The first commercial sports bra (1977) was prototyped by sewing two men's jockstraps together

The first commercial sports bra — the "Jogbra" — was prototyped in 1977 by Lisa Lindahl, Polly Smith, and Hinda Miller, who assembled an early version by sewing two men's jockstraps together. Per the Smithsonian Magazine account, the design idea arrived as a joke: Lindahl's then-husband "put his jock strap on upside down across his chest, and put it on like a one cup bra," which suggested that the compressive, sweat-tolerant engineering of athletic supporters could be redirected to hold the breast during running. The product was first called the "Jockbra" and renamed "Jogbra" because women did not want to be called "jocks."

The garment solved by intuition a problem that a formal research discipline would later quantify: how to restrain breast movement during exercise. The measurement science that grew up around the same problem — reflective-marker motion capture of breast displacement — is treated in claim-breast-displacement-figure-eight-motion-capture-2009, which relies on the same optical marker-tracking instrument lineage.

Downstream commercial history is folded here as supporting detail rather than split out: the cited article says only that the founders "sold it 12 years later to Playtex Apparel" (≈1989–90); the more specific "1979 patent" and "1990 acquisition" dates the capture carried are not in the article and remain unsourced here (marked at audit 2026-07-12). The capture also noted Title IX (1972) as a plausible policy tailwind for the brand's growth, but that causal claim rested on general search context and is not asserted as a standalone note.