A Complete History of the Cone Bra Trend

There are undergarments, and then there’s the cone bra. The pointy piece of lingerie has been worn by Marilyn Monroe and Madonna—and as of 2025, they’ve been revived by everyone from Addison Rae to Miuccia Prada. For Miu Miu’s fall 2025 collection, the designer's quintessential dose of retro inspiration manifested in clingy knit tops, pencil skirts, and bullet bras. “All the girls are excited,” Mrs. Prada said of the latter. “It’s like a new fashion.”

While Prada has proved herself an expert in making what’s old feel new again (hello, boat shoes), the bullet bra dates all the way back to the 1940s. In more recent history, the design is commonly associated with Jean Paul Gaultier, though his iconic silhouette was an avant-garde take on the bras his grandmother wore.

Naturally, bustline shapes have shifted throughout history. In the 1920s, small breasts were en vogue per the decade’s popular gamine look, while by the 1930s, slightly larger “champagne coupe” breasts were more desirable.

According to Dr. Valerie Steele, director and chief curator at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, these trends are typically set by famous women. In the case of the bullet bra, a dominant style from the 1940s through the 1960s, that meant movie stars like Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.

“People have modeled themselves after actresses since the 18th century,” Steele tells W. “These actresses,” she says in reference to Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth and other bombshells of the day, “were known for having a particular sort of erotic femininity.” Coincidentally, Madonna namechecks Monroe, Turner, and Hayworth in her 1990 hit “Vogue.”

Early models of the bullet bra included A. Stein & Company’s Perma-Lift and Maidenform’s Chansonette, though Frederick’s of Hollywood—whose clientele included Monroe and Mansfield—has also been credited as one of the bullet bra’s earliest adopters. With the style emerging during World War II, it’s no surprise that the shape of its cups recalled warheads or full metal jacket rounds; some even referred to it as the torpedo bra.

Although bullet bras offered structure sans underwire, they weren’t worn for utilitarian purposes. Instead, women sought to imitate the buxom silhouettes they saw on screen, likely because they also knew a way to a man’s heart was—at least partially—through sex appeal.

“Corsetry and brasseries have always been about aesthetics,” Steele explains. “I think it’s this kind of self-fetishization for many women then. You wanted to be desired by men, and so you wanted to look like what men wanted you to look like. The bullet bra emphasized size and uplift.”

Many of the era’s popular sexpots began their careers as pin-up girls, and during the war, they continued posing for scantily-clad photos as a method of morale-boosting for the troops. “You saw lots of voluptuous women painted on fighter pilot jets,” Steele says.

The “sweater girl” phenomenon was also responsible for popularizing pointy breasts. This look was used to describe women like Turner and Mansfield, who flaunted their curves by layering bullet bras underneath form-fitting sweaters, a combination that clearly inspired Mrs. Prada’s latest Miu Miu line.

By the 1970s, bullet bras largely went out of style as women sought softer, more comfortable alternatives. Many stopped wearing bras altogether. It was Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood who completely reinvented the notion of lingerie a decade later, creating corsetry and bras meant to be seen beyond the boudoir—the underwear-as-outerwear trend, as we know it today.

Gaultier’s first cone bra was technically created for his teddy bear, but he officially experimented with it on the runway for his fall 1984 collection. He designed velvet corset dresses and bras with so-called “cornetti” cups, a reference to the crescent-shaped Italian pastry.

Gaultier’s unconventional approach to design would become synonymous with his reputation as fashion’s enfant terrible: he put men in skirts long before A$AP Rocky and Pete Davidson wore them on the red carpet, and cast models of all ages and sizes at a time when Supers populated most runways.

Madonna noticed a fellow disruptor when she saw one, calling Gaultier herself to request that he design costumes for her Blond Ambition tour. She would be promoting her album Like a Prayer, which scandalized the Pope and cost her a Pepsi deal.

Gaultier and Madonna’s debut collaboration would bow on stage in Japan, when she ripped off a slitted blazer to reveal a pink bodysuit with conical cups. “Do you believe in love?” she asked the crowd before launching into her feminist power anthem “Express Yourself.” “Well, I’ve got something to say about it.”

This design evoked some of Gaultier’s earliest inspirations for the cone bra, incorporating motifs from the 1940s and 1950s. “I loved the flesh color, the salmon satin, the lace,” he once said of his initial exposure to corsetry.

Fashion critic Suzy Menkes would aptly associate Gaultier’s iconic silhouette with the feminist movement coming full circle: “The burgeoning sexual freedom of women, seeded in the 1960s, culminated in Gaultier’s costume design for Madonna’s 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour,” she wrote in her introduction to 2011’s The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier.

The bullet bra’s peaks can certainly be correlated with major developments in women’s rights. Between the 1940s and 1960s, more women than ever entered the workforce, while in the 1990s, the sex positivity movement emerged, challenging old-school feminists to rethink eroticism from an empowering perspective—a tenet that Madonna would embody.

In the 2020s, Gaultier’s cone bra has been reinterpreted by countless designers, including Daniel Roseberry of Schiaparelli and Dolce & Gabbana. Gaultier has even invited other couturiers to reimagine the cone bra alongside him, with Simone Rocha and Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing, among others, sending their own versions down the runway in collaboration with JPG.

After years of speculation, Gaultier has finally found his successor in Duran Lantink, who himself has a history of experimenting with three-dimensional breasts. The Georgian designer will show his first Gaultier collection as creative director in September.

Celebrities have also been driving factors in the current cone-bra craze: Kylie Jenner and Charli XCX donned bullet-bra gowns at last year’s Met Gala, while Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion wore metallic cone bras to perform “WAP” at the 2021 Grammys, a song that generated as much controversy as Madonna’s own work.

Influencers aren’t immune to the trend, either. Burgeoning pop star Addison Rae and even the Internet’s favorite tradwife, Nara Smith, have recently modeled Gaultier’s original “cornetti” cone bra design.

As for what this says about feminism in the current decade, Dr. Steele believes that the idea of bodily exposure—at least, in the spheres of fashion and pop culture—has gone from taboo to commonplace. “It’s become a kind of aestheticized eroticism,” she notes. “A lot of women want to have something that’s sexy in their wardrobe, and the cone bra is an easy way to inject sexuality into fashion.”

Mrs. Prada would certainly agree that a healthy dose of girl power is needed right now. Of her latest Miu Miu show, she said “the collection was about the idea of [using] femininity in this difficult moment to lift us up.”