It has been an interesting week of discovery for women – more specifically, women’s underwear – after we discovered the fascinating reason as to why there’s often a bow on the front of our underwear.
Now that mystery seems to have been cracked wide open, internet sleuths have turned their attention to the teeny tiny bow which frequently appears on the front of the front of bras.
Most of us would assume that the bow was just there to look pretty, after all, it serves no real function. But, it turns out that, like the underwear bow, there’s a very historical reason for that tiny piece of ribbon.
After someone asked the all important question on information sharing site Quora, one clever user cleared it all up for us, and it’s a lot more fascinating than you might first think.
“In olden days when women wore corsets, there was a piece of whalebone called a busk. It was inserted in a sheath down the front of the corset and tied in place with a bow. The busk is gone but the bow remains,” the Quora user explained.
In case you missed the explanation behind the underwear, there’s a very similar reason, with the tiny bow dating all the way back to before elastic existed, meaning people’s underwear were held up by being tied together with ribbon, which was threaded through the eyelet lace around the top.
“The little bow is where you tie that ribbon, and of course it’s in the front because that’s the easiest place to do something like that,” the Quora user wrote.
Everyday really is a school day on the internet.