I was awake in the middle of the night watching a young Clara Bow in a 1932 movie. It was pre-production code. And it was quite evident that she was not wearing proper undergarments. In one scene, she wrestled with a large dog. The camera angle on the dog was rather immodest, too.
Contrast that with Jane Russell in The Outlaw, made eleven years later and banned in a number of jurisdictions because of an ill-fitting top:

There's not steady progress toward greater and greater freedom. It fluctuates.