Nice girls may go to heaven -- but for over 60 years, bad ones have gone to Frederick's of Hollywood (FOH).

Perhaps that’s why it’s proven so adept at embarrassing, titillating, and otherwise seducing unwitting mall-walkers for so many years -- the average vinyl bustier or pearl-and-lace G-string available at Frederick’s makes Victoria’s Secret (LTD) look downright tame.

But then, the company has always been a pioneer: Founded by Frederick Mellinger in 1946, it wasted no time in bringing us the world's first push-up bra in 1948, named the "Rising Star." In case you had any doubts about what it was for, it came with a helpful instruction card: "You cup your breasts IN, arrange them UP, and SNAP." Women winced -- but they bought thousands of both the Rising Star and a cone-stitched model with military uplift. Brand name: the "Missile."

Other Frederick’s epigrams of the 1950s were equally catchy (if jaw-droppingly pre-feminist): Mottoes like "Padding makes perfect" -- along with the promise that any woman could "come in [to Frederick’s] looking like a Chevy and leave looking like a Cadillac" -- were perfectly suited to an America then having an extended love affair with all things sleek and pneumatic.

It was in that same decade that the infamous Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue was introduced. One of its first slogans: Put Your Breasts on a Shelf.

And in the 1970s, though bra-burning was spreading across the country like wildfire (in a manner of speaking), Mellinger was unperturbed, saying, "The law of gravity will win out."