sports bra to the world in unfettered celebration. It’s one of the most iconic moments in sports, and a particularly special moment for the sports bra. Today, that black Nike sports bra hangs framed in Chastain’s home.

“She was a blazing image of the strength and the victorious feeling that women get when they win world championships,” Miller says. “And that’s what Lisa and I wanted in the very beginning.”

“It wasn’t until much later that I began to understand the impact,” Lindahl says, “and that it wasn’t simply about function and comfort, but the sociopolitical implications for women as well. The ripple effect through, literally, generations—I am now seventy-two-years-old and the sports bra is still being written about, talked about, and implicated in feminism.”

Today, the women of Jogbra no longer log the same miles as their runs from the seventies, but their outlook on health, wellness, and feminism remains unchanged. The sports bra business gave them the tools and experience to approach work with passion and purpose.

Miller has stayed close to campus since her days in the Royall Tyler Theatre and currently serves on the advisory board of the Sustainable Innovation MBA program, and is a proud parent of her 2017 SIMBA graduate, Noah. After serving nine years in the Vermont legislature as a state senator for Chittenden County, she pivoted her focus to socially responsible entrepreneurship. Today, she is humbled to support the largest national health movement for Black women, GirlTrek, with her health and wellness expertise.

As VP of the Board of Directors of the Epilepsy Foundation of America, Lindahl went on to advocate for people with epilepsy, a condition she’s lived with nearly all her life and to which she credits her problem-solving skills. With the help of Burlingtonbased Dr. Lesli Bell, she also designed and marketed a compression garment for breast cancer survivors to help ease the painful swelling of truncal lymphedema, a common condition among survivors. Lindahl, a life-long visual artist and writer, has written multiple books including her latest, titled Unleash the Girls: The Untold Story of the Invention of the Sports Bra and How it Changed the World (and Me). She leads a full life as an artist and activist, and continues as an advocate for people with epilepsy. Polly Smith is still her best friend.

“There's always hope for what's coming next. New ideas, solving problems creatively, and not putting up with things that don't feel right,” Lindahl says. “And you know, clothing and fashion will always be a mirror of what's going on in our culture, politics and society."

UVM Hinda Miller, Lisa Lindahl, and Polly Smith at the National Inventors Hall of Fame.