The Maidenform "Dream" campaign ran from the end of World II through the 1960's. It featured gorgeous women, their bottoms modestly clad but their tops ensconced only in their bras, dreaming they went shopping, played pool, rode fire trucks or crossed the Nile on Cleopatra's barge in their Maidenform bras.
For the time, it was shockingly risqué. In fact, Mad Magazine spoofed the campaign in 1962, with "I dreamed I was arrested for indecent exposure in my Maidenform bra." But the one thing it did was sell a heck of a lot undergarments. Big risk. Big payoff. That's elemental thinking.