Nina Leen / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images
The man wants to make his wife happy. Charles L. Langs sits at the table and tinkers. With a brush, he carefully strokes glue on the edge of the colored and patterned fabric hat. The little cones should finally hold well - on his wife.
On July 28, 1948, the Detroit-based entrepreneur patented his ruffled cups - as a "breast cover," strapless, backless bras that were nothing but glue on the skin. No straps, no wire, no rubber band.
The idea had come to him, so Langs 1949 told the "Life" magazine, as he watched his wife Mary sunbathe in Florida, as she moved the wearer of her swimsuit to achieve a uniform tan.
Only a few years earlier, in 1946, the trained mechanical engineer and late-appointed swimwear designer Louis Réard had presented his latest creation in Paris: the bikini, consisting of only four tiny fabric triangles.
Langs had a similarly unusual career for a bikini designer. After all, he knew his way around: as a graduate of the prestigious Yale University, he made his living in the automotive industry - with chrome-plated grille for Cadillac and Ford. The patent sketch is also amazingly reminiscent of a car headlight, but that was just a coincidence. Much more important: The covers were not screwed, but just glued.
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Hat Bikini: The man who stuck to his wifeHe got help from a friendly chemist: Charles Walton was head of product development for the tire manufacturer Goodyear and worked from 1947 on Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, short: 3M, the adhesive manufacturer, who later became known for the yellow "Post-its".
Walton was to develop an adhesive that could be removed without pain and residue, which he apparently also largely succeeded. While the patent application originally referred to a disposable bikini made of "cheap material," Charles L. Langs filed a second patent application on February 14, 1949: The breast covers were now reusable by applying a new adhesive-coated ring on the rim ,
Big shop with small clothes
Langs called his breastplate "Poses", written with a makron, ie a line across the e, so that they should be pronounced "pose-ease", in the sense of: easy to apply. The frilly cones were so firm and secure, Langs said, that they stayed in position even if their wearer jumped off the dashboard.
Accustomed to think on the scale of car production, Langs plans to produce 200,000 Poses daily, wrote "Life". The marketing campaign, including a large "Life" photo shoot with the inventor of gluing and models in sports, achieved success: Langs could hardly save himself from placing an order.
"He's more worried about how he's going to satisfy demand," Business Week reported a few weeks later. The clothes business had quickly become too big for the 36-year-old. Langs could no longer tinker all the hats himself, by ad in the "Wall Street Journal" he was looking for "a person or a company that cares about sales and production."
In the same year, the "Time" magazine reported the sale of Langs' company to the US conglomerate Textron Inc. For $ 70,000 in cash and the prospect of additional royalties, Langs separated from his adhesive bikinis and left the trouble The new owner: Customers complained about sloppy processing and non-delivery of their orders.
When the patents were granted in the early fifties, the Poses had their best time already behind them. The hype was over. Even more than half a century later strapless bras were still considered an imperfect invention in the history of swimwear because they were either uncomfortable to wear or did not stay where they belonged. There was no sign of Lang's tight cones.
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