Like many girls in Miss McAnally’s 6th grade class at Kenter Canyon Elementary School, I had the desire to be seen and wanted.  We were starting to develop and some of us needed to wear bras. Sally Crammer, my desk partner, must have been a full B cup. I remember her wearing sleeveless blouses, the semi-circles of sweat stains and fuzzy tufts of dark hairs poking out of her armpits, like little furry animals.

 Many of the girls, like Donna Fine and Ruthie Turney, were wearing bras when we returned from the summer vacation of 1960. I’m not sure they actually needed them, but they were definitely showing more than swollen nipples. Most likely their mothers took them shopping, to Bullocks Westwood or Henshey’s in Santa Monica, and bought them a couple of white “training bras” they could grow into. 

At recess Brodie Greer and some of the other boys chased these girls, weaving through the handball courts and running in circles around the tether-ball poles. The girls squealed and giggled as the boys tried to grab the back of their cotton blouses and take hold of the sandwiched bra band and snap it. Snap! the game was won. I watched this adolescent foreplay from the sidelines, because I was still flat chested, and rather shy. It was like watching a movie about the game of desire on the playground.

 I wanted to be desired too. I wanted to be worthy of attention. My mother got attention because she was famous and beautiful. Famous for being a designer of lingerie. Bras had no mysterious lure for me even when I was little. They were the mainstay of my parents’ business. But for any girl her first bra is special, a rite of passage, like her first period.  The memory stays with her forever. 

I remember my first bra. I still didn’t need one, but I’d graduated from sixth grade and was about to go to summer camp. Sitting at the yellow Formica kitchen table, my mother read me the camp’s clothing and supply list. “Let’s make you a bra,” she suggested. 

How excited I was. The following week I was dropped off at my parent’s factory and I found my way into Mother’s design studio at the far end of the stretched-out building. The long room was filled with design tables, mannequins, and a collection of power machines: a couple of single-needles, a two-needle cover-stich, a zigzag, and a couple of safety overlocks. The sample makers were busy sewing. Mother wore soft blue leather slippers she kept under her worktable. Her hair was twisted up in a chignon. She wore a slim black skirt with a crisp white button-front blouse, and a yellow tape-measure draped around her neck. 

Off in our private corner, the two of us stood at Mother’s work table which was neatly appointed with various metal straight edges, curved rulers, a mechanical pencil, a couple of erasers, a thick stack of fashion magazines, and pads of tracing paper. I wore seersucker shorts and a sleeveless summer top. Mother asked me to stand with my arms in a T as she deftly slipped the tape off her neck and wrapped it gently around my thin chest, then instructed me to remain straight while relaxing my arms down to my side. I loved the soft scent of her Channel No. 5 and the gentle touch of her cool, long fingers, tipped with glossy painted nails. 

She took three measurements: lower chest (the under-bust measurement), across my nipples (the bra’s over-bust measurement), and a couple of inches above my nipples (the upper-chest measurement). Sliding the cloth from under my arms, she measured the distance between my nipples (apex to apex). She slipped the tape over my sloping shoulders for a strap measurement, then had me turn around so she could take a few back measurements. 

With all the numbers recorded on her note pad, she scooted over a high stool next to her swivel chair. A ready student, a jumped up on the seat. Between us Mother placed a piece of blue grid-patterned paper on the corkboard surface. She placed a small jar of silver push pins in front of me and instructed me to place one at the corners of the paper. Transcribing her measurement notes into pencil dots on the grid lines, she instructed me on how to place the ruler between the marks and swipe the lead across the straight edge, dot to dot. 

Then, she handed me the shiny protractor to encircle the shape of the bra cup. At age eleven, I found that one twist of the device was sufficient, its diameter was no wider than a small cookie. Some brassieres had more than eighteen separate pattern pieces, more than a man’s three-piece suit. But because my first bra served no other purpose than creating an illusion, my bra had but a few pieces to sew together.

Mother showed me how to hold the large, heavy scissors, balancing their weight by securing my elbow on the table.

“Try to open the scissors just enough to bite onto the paper, then slide the paper through the blades,” she said. Her steady hands guided me. 

I remember how patient she was while I worked the pieces. I felt the others in the room smiling at my effort, which made me try all the harder.

After we finished cutting out the pattern, Mother passed on the pieces to Rosa, the sample maker, and gave her the simple sewing instructions. We then left her office and she drove me to Van Nuys airport for lunch. When we got back to the design room, Rosa had finished sewing up my bra, made from little pieces of French lace: two small doilies attached to stretchy side bands that hooked together in the back, tiny pink and green satin buds placed at the center front and at the top of the flat discs where the shoulder straps attached. The straps and back band were elasticized, and substantial enough to show under my blouse. That’s all I cared about but I didn’t let my mother know that.

At summer camp I got snapped in the back by a cute, lanky blond boy and it changed me. It was my first bite of romance, my first initiation into my femininity That first bra was more to me than a mere undergarment. It was my first experience with allure.

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The First Lady of Underfashions is a nonfiction saga-like memoir written by Christina Erteszek and includes excerpts from her parents' unpublished memoirs. It is a complex, layered, and nuanced story that bridges the violence of war, the innovation of thought, the singularity of religion, the quest for identity, and the intrigues and intricacies of family life. Jan and Olga escape from World War II Europe and arrive in the US with just a few dollars. They turn their paltry savings into a multi-million-dollar fashion business. Olga becomes a leading patent holder of female lingerie, a trendsetter in the industry, and is widely known for her innovative business tactics. But as this husband-and-wife team think of retiring, they decide to merge with another fashion company, which proves to be a fatal move when a loophole in the agreement allows for a hostile takeover. This is also a story of a daughter's need to find herself. Along her path to self-discovery, she discovers her parents have many secrets, some of which will never be revealed.

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Olga Erteszek and daughters

I remember changing clothes after P.E. at Paul Revere Junior High in ninth grade. Jeannie Gardner, one of the most popular girls, had a locker a few spaces down. Usually the locker room screamed with chattering girls jammed between rows of metal cabinets. But on that day, lots of the eighth and ninth graders had already fled to their next class. Jeannie and I were the only girls along the wooden bench that separated us.

I was in my Olga underwear: Young Secret black bra, a four-section contour cup, and a panty garter belt with a tummy-flattening Lycra band. My stocking foot was propped on the bench while I attached the mid-thigh hose top to a garter dangling beneath my tricot panty. I sensed Jeannie staring, mesmerized, as I snapped the black rubber tab into a metal ring. I was enjoying the attention, as Jeannie usually ignored me—not that I cared much, though she was prettier and more popular.

At fourteen, petite and shapely Jeannie resembled Sandra Dee. She went out with an older guy, an eleventh-grade football star who drove a red convertible Mustang. I spied the Plain Jane white undies gathering up at her waist with a droop at the butt, like they’d been washed and worn too many times. After working alongside my mother to construct my very first bra and visiting the Olga Company so many times, I couldn’t help but notice that the bra covering her perfect breasts puckered at the sides, while the stretched-out elastic stood away from her underarm. I suspected her mom bought her Lollypop underwear, three to a pack at Sears and Roebuck on Pico Boulevard. Her cheap underwear distracted me from who I thought she really was and it made me feel spiteful, not Christian-like at all. I assessed and judged like my parents were forced to do on that painful path to freedom. Though in the ninth grade I wasn’t paying much attention.

“That’s groovy underwear,” Jeannie said, sizing me up as I plucked my skirt from the hook in my locker.

“Thanks.” I wanted to say more but nothing came to mind.

“Did your mom make that?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow,” she turned away as if finished with me, reaching for a white ruffled blouse hanging inside her locker. Then, as she maneuvered each button down her perfect chest, to my surprise she addressed me again.

“Chrisie, I was wondering, where are your parents from?”

“They were born in Poland.” I was surprised at her interest, because I doubted Jeannie’s mom shopped in the fine stores that sold my mother’s creations. I suspected she shopped at Penny’s or Sears and Roebuck, stores to which the Olga Company had no interest in selling.

“Then why aren’t you Catholic?”

All the Catholics at Paul Revere Junior High knew each other; they attended St. Martin of Tours in Brentwood or Corpus Christi in Pacific Palisades. I always wore a small gold cross around my neck. She must have noticed.

“I’m a Congregationalist,” I said proudly.

“How can that be?” She looked straight into my eyes now. “Poles are either Catholics, or Jews—and there are few of those left.”

I didn’t know how to reply except to say there were also a number of Congregationalists from Poland. Honestly, I hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. I had a limited knowledge of history, and as for the religions of Poland, I knew nothing. In fact, regarding Poland I knew very little at all, apart from the taste of Polish sausage, the colorful costumes of the peasant dolls my mother collected, and the bouncy sound of polkas my mother played on our phonograph so she could dance the half jump steps around the living room. I knew my parents lost most of their family to the Holocaust, but the details were never discussed in our home. Even in history class I can’t remember learning about the Holocaust. Not in the Sixties. Not in Brentwood.

BUY THE BOOK

The First Lady of Underfashions is a nonfiction saga-like memoir written by Christina Erteszek and includes excerpts from her parents' unpublished memoirs. It is a complex, layered, and nuanced story that bridges the violence of war, the innovation of thought, the singularity of religion, the quest for identity, and the intrigues and intricacies of family life. Jan and Olga escape from World War II Europe and arrive in the US with just a few dollars. They turn their paltry savings into a multi-million-dollar fashion business. Olga becomes a leading patent holder of female lingerie, a trendsetter in the industry, and is widely known for her innovative business tactics. But as this husband-and-wife team think of retiring, they decide to merge with another fashion company, which proves to be a fatal move when a loophole in the agreement allows for a hostile takeover. This is also a story of a daughter's need to find herself. Along her path to self-discovery, she discovers her parents have many secrets, some of which will never be revealed.

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