A Complete History of the Cone Bra Trend

There are undergarments, after which there’s the cone bra. The pointy piece of undies has been worn via Marilyn Monroe and Madonna—and as of 2025, they’ve been revived via everybody from Addison Rae to Miuccia Prada. For Miu Miu’s fall 2025 assortment, the fashion designer’s quintessential dose of unfashionable inspiration manifested in clingy knit tops, pencil skirts, and bullet bras. “All the girls are excited,” Mrs. Prada mentioned of the latter. “It’s like a new fashion.”

While Prada has proved herself knowledgeable in making what’s previous really feel new once more (hi, boat sneakers), the bullet bra dates all of the as far back as the 1940s. In more moderen historical past, the design is recurrently related to Jean Paul Gaultier, although his iconic silhouette was once an avant-garde take at the bras his grandmother wore.

Naturally, bustline shapes have shifted all the way through historical past. In the 1920s, small breasts had been en trend in step with the last decade’s standard gamine glance, whilst via the 1930s, relatively better “champagne coupe” breasts had been extra fascinating.

According to Dr. Valerie Steele, director and leader curator at The Museum on the Fashion Institute of Technology, those tendencies are generally set via well-known ladies. In the case of the bullet bra, a dominant taste from the 1940s during the 1960s, that intended film stars like Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.

“People have modeled themselves after actresses since the 18th century,” Steele tells W. “These actresses,” she says in connection with Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth and different bombshells of the day, “were known for having a particular sort of erotic femininity.” Coincidentally, Madonna namechecks Monroe, Turner, and Hayworth in her 1990 hit “Vogue.”

Early fashions of the bullet bra incorporated A. Stein & Company’s Perma-Lift and Maidenform’s Chansonette, although Frederick’s of Hollywood—whose clientele incorporated Monroe and Mansfield—has additionally been credited as probably the most bullet bra’s earliest adopters. With the way rising all through World War II, it’s no wonder that the form of its cups recalled warheads or complete steel jacket rounds; some even referred to it because the torpedo bra.

Although bullet bras introduced construction sans underwire, they weren’t worn for utilitarian functions. Instead, ladies sought to mimic the buxom silhouettes they noticed on display, most likely as a result of in addition they knew a technique to a person’s center was once—no less than partly—thru intercourse enchantment.

“Corsetry and brasseries have always been about aesthetics,” Steele explains. “I think it’s this kind of self-fetishization for many women then. You wanted to be desired by men, and so you wanted to look like what men wanted you to look like. The bullet bra emphasized size and uplift.”

Many of the technology’s standard sexpots started their careers as pin-up ladies, and all through the conflict, they persevered posing for scantily-clad pictures as one way of morale-boosting for the troops. “You saw lots of voluptuous women painted on fighter pilot jets,” Steele says.

The “sweater girl” phenomenon was once additionally liable for popularizing pointy breasts. This glance was once used to explain ladies like Turner and Mansfield, who flaunted their curves via layering bullet bras beneath form-fitting sweaters, a mix that obviously impressed Mrs. Prada’s newest Miu Miu line.

By the 1970s, bullet bras in large part went out of fashion as ladies sought softer, extra at ease possible choices. Many stopped dressed in bras altogether. It was once Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood who totally reinvented the perception of undies a decade later, growing corsetry and bras intended to be observed past the boudoir—the underwear-as-outerwear pattern, as we comprehend it as of late.

Gaultier’s first cone bra was once technically created for his teddy undergo, however he formally experimented with it at the runway for his fall 1984 assortment. He designed velvet corset clothes and bras with so-called “cornetti” cups, a connection with the crescent-shaped Italian pastry.

Gaultier’s unconventional way to design would turn into synonymous together with his recognition as model’s enfant horrible: he put males in skirts lengthy sooner than A$AP Rocky and Pete Davidson wore them at the purple carpet, and solid fashions of every age and sizes at a time when Supers populated maximum runways.

Madonna spotted a fellow disruptor when she noticed one, calling Gaultier herself to request that he design costumes for her Blond Ambition excursion. She can be selling her album Like a Prayer, which scandalized the Pope and price her a Pepsi deal.

Gaultier and Madonna’s debut collaboration would bow on level in Japan, when she ripped off a slitted blazer to show a red bodysuit with conical cups. “Do you believe in love?” she requested the gang sooner than launching into her feminist energy anthem “Express Yourself.” “Well, I’ve got something to say about it.”

This design evoked a few of Gaultier’s earliest inspirations for the cone bra, incorporating motifs from the 1940s and 1950s. “I loved the flesh color, the salmon satin, the lace,” he as soon as mentioned of his preliminary publicity to corsetry.

Fashion critic Suzy Menkes would aptly affiliate Gaultier’s iconic silhouette with the feminist motion coming complete circle: “The burgeoning sexual freedom of women, seeded in the 1960s, culminated in Gaultier’s costume design for Madonna’s 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour,” she wrote in her creation to 2011’s The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier.

The bullet bra’s peaks can definitely be correlated with primary tendencies in ladies’s rights. Between the 1940s and 1960s, extra ladies than ever entered the team of workers, whilst within the 1990s, the intercourse positivity motion emerged, difficult old-school feminists to reconsider eroticism from an empowering standpoint—a guideline that Madonna would embrace.

In the 2020s, Gaultier’s cone bra has been reinterpreted via numerous designers, together with Daniel Roseberry of Schiaparelli and Dolce & Gabbana. Gaultier has even invited different couturiers to reimagine the cone bra along him, with Simone Rocha and Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing, amongst others, sending their very own variations down the runway in collaboration with JPG.

After years of hypothesis, Gaultier has in the end discovered his successor in Duran Lantink, who himself has a historical past of experimenting with 3-dimensional breasts. The Georgian fashion designer will display his first Gaultier assortment as inventive director in September.

Celebrities have additionally been using elements within the present cone-bra craze: Kylie Jenner and Charli XCX donned bullet-bra robes ultimately 12 months’s Met Gala, whilst Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion wore metal cone bras to accomplish “WAP” on the 2021 Grammys, a tune that generated as a lot controversy as Madonna’s personal paintings.

Influencers aren’t proof against the fad, both. Burgeoning pop megastar Addison Rae or even the Internet’s favourite tradwife, Nara Smith, have just lately modeled Gaultier’s unique “cornetti” cone bra design.

As for what this says about feminism within the present decade, Dr. Steele believes that the theory of physically publicity—no less than, within the spheres of style and popular culture—has long past from taboo to not unusual. “It’s become a kind of aestheticized eroticism,” she notes. “A lot of women want to have something that’s sexy in their wardrobe, and the cone bra is an easy way to inject sexuality into fashion.”

Mrs. Prada would definitely agree {that a} hearty dose of girl energy is wanted at this time. Of her newest Miu Miu display, she mentioned “the collection was about the idea of [using] femininity in this difficult moment to lift us up.”