Polly Smith, a co-inventor of the sports bra, spent a decades-long parallel career as a Jim Henson Company costume designer

Polly Smith is credited as a co-inventor of the first commercial sports bra — she described her own role in building the 1977 prototype as "I was the fabrication" — and, separately, worked for decades as a costume designer for the Jim Henson Company. Per the National Inventors Hall of Fame, she was "brought on as a costume designer for The Muppet Show" and "enjoyed a decades-long career with the company, going on to design for Sesame Street." The invention itself — prototyped by sewing two men's jockstraps together — is treated in claim-first-sports-bra-1977-sewn-from-two-jockstraps; this note is the distinct biographical bridge rather than a re-statement of that claim.

The bridge matters because it links two otherwise unconnected invention domains through a single person: 1970s women's athletic apparel (the Jogbra, and the biomechanics that later formalized it in claim-breast-displacement-figure-eight-motion-capture-2009) and the entertainment-technology world of Jim Henson's shop, which independently built the animatronic/CG control device in claim-henson-1988-waldo-realtime-cg-puppet-control. Smith worked in costuming, not the Creature Shop's electronics, so the connection is institutional and biographical, not technical — but it is the person-hook that surfaced the whole waldo/animatronics thread.

As an uncontested biographical claim on a Tier-3 institutional profile, the note clears its sourcing floor but stays a seedling pending corroboration of the specific productions and dates.