anything goes with emma chamberlain - fashion history, a talk with richard thompson ford [video]

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

[video available on spotify] i love fashion but i wouldn't consider myself a fashion nerd. i'm not super educated on the history of fashion and so that’s why i'm excited to speak to richard thompson ford. he’s a stanford law professor and fashion history expert. richard’s also the author of several books, including “dress codes: how the laws of fashion made history.” he’s dug deep into fashion as a system of power, how the written and unwritten rules of fashion have evolved and influenced what we wear today. so let’s welcome richard thompson ford. you can find the book "dress codes: how the laws of fashion made history" by richard thompson ford here: https://open.spotify.com/show/4S424uBZacD2i6FmZgZPXR?si=8a20042d00194706 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fine, I'll admit it. I just love fashion. Ah, sorry. Okay, fine, I'll admit it. I love fashion. I love fashion, but I wouldn't consider myself a fashion nerd in the sense that I'm not super educated on the history of fashion. I love the technical side of fashion, for example, like how to balance the colors of an outfit or even the intricacies of how things are constructed

or the intricacies of how different fabrics work and how they lay on the body. I love fashion in a very current way. You know, I love going to fashion shows and watching new collections come down the runway in real time. I love going to fashion shows and watching new collections come down the runway in real time. I love fashion right now. I love fashion in the current moment,

but I just don't know a lot about fashion history. And I think that this is important for me as a fashion lover because history plays a huge role in fashion. Like when you're interested in fashion, you're naturally, whether you want to be or not, kind of interested in history, because the two are heavily tied together.

We've been wearing clothes for a very long time. And that's why I'm excited to sort of develop my knowledge about fashion history, which is why I'm so excited to be speaking to our guest today, Richard Thompson Ford. He is a Stanford law professor, Bay Area Palo Alto represent. I'm not from Palo Alto, but I am from the Bay Area. So, you know, I feel close to him in that way. I've never met him, but I think we're gonna love each other He is a fashion history

Expert. He also has expertise in many other many other Categories, but today I'm gonna be talking to him specifically about fashion Specifically Richard has dug deep into fashion as a system of power How the written and unwritten rules of fashion have evolved and still influence what we wear today. He's written several books, the most recent one being Dress Codes, How the Laws of Fashion Made History, and I'm so excited to learn more about fashion today. Beyond just like when did they create the corsets and why are they so snatched? Like that's more

than we're gonna dig a little deeper than that today and really really become fashion nerds together and maybe you don't want that maybe you don't but I do so come along for the journey and I will welcome in now Richard Thompson Ford. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection. How epic is that? And it's free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda.

It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. So whether you're going on a run or you're running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. This episode is brought to you by Hotels.com. The last trip that I went on was to New York for New Year's. It was such a phenomenal trip. You know, I travel a lot and over the years

I've sort of figured out how to have the best experience. It requires a lot of research to find the perfect place to stay. I'm looking for something safe, clean, reliable, fairly priced. Whether you're looking for an all-inclusive getaway or a relaxing weekend spa visit, the Hotels.com app has a perfect hotel for every trip.

You can compare up to five hotels side by side and see their prices, amenities, and star ratings without having to switch back and forth between options. So start planning your next getaway and find your perfect somewhere in the Hotels.com app today. This episode is brought to in the Hotels.com app today. This episode is brought to you by Hotels.com. The last trip that I went on was to New York for New Year's. It was such a phenomenal trip. You know, I travel a lot and over the years I've sort of figured out how to have the best experience. It requires a lot out how to have the best experience. It requires a lot of research to find the perfect place to stay.

I'm looking for something safe, clean, reliable, fairly priced. Whether you're looking for an all-inclusive getaway or a relaxing weekend spa visit, the hotels.com app has a perfect hotel for every trip. You can compare up to five hotels side by side and see their prices, amenities, and star ratings without having to switch back and forth between options. So start planning your next getaway and find your perfect somewhere in the Hotels.com app today. We're going to have a fashion day, you know, because you have so many things that you do,

so many amazing things that you do but I'm So curious about the fashion piece of it because I think a lot of people look at fashion as something that is You know sort of materialistic like when you hear the word fashion what comes to mind? It's like it's Materialistic it's you know, it's capitalism. It's this is that but You know, there's so much more to it. What initially drew you to fashion and what particular piece of fashion was the most interesting to you? Well, what drew me to fashion initially was being a kid growing up. I grew up in a town called Fresno. And yeah.

No way! Yes. Oh my God, my family, I have family in Fresno. Oh, is that right? Yes. Yeah, so I grew up in Fresno and I went to a high school which was great in many ways. I was one of a very few African American kids there.

And right away, fashion and clothing was a way to kind of navigate the social scene. It was a way to set myself off, a way to, you know, exert some personality that wasn't just my race. And I found that really useful and powerful. And so it got me interested in fashion trends. I had a preppy phase. I had a punk rock phase, you know, I mean all the stuff that kids go through. Yes. So initially the interest sort of started with

how you could use it to sort of create, like manipulate identity in a way. Yeah. You know, it's like you can go in and your clothes can speak for you in some ways. Okay, so it started there and then how did it sort of evolve to today? Sort of fill in the blanks from that initial moment of like, I love this. This is, you know, maybe in a way sort of an art form or a way to speak. Yeah.

What then made it such a focus, I guess, in, in your career? Well, a couple of things, one's personal and one's professional. My father was also a stylish person. He had great clothes and a great sense of style. Yes. You know, I wish I could have worn some of his clothes, but we were not the same size, because he had some great stuff. He studied as a tailor. He was a professional.

He was a university professor and administrator. But he actually studied as a tailor at a historically black college at a time when they insisted that the students learn a trade as well as a profession in case they needed something to fall back on. So he always talked about clothing. And, but the thing I saw as a kid was he used clothing as a way to navigate his surroundings.

He was one of the only black people at the Cal State University of Fresno where he worked. So I noticed that. And the way clothing mattered for him, it was fun and he liked it just as style, but it also had this very serious side. And that was powerful. Professional side is I teach a variety of classes in law, including employment discrimination. And there are a lot of lawsuits around clothing. People suing their employers for a dress code

that, for instance, requires them to wear something they don't wanna wear. So dress codes that require women to wear makeup or tease their hair or wear high heeled shoes can be challenged as sex discrimination. Dress codes that forbid head coverings might be challenged as discrimination on the basis of religion,

if your religion requires a head covering. Lots of lawsuits. And the way the courts dealt with those lawsuits never struck me as satisfying. So I teach these cases to my students and any student who was remotely interested in fashion kind of thought, well, that's not what was really at stake in this case. What the court's talking about isn't really what I think was going on.

And the students were right. And so over time, I thought it would be great to dig into this and get a better sense for why people are suing, why employers want to have these risk codes, that goes beyond what the typical legal analysis was talking about. Do you have an example of one of those lawsuits? What about it was not satisfying? Maybe give an example or dig into that a little bit more. In a lot of the cases there's a moment where the court says of course fashion

is trivial. You know I mean there are a couple cases where they actually say just overtly of course this is trivial and not worth the attention of the courts except for the fact that it coincides with discrimination on the basis of race or religion or a freedom of expression claim. But the presumption that fashion was trivial in and of itself always rubbed me the wrong way and I thought, you know, you're not going to get a good analysis if you begin with the proposition that what everyone cares about is trivial.

So that struck me as wrong. Here's one case in particular, there was a case involving an African American woman who had locks and the employer had a dress code against unprofessional hairstyles. And so it said that hairstyle is unprofessional, you have to change your hairstyle. Now, the way the courts typically would analyze that would be to say, well, is the hairstyle part of her race?

You know, if it's part of her race, then maybe she has a legal claim. But if it's not part of her race, then it's just a workplace rule and you've got to change your haircut. But what they left out was all the ways that that hairstyle might be important to her that weren't directly about race,

might have been indirectly about it, but also the way it would be, they didn't care about the fact that it would be impossible for her to change her hairstyle and put it back because the nature of that hairstyle, they didn't think about the fact that what they were really talking about wasn't just, you have to show up for work with a different hairstyle, but you've got to change your hairstyle permanently because

that hairstyle can't be switched back and forth. Yep. It just kind of went right over the head of the court. And so there are a lot of cases involving things like that where they just seem to not get it. I guess that is sort of part of the problem is this sort of misunderstanding of what fashion and I guess identity as a whole really is. Like I think, I guess, and this can even just be a personal opinion, how important is it that we protect our fashion choices,

our choices with our hair, our choices with our makeup? How important is that? And is there any moment when we should be like, okay, I guess I have to change it? There is no manual for life, but what is sort of your ideal, what's the mantra? What's the, you know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not against all dress codes. So I think there are times when the dress code's perfectly reasonable, it's necessary, people should just comply with the dress code. But I think that what people don't get is what you're getting at with why is it important to the individual and why is it not trivial. And when you need to navigate the world and maybe it's assert authority, maybe it's assert competence, the way you come across matters, how you feel in your own skin matters.

And I think people who don't understand that are usually people who almost always feel comfortable because the norms and the rules are set up for them. So they've never confronted a situation where someone says, you know, something that is kind of central to your identity is banned. So a lot of the... In the book, I try to talk about examples. A lot of them involve women, where the dress code is really working against their ability to do their job

or to be successful at something. You have to wear this outfit, and that outfit's going to make it psychologically or symbolically really hard to accomplish what you want to accomplish so your clothing's working against you and that's a problem that only certain people face in certain circumstances. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection. How epic is that? And it's free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals

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like Fizz, the more you stay, the more you get rewarded with dollars off and free data. You can even roll over unused data each month. Try the other side. Switch to Fizz. Check out fizz.ca conditions apply. Can we kind of dig into the history of women's fashion? Because I think it's so fascinating and there's so much, I think we all just think of the corset. And we just, and you know what? Sometimes my stylist still puts me in a corset

and it's fashion and we hate it. And every time I put one on I'm like, how in the world did women wear this every day? I'm grumpy when I'm in a corset for a photo shoot. It's a nightmare. Anyway, little women's fashion history. What are the key points? So I guess the key point I'd begin with is that

there's a moment in history where men's and women's fashions, or a couple of moments actually, where they diverge in really important ways. So one of them is in the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance and there's a moment when fashion starts to really take off. Tailoring becomes a big deal throughout Europe and it's happening for men. So for a long period in history, all of the innovative fashions, the newest fashions, the sexiest fashions, they're for men, not women. So the men get all this tailored clothing, they get leggings, they can show their legs in public.

They get, you know, and the women are still in draped clothing, which used to be what everyone wore. That's an important moment. And up until about the 1700s, women's fashion is following trailing men's fashion and they're getting little pieces of what the boys got, but not everything. And the one big one is the women always have to be draped

below the waist. Pants are forbidden. And a woman wearing pants could be subject to arrest. In the middle ages Ages and the Renaissance, they had a crime in England called misrule. So a woman wearing pants would be liable for sexual misrule. And it was assumed that wearing pants meant

that she was also engaged in other morally objectionable behavior just for wearing pants. So this was a big deal. And so it's a big part of masculine privilege to be able to wear this fashion and an insertion of masculine power. Women are always expected to tread this tightrope between being decorative

and therefore attractive to heterosexual men, but also not too attractive or not too sexy or not too wanton and alluring. And so this is just a consistent theme. So being draped below the waist is important because it signals your sexual propriety or chastity, but at the same time, you're supposed to be alluring. And so all these things are going on above the waist

to make the women sexier. It's real weird push-pull there. So that's the one important moment. A second one happens in the late 1700s and it's a moment that some historians describe as the great masculine renunciation. And so the great masculine renunciation. And so the great masculine renunciation is when men start to become unfashionable.

They start to reject fashion. So men used to wear, you know, brocade, jewels, makeup, you know, high ranking, very macho men are wearing makeup, eyelash curler, blush, powdered wigs, the whole works. Love. Yet it's normal masculine fashion for elite men. Sometime in the mid to late 1700s, men throughout Europe, it starts in England and it kind of spreads, start to renounce all of that.

And you get the kind of precursor to the modern suit. It's streamlined, it's sober, it's dark colors, and it's a really important symbolic thing because political ideals are changing. And so rather than societies based on aristocratic privilege, you're getting the enlightenment and the norm of industriousness, sobriety, rationality, that's important.

And so the clothing's starting to match that. Like I'm practical, I'm sober, I don't care about fashion. So this is probably familiar, right? That's the typical masculine ideal now. I don't care about fashion. Then suddenly women are the fashionable ones. And the women have the ruffles and the brocade and the jewels and all the rest of it.

So they're still in one sense kind of trailing behind in the sense that the modernized fashion is now this masculine fashion that's redescribed as not fashion at all, but just being well dressed. And the women are frivolous and fashionable and silly. You mentioned that, you know, at one one point if a woman was wearing pants she could go to jail.

When did like I feel like now we can wear I mean in America we can kind of wear whatever like there's there's really no laws. I mean yeah you might have dress codes at school but I feel like now it's that it is so vastly different. It's like We have so much freedom, you know now we can wear anything. So I'm curious about how we got from Such extreme to such extreme, you know, like it which is amazing. Happy to be here now, but it's it's There must be a lot that happened in between there. Yes, there, so several things happened. Back, you know, if we go back to the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, there were all kinds of laws about what people could wear. Some historians

call them sumptuary laws and they had to do with who could wear fine elaborate clothing. It was regulated according to social rank. So you had to be of a particular aristocratic status in order to wear certain things so that people would know on site what part of society you belonged in and you know, then those kinds of sumptuary laws start to go by the wayside. So, you know, by the 1700s, there's not much of that left, but you still have laws about public indecency. And so those kind of pick up as the strong legal prohibitions where the women wearing pants, you know, all the way up through the early 20th century would be considered indecently dressed and therefore subject to arrest for that.

Mm-hmm. Even though there are no comprehensive dress codes. Those kind of laws continue until the 60s and 70s. And in the 1970s, you start to get a lot of pushback against that based on changing norms about personal expression, changing gender norms. There's a lot of interesting cases involving people who were, what they called back then, cross-dressing.

So, wearing clothing not pertaining to their gender. And they would challenge those laws as a violation of the right to freedom of expression, and as vague. What counts as male and female gender in terms of clothing. I don't understand what you're talking about. So those cases started to break down enforcement

of public indecency laws. So at this point, they're pretty rarely enforced. They're still on the books. And there are still cases where these laws are enforced. You get a sagging pants, the kind of that hip hop style. They're still on the books. And there are still cases where these laws are enforced. Sagging pants, the kind of that hip hop style. I mean, there's some cities that are still enforcing bans against those as either public indecency

because you're showing your undergarments, they passed new ordinances banning that kind of fashion. So they're still out there, but you're right, for the most part, we're kind of past that. What do you think about, for example, that rule against saddened pants? That one specifically, let's just dig into that for one second, do you think that showing,

say, undergarments is wrong? No, I don't. And I mean, a few things about that. I think that when that started, it was new and shocking and new uses of fashion are often met with moral disapproval. Always. So, oh my God, she's wearing her underwear.

But there was a time in which a t-shirt would be considered underwear and scandalous to wear. So there's that. Certainly this was racially targeted. I mean, there's really no doubt that the targeting of the sagging pants in particular was about young African American men who were also considered to be a social threat in other ways,

and that's why that was targeted. So there are a lot of problems with that. Yeah, with those kinds of laws. It must be a very challenging battle to fight when there are say these sort of dress codes that are targeted but maybe they're not blatantly targeted. It's a sneaky way of targeting because they're not blatantly targeted. It's a sneaky way of targeting, because it's not blatant.

Like there are certain things that I think are blatant. For example, like, you know, there are certain hairstyles that say, you know, are traditional to, you know, whereas say sagging pants, it's like, that might be a trend within a community, but it's like, it's something that maybe everyone, it's challenging to navigate, when it's not something that's obvious on paper.

Like, do you see what I'm saying? That's what's so challenging. When it's like, yeah, but anyone can sag their pants. I guess, it's like how how has that been thought? Yeah yeah absolutely when some of these sagging pants bans and the criticism and you know during the 1990s 1980s and 1990s the criticism was ferocious and you know everyone for a while is talking about sagging pants politicians you know running for, all kinds of people,

talking about sagging pants, like there weren't more important issues to deal with. But it was, and people of all races, by the way, which gets to your point about it being challenging to confront this, because you'd have a lot of black people saying, yeah, they're sagging pants, they're terrible, we've gotta do something about that. So then how can you say it's racist?

And I think over time, often what happens is a new style becomes mainstream because it's seen often enough in enough different contexts that people begin to get comfortable with it. So when you first have the sagging pants, the immediate association of most people is these are black gangsters who are also up to no good in a lot of other ways, and this just is the symbol of all those bad things. And then over time, people get more

comfortable with, for instance, hip hop. Hip hop goes mainstream. The style starts to spread. You get athletes wearing it. You get people of different races wearing it. And after a while, everyone starts to understand that this is just another style.

And it's not a symbol of a social menace. But I think people have to get used to seeing it in a lot of different places first. And it's really hard to fight that idea when it first appears that, you know, oh my God, this is actually something that's quite threatening. There's so many different sort of dress codes

for different things. Like there's dress codes for work and then there's dress codes for school and then there's dress codes for school and then for going out to a party and then for hanging out with friends and then even pajamas. Like there are so many different sort of mini little dress codes that are peppered into

our day to day life. Do you foresee sort of different informal dress codes changing in the future? Like and in what ways do you, would you predict? Oh, that's tough. Okay, so. I know, I mean, it's impossible, I know. So the easy part is, I definitely,

there will be informal dress codes in the future. I have no doubt about that. I do not think we will live to see the day when it really doesn't matter what you're wearing. Yeah. I think people will care about it, and there will be lots of informal expectations and they will be informally but powerfully enforced.

Now what exactly that's going to look like is trickier. You know, I mean, one thing, you could kind of begin to parse the symbolism of certain types of clothing by looking at norms in the past and how things have evolved. So for instance, this kind of a jacket is called the sport jacket because it used to be worn for sports. And so there's a pretty consistent historical trend over hundreds of years of clothing that was once sporting clothing later becoming

You know business attire and I think we still see that today. Yeah, so that like investment bankers who used to have a You know suit and tie dress code until very very recently Now there's no dress code in most of these banks, but they've all gravitated towards something called the Midtown uniform. I don't know if there's an Instagram page. I don't know if you've seen it,

but it's a Patagonia fleece and a button down collar. They all wear exactly the same thing. They're everywhere in Palo Alto. Yeah, everywhere. That uniform is everywhere, yes. Right, there's no dress code. They're all wearing exactly the same thing. That's true, it is interesting how humans just,

we like to feel like a part of a community. And I think that the whole Patagonia vest and that whole uniform is, it's no more like effective than a north face vest, but it is, that is the uniform. It's interesting that you say that you never can imagine, like you don't think there'll ever be a time where it doesn't matter what we're wearing. And that tells me that it's because it holds more value than I think we think it does. Historically, what is like the through line?

Why is it so powerful? Like why? Because it just shouldn't be that big of a deal when you really break it down. It's like you're just staying warm, covering up your, like why does it matter so much? Yeah, I think it matters because clothing, at least since this moment that I described

as the birth of fashion, when tailoring really takes off, it becomes a way in one sense to transform the human body. And this was really clear in the, let's say, in Tudor-era England when Queen Elizabeth I would wear these magnificent gowns and they were architectural, you know, they had shoulders that were sculpted and skirts that were built out. And a lot of the fashion in that period of time

for both men and women had these characteristics, if you were in the elite. And people commented that she looked other worldly, she looked super human. And that power of fashion, I think, has never gone away. So there's that, and then fashion allows us to immediately make associations with other periods of history, other people, other groups,

so you can communicate an enormous amount in a split second by what you're wearing including communicating things that you wouldn't want to say out loud. So fashion lets you do all of that. It's and I think that's why it's extremely powerful and as long as we are embodied flesh and blood human beings you know until we can upload our consciousness into the cloud or something, that's gonna matter. Yep, it's so true. Do you think it's important for people to pay attention to fashion or do you think it's sort of, like, do you think it's optional? I think it's not optional when we speak of fashion

in the broadest sense. So when we're talking about, do you care what you're wearing? I don't think that's optional. And I think people who say that they don't care are not self-aware or not being honest. I'm sorry, some people would be upset at me for saying that but I don't I don't buy it Yeah, I think that they may dress to look as if they don't care about fashion

Yeah, and that is that is also a choice exactly. Wow, that's a great point. For example, like Mark Zuckerberg wears a great t-shirt you know really famous example and Yeah, people would say, you know, come on, fashion doesn't matter, look, you know, the CEO of a billion dollar, multi-billion dollar corporation just wears a gray t-shirt. But when you hear what he says about why,

he said something like this, it's not a direct quote, but I wear this gray t-shirt because if I wasted my time thinking about trivial things like fashion, I wouldn't have time to do my job to be the best CEO of Facebook and I would devote all my time to that. So what's the great t-shirt now? Is it a matter of indifference? No, it's a symbol of the work ethic.

And so if you're not wearing a great t-shirt, if you look like you care about fashion, that suggests you're wasting your time on trivial things when you should be working. And people actually said that. So when the, she was then the CEO of Yahoo! Marissa Mayer got a Vogue fashion spread. She's a fashionable young woman,

and of course she's gonna do it, it's lots of fun. People in Silicon Valley said, look at her, she looks like she's going to a party or on vacation while everyone else is working. So people do care. Yeah. You know, and there's just another, it's like an inverted dress code at this point. If you look like you care. Now that's a problem.

Yep. What would you say to people who get really, like I'm remembering even like Miley Cyrus for example, when she came out and all of a sudden she's like, you know, wearing really revealing clothes and like, you know, whatever and everybody was up in arms like as though she killed their family. What are your thoughts on that? Like what, people get really just angry about what other people wear number one why do you think that is number two is that healthy or no I think I think it's no but I want to hear you elaborate I think it's often unhealthy

and I would say I think it, sometimes it's inevitable and sometimes people, you know, dress in order to provoke a response and then it's not surprising that they are successful in doing that. But I think that often it's unhealthy, particularly when it's directed at women. So I'm gonna come back to this point about the way women are forced into catch 22s around their attire constantly and, um, criticized no matter what they do.

And so I think a lot of women, when they dress in a way that might be considered provocative are trying in an odd way to take control of the gender norms around clothing. You know that they've lived their lives being pushed and pulled in these directions. You know either you're too frumpy or you're too sexy, your outfits boring or it's slutty. It's back and forth. And they're just like, you know, I'm just gonna wear something where there's just no argument about it. And call me what you want.

Do you think that it works? That's a hard one, yeah. I think it can work for some women if they are ready for the reactions, but I do think that often it doesn't work because you don't opt out of the judgment. I mean that's. Well it's also not for you at the end of the day.

Yeah. It's still not for you. Right. You know, right? It's like, I think that that's what's so unfortunate about is that it's like, it's almost like, you know, you can't win, right? Because it's like, if you're like, you know what,

this is like an, I wanna empower myself, so I'm gonna go ahead and do this. But then, that doesn't do it either. It's almost like, I think I think ultimately to set yourself free, and maybe it's not this simple, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts. It's like maybe to set yourself free, you have to do something that's just completely

a reflection of your personality, whatever that is. So it can't, it not any extreme necessarily, but it must just be the truest representation of you. So it's like if somebody's dressing as an act of rebellion, but then they're like, oh this doesn't even feel like me, then it doesn't work. It's almost like the biggest act of rebellion is to dress however what is the most truly you maybe? I don't know. Yeah it's so I hear what you're saying about how... It's like there's nowhere to win. Right that you're reacting so if you're reacting to something that you're

not in control you're you're now in a responsive posture to some other thing patriarchy whatever the male gaze all all of that. And I do think people are often buffeted back and forth by that kind of thing. I mean, I would love it if there were a way for people to dress only for themselves, but I have to say I'm skeptical that that's possible. I think- I agree. Yeah, I completely agree. I think one is always dressing for other people and to communicate something and maybe the only, to the extent it's a solution,

solution is to recognize that and decide what you wanna say, decide what you wanna communicate with your clothing. Now that doesn't solve, that doesn't help women out of the Catch-22. And I think that's a matter honestly of political activism. I mean, that's a case where there needs to be sustained pushback against unfair gender gender expectations around clothing. What do you think about sort of the way that we're consuming fashion today

compared to how we used to consume fashion, you know, a few hundred years ago? I mean it's definitely different. Yeah. Because it used to be like, what, you'd buy a new pair of shoes every five years? I mean, who knows? Like, how is it, how is the way that we consume clothes different back then versus today? I mean, I think it's obvious, but I'm curious the sort of details of that.

For a long period of time, any fashionable clothing was custom-made and therefore very expensive and only available to the elite or people with lots of money. So you get mass-produced clothing in the 1800s. The Brooks Brothers suit is one of the first examples of mass produced clothing. So now you're not going to the tailor and having something made. You can buy it in a catalog.

It's cheaper. Europeans commented on the way Americans were also well dressed. Because this was the first country where you had this mass produced cheap clothing. Everywhere, everyone's wearing a nice waistcoat. So one person said a mob in the United States is a mob and silk waistcoats Yeah

Because the rabble can afford this shoes are still really expensive So you mentioned shoes and that's where you look like the term well well-heeled Comes from because you know, you're rich if you've got nice shoes that those weren't easily mass-produced And so our real disposable attitude toward clothing, I think it's pretty recent. That disposable attitude for everybody as opposed to just the very, very wealthy, fashionable set who would have a new,

follow the new spring fashions and would have you, but it's a tiny sliver of the population. Now, almost everybody can do that if they go to some fast fashion store where they're copying the high fashion clothing at a very low price point. And as to how I feel about it, there's a lot of waste involved. It's not great for the environment.

In fact, the fashion industry is one of the larger contributors for the environment. In fact, the fashion industry is one of the larger contributors to environmental pollution and degradation. And the labor practices used in some of this cheap clothing are appalling. So there's an argument that it would be better both in terms of social justice and in terms of environmental health if we had a different attitude toward fashion where we kept things longer.

I know, I'm so about that right now where I'm like, buy one really good thing instead of five really shitty things. Go in like, you know, and make it a part of your uniform in a way and like, you know, have fun with accessorizing and like do other things I because I I was such a Consumer, you know, I was like, oh, I love fashion. I need to have everything. This is the cheaper option like in high school I was ordering fast fashion stuff all the time. I you know, then eventually I found

thrift shopping and I was like this is actually more fun and then Because thrifting was not cool when I was little. And then now, going to the thrift store is like, cool. Isn't that wild? Yeah. It was not that way when I was a kid. I actually do think it's kind of cool though that now it almost feels like fashion is less about, it's about having a cool outfit, period. People are less concerned about what brand is this what brand is that it is more about at least with Gen Z like I don't know it's more about like just wearing a cool outfit because thrifting is cool it's almost like a weapon now to be like I thrifted this you know so it's

interesting to see that it's becoming almost in some ways more of something to brag about when you got something for a deal and it's cool and I still look cooler than you. That's the flex now. But maybe that's just a smaller, because I still do think that the big designer brands and all these expensive sorts of things still have societal impact. But maybe we're going in a direction where it's lessening a little bit. I also think it's lessening a little bit because there's a lot of fake designer that looks pretty real. So it's like, how is anyone to know?

Do you think that designer things have less of a sort of importance now? Yeah, I think this is something that the big fashion brands are really worried about. Yeah, I know. And they're spending a lot of money on lawyers to stop these fakes from circulating. Yeah, I know, I don't know how that's gonna work out.

Yeah, you know, but they are worried about it and it's interesting that some of the fakes are so, some of them are so good they're indistinguishable from the real thing, even if you take it apart. Some of them are made in the same factories. So it actually is identical. It's just that the factory ran off some extra ones after they made the things for the brands.

So it's an issue. And I still think the fashion brands have got a lot of cultural clout. And it's interesting how they navigate that. So I'm thinking of Gucci and their collaboration with Dapper Dan. I don't know, do you remember? So Dapper Dan during the 80s and 90s was the hip hop tailor up in Harlem who made clothing for artists like Eric B and Rakam and Salt and Pepper. And they were, he used fake Gucci and fake Louis Vuitton fabrics to make these jackets and suits and clothing

and these really cool stuff. And they sued him. Of course they did. They sued him for trademark infringement and they put him out of business. But now he's collaborating with Gucci. And so it's kind of come back full circle in this. So wild.

So they're trying to figure out, now they realize this stuff was cooler than most of the stuff that we put out officially. Totally. And we wanna be associated with it. It's always been true that part of the status of fashion has been about the expense and part of it has been about savoir faire.

What do you know? Do you know what to wear when? You know what's appropriate? Back in the day, it was all about the appropriateness of clothing so that you would know that someone was from the wrong social class, if she wore diamonds to a garden party, because a truly elegant woman would never wear diamonds

except to the theater or at night, and she'd know to wear something else. So there's this kind of thing. But I think your thrifting example to go back to that, it's still got a little element of that without all the class snobbery where what's cool is to know how to put together a cool outfit, not just to have enough money to go and buy out the Gucci boutique. Yep. It's almost like, that's what I do love about sort of that section of like fashion right now is it is more about do you know how to put something together that's cool and feels

different because it's so saturated and everyone's wearing the same thing. It's almost more about having something that no one else has than it is about, at least in some corners of the fashion world. But yeah, it's more about that than it is about having the hottest new designer bag because it's like anyone can get that. Whereas not just anyone can find this random Betsy Johnson pair of heels from 1996. Like you just, like only you have those and that's almost a currency of its own. What is sort of your wish for the world when it comes to our human relationship to fashion?

Where would you like to see it change and evolve? And what does that look like? And it can also be like, I know that this needs to change, I don't know how, but just anything. The answer can be whatever you want the answer to be, but I'm just curious what a bright future looks like in your eyes. to see a world where people can dress in the way that empowers them. And I know understanding that you've got to navigate and it's a social relationship. You know fashion is a relationship with other people so it's not all about the

individual but where dress codes and expectations and norms around fashion that are designed to produce hierarchies that are designed to reinforce class snobbery that are designed to put women on that catch 22 treadmill are, those are gone. And what's left is a landscape in which people can use clothing in order to, you know, express themselves, their connections with other people in a variety of ways. I don't want to say any way they see fit, because that's not realistic. But there are a variety of ways where people can find a way to be comfortable, and I'll throw in sustainability,

so maybe better clothing, but less of it. Yeah, ops, took the words out of my mouth. This was amazing, thank you so much. Thank you. Oh my God, I learned so much today. I learned so much. That's great, this was really fun. This was awesome.