In 1935, the S.H. Camp and Company — and shortly after the Warner Brothers Corset Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut — introduced and standardized the A, B, C, and D cup sizing system for brassières, replacing a bewildering variety of ad hoc sizing conventions. This standardization allowed mass manufacture and retail distribution on a new scale, making the brassière a genuinely universal garment across the United States. The development represented the complete industrialization of women's intimate clothing and the final triumph of the bra over the corset as the primary bodily support garment.

The standardization of the bra drew the attention of American women writers who noted wryly the new authority of scientific measurement over women's bodies — now the subject of industrial classification as much as poetic idealization. Dorothy Parker and other female wits of the Algonquin Round Table used the bra as an index of modern American femininity's peculiar combination of freedom and new constraint. The cup-sizing system later became a persistent reference point in feminist poetry and body-positive writing.