Frederick Mellinger founded Frederick's of Hollywood in Los Angeles in 1946, a mail-order lingerie company that pioneered the strapless bra and several other undergarment innovations for the American market. Frederick's was instrumental in popularising the strapless bra, the push-up bra, and other structural undergarments as standard items in American women's wardrobes in the post-war period. The company's catalogue — mailed to millions of American homes — made it a primary cultural mediator of American ideals of femininity and sexuality through the 1950s and 1960s.

Frederick's of Hollywood occupied a peculiar cultural space between the respectable and the risqué, and its catalogues featured in the poetry and fiction of writers examining Cold War American femininity — most notably in the work of Sylvia Plath, whose journals record the tension between the idealized, structured female body and interior female experience. The post-war American lingerie industry's expansion gave feminist poets of the 1960s a concrete consumer landscape to critique.