Chillisauce hoists world's biggest bra onto Southbank Building for breast cancer awareness
There is a brassiere bruhaha brewing over who deserves to own the record of the world's biggest bra.
On one side is the size 1222 B-cup brassiere recently commissioned by the makers of British stain remover Vanish. The garment was hung across a skyscraper in Central London as part of a "Wear It Pink" campaign by the British-based Breast Cancer Campaign. It measured nearly 88 feet under the bust and 102 feet around the chest, and required more than 4000 square feet of lightweight, pink spinnaker nylon.
The brassiere was colossal by any standards, so judges for Guinness World Records awarded it the coveted title of "World's Largest Bra."
As titillating as that honor may be for the folks who made this brontosaurus-sized brassiere, it doesn't deserve a world record according to a Big Apple-based artist who claims he built an even bigger bra 42 years ago in New York.
Back in 1969, Joey Skaggs, a famed conceptual artist and media prankster, created a bra that was reportedly 120 feet long -- 50 feet for the cups alone -- as a statement about America's fixation on breasts.
"There was a woman named Francine Gottfried, who was an office worker on Wall Street who had very, very large breasts," Skaggs told HuffPost Weird News. "When Francine would go out to lunch many Wall Street workers would point, stare, whistle and hoot."
The story got national attention and inspired Skaggs to build a bra big enough to satisfy anyone with a chest obsession.
Although Skaggs first wanted to hang it around the Statue of Liberty, all attempts to provide support for Miss Liberty failed. Another attempt, stretching it across the Wall Street intersection, failed when Skaggs was removed from a lamp pole, bra in hand, by police officers.
Skaggs says he finally was able to show his support for Gottfried -- and all women -- on Valentine's Day 1969, when, with the help of friends, he tied one end of the bra to the outstretched arm of the statue of George Washington in front of the U.S. Treasury building on Wall Street.
After stretching the bra across the front of the building and tying the other end to a column, Skaggs waited to see the reaction to his work.
It wasn't good.
"When the flood of workers going to lunch saw what was happening, they became enraged," he said. "Hundreds of men attacked the bra and ripped it to pieces."
Police officers arrested some of Skaggs' friends, but Skaggs himself managed to slip away, narrowly averting, ahem, a big bust.
