It began with the May,1915 edition of Harper’s Bazaar magazine that featured a model sporting the latest fashion. She wore a sleeveless evening gown that exposed, for the first time in fashion, her bare shoulders, and her (shaved) armpits. Shocking at first, this soon caught on. At the same time a marketing executive with the Wilkinson Sword Company, which made razor blades for men, designed a campaign to convince women that underarm hair was unfeminine. By 1917 the sales of razor blades doubled as women conformed to this feminine stereotype of shaving under their arms.
