Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for tuning in. Let's hear it for the man, the myth Legend super producer, mister Max Williams. Look, guys, this is in media arrests. We're coming to you right at the halfway point of a fascinating conversation with none other than our goodpal aj Bahamas Jacobs.
Indeed, why don't we just join the conversation already in progress.
We're building out this concept, this ancient idea of headdress, right visual signification of something like success or authority, what we would call a modern parlance, a flex, and that leads us to one thing we have to get to before we travel further down the body of ridiculous fashion trends. Toll wigs like big big old wigs big old.
In fact, the phrase big wig is derived from the fact that people who had who were higher on the socioeconomic scale, had the big the bigger the wig, the bigger the bank account. I guess so yes. But the wigs were also incredibly vertical and reached heights of four feet. And this I'd say, the height of yeah, this is I mean, it was especially crazy during the lead up to the French Revolution. The famous Marie Antoinette, she was kind of the They would have these wigs that were
made of wire. You needed wire because they were so big, but you needed horse hair and human hair, beef fat to keep it all in play, hollows maybe a little talely, yeah, delicious. You had powder like powder from wheat and white rice. And this, by the way, was when the peasants were starving, so this was not very beloved when uh, you know, she's using food in her wig instead of in their stomach. But these they became crazy tall. It was sort of like a you know, like the arms race, who can
get the highest who? And they were so tall they would have to stick their heads out the window of the carriage. They would have to be very careful chandeliers. People's head caught on fire. And they had not just the hair, but they had all sorts of things in them. They had feathers, flowers, taxidermied birds. To go back to our first hat shop. Nothing a battleship, a replica replica of a French battleship. Marie Antoinette was famous for that.
Uh.
And of course a lot of insects because you had the beef tallow and it was just the delicious.
So the insects a non consensual ornamentation.
That's right.
They were meant to be there, but they added to the fun.
And gosh, I love your locust contessa. Yeah, I love you. I love your cat.
Your hair is moving around so interesting, so active.
Yeah.
But yes, so this literally was one of the complaints that led to the French Revolution. People didn't have anything to eat. I mean, this is I guess the Lady Gaga and her meat dress really would have pissed them off.
Oh gosh, this idea.
Of these ridiculously tall wigs were just such an obvious status marker that would enrage the lower class. And they paid for it. They paid for it, they sure did.
Yeah, someone took something off the top.
Right, exactly more than just.
A wig, more than just a wig, right. And this leads us to I think another another important trend that we have to talk about. I was speaking years ago with a friend of ours, good friend of the show Holly Fry from Stuff You Missed in History class, and in our conversation we noted that quite a few of the fashion trends, regardless where they lay on the spectrum, Quite a few of the fashion trend for women and female identifying people were incredibly painful and inconvenient and literally
bad for you. Like a far example of that would be footbinding. But there's a lot more to that.
Store, just corsets and all of that stuff just constricting your movements and just like the idea of suffering for fashion, you know.
Yeah, well, Court, let's dive into corsets. And I will say, for my year of living constitutionally, I tried to dress the part, so I had to wear the hat, which was not so bad. Socks were kind of a pain in the ass or painted like because they didn't have elastic, so you had to wear these little sock belts. And so the amount of time I spent putting on sock belts,
I'll never get that back. But I had it easy because my wife was nice enough that she occasionally dressed up and she had to put on these stays, which were sort of proto corsets, and she hated them. I mean, who wouldn't. They are, like, you know, they're constricting, They're like boa constrictors around your waist and some of these corsets, it was a trend that was around in the seventeen hundreds eighteen hundreds, and they just got more and more
constricting and unpleasant. They were made from all sorts of horrible things like whalebone and metal, and by the end they would squeeze the woman's waist to thirteen inches around. That is crazy, Like I'm doing my fing It's like an eggo waffle and yea, it is just disturbing. Now. Thankfully, not everyone was like, oh, this is wonderful. You had a lot of backlash from sort of proto feminists, early feminists, and also doctors who said it was dangerous and newspaper people.
Eighteen ninety one, the Chicago Tribune said the tight lacing has produced generations of invalids and bequeathed to posterity suffering that will not vanish for many decades. Generational suffering.
That's what I'll not pass from the earth exactly.
It could impede just basic day to day function when you get down to thirteen inches in diameter, that's just people don't walk away from that, you know it now, even after you take off the corset.
Super painful and you would have to wear increasingly small coursets until you got to that size, and you'd have people pulling. You've seen in the old movies, people pulling on the.
Store, the foot of the lower back of the second person helping you strap it up.
I mean that was real. That was real, and I one of the there were all these dress reform movements. One in the French Revolution, rational dress, they called it. Another in Victorian times you might have heard of bloomers bloomers, so bloomers were part of the rational dress movement where women were trying to find and bloomers were original. Is sort of like hammer pants for women, like the parachute pants, parachute pants basically, and they were mocked relentlessly by the press,
so they never really caught on. But that was just one of the ways that they were trying to fight this this corporal punishment that women were like, and not just during the day, they'd have to wear them at night so that they would train their waste.
That's just it's okay.
It sounds crazy and intensely disturbing for a lot of us listening along in twenty twenty five. We do know, however, that again this was not the only painful thing people subjected themselves to in the in the chase of being
the most fashionable one. Look, I don't know how painful these are, ag but one thing a lot lot of people in the US remember from their grade school history days is that whatever you saw a picture of a fancy or important person in Elizabethan times, unless they were a member of a church or like a religious official,
they had an inexplicable rough like a white collar. They just like went around like somebody took a pin a cupcake wrapper and just pop them in so that their head looked like the cupcake.
I love that description. Yeah, I often think they remind me of what my dog had to wear after getting Now I will say, I just want to make one note in general, which is that from our point of view, a lot of these fashion trends are ridiculous, and some are genuinely harmful, like the corset. But I do want
like to do a mental experiment. Imagine someone in the future is like in school if they still have those reading about twentieth or twenty first century American fashion, and they would read about how these men would spend hundreds of dollars a year on this thin strip of colored cloth that hung around the neck and required elaborate loops, serve no purpose.
A crevass.
You say it is a cravas. We're a necktie, right, So yeah, we shouldn't be two cock I mean our or crocs. Can you imagine what people will say about crocs. I love crocs. I know that that's a functional shoe.
It's it.
I wear it. I wear Camo ones, so I look really cool and military.
I love this point because a little while back, fascinated by the same thing that you're mentioning there, we did a ridiculous history episode on the evolution of the necktie.
Oh and like so.
Many things, it began with function, basic function. Yeah it was it was military dress, right, But then aristocrats of well to do people may have seen some of that military dress. That boy is like a functional scarf, you know what I mean, right, And then they said let's all start doing that, and it just accelerated. And now in certain I love that you mentioned this. In certain
aspects of us or Western society. Even today, if you go to a place above a certain social echalon, you have to not only practice this weird conspiracy of neckties, but you have to have specific ones like Noel saying a cravat or you know, a tuxedo party, a black and white party, and if you don't participate in the silliness, then you're not at the top.
Now, wait, what is a cravat versus a necktie? I'm not sure. I know.
Well, it's really good. I would say it goes down more to the knot like a cravat is going to be a little more loosely nodded.
Interesting, Oh yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, and then you got the you know, the windsor and whatnot for your typical day trader tie.
Right, And one other tie question was was there any truth to that it was a napkin?
At one point I would say.
I would say there is, from what we found in our research, there is robbable partial truth to that because the military members that were wearing these as scarves when they're in the field, they're using it as a catch all things sort of like the the towel in Douglas Adams works, you know what I mean, So they always
have you know, they have a washcloth. Now they can maybe try to strain water, stop wounds, and then if they're eating, you know, clean their faces up because they were probably they were probably beardy, right, who has time to shave?
Well, I love that. I mean now I think it's actually very useful because it's you can't lose it. You can't lose the tie. So if we go back to using it as a napkin and a towel, then maybe that would make sense. But anyway, you did bring up these crazy white collars that they had in Elizabethan times.
Which were not napkins.
They were not napkins. They were purely ornamental, although I imagine they did catch food so you could like save them for later. But they were like they were called ruffs, and the biggest ones where they made of six yards of cloth, that's a lot of cloth, and they would they would fold them in these little pleats up to six hundred pleats. They would go out like eight inches from your neck and they were just absolutely absurd and even people at the time thought that they were absurd,
and including religious people. Preachers called them the tools of Satan. One preacher, one preacher said, the devil, in the fullness of his malice first and invented ruffs. So yeah, and they were sort of again a class distinguisher. The richer you were, the bigger, you're rough, and they were banned. The Puritans hated them, of course, but they were also banned by King Philip of Spain, who was trying to reduce the power of the nobles. There were colored ruffs
that were very controversial. There was a famous woman who was convicted of murder in sixteen thirteen and she was alleged to have invented the yellow ruff, which was like even more offensive than the white ruff.
Can I just say that I'm a little bit of a conundrum. I am afraid of birds, but I have in the last year or two become very fond of the board game Wingspan, which is a bird based strategy game and it's a lot of fun. Highly recommend it. But there are these cards that are different birds and tells you little details about them. And there is a bird called a rouff. And the question occurred to me
that has this plumy thing around its neck. What came first, the rough the bird or the rough the fashion trend? And I'm trying to figure that out. And the Internet is very confused about this, and the one Guardian article that seems to fully go into it is behind a paywall and I can't get to it, so we'll just have to chicken or the egg that for now.
So to speak, to use a bird metaphor. Indeed, nicely done. Well, that is fast, and I have heard great things about that game. I actually bought it and I spent like two hours reading the instructions and I still don't know how to play.
One is just when you get down, when you get over this way, or when we're up that way, let's just make it night, all right.
Absolutely.
I have the expansion, the Eastern European Expansion with the nectar and everything. It is one of those games AJ where it has quite the learning curve, but once you push yourself over it, it is so rewarding in such a zen lovely game. And it's a less of a competitive game and more of like a kind of let's all just hang out and be part of this ecosystem together kind of game.
Love it. Yeah, I've heard you. I've heard it from many, including people who actually do like birds.
Imagine how much they like it as Yeah, yeah, all about it. We Also, I have one question, going back to what we were saying AJ about ruffs. Does it not a question for the group. Am I a dummy for Like the first time I saw a rouff, I assumed it looked like there was a connecting piece that would go over it. I didn't think it would be possible for people to wear just this gaudy circle of fabric without you know, some other like.
Attachment, like like a space helmet.
Like a space helmet. Yes, just so anachronisms society. That's kind of what I was thinking. I was like, maybe a plague helmet or something. You know, maybe they just want to look ready. But as we have learned, and as your research shows, this was entirely to end Kate's status.
This was not functional, and you did you did need wires, like it couldn't just maybe that's the prob It couldn't just hold its shape by itself like the wigs, like some of the huge crazy dresses. They needed metal support.
Absolutely, okay, all right, And I love the tools of Satan. I love how it sounds like one Satan is real and then two was having like a slow week. It was kind of just sort of out of ideas at four point thirty on a Friday, and said no silly collars. That's why silly collars is the new malice, torture.
You've got murder and these big collars. I do love what they condemned as satanic. I remember doing a history of utensils, like eating utensils and the forks. I remember where the Puritans they hated the forks as the tool of the devil. Again, the devil.
So it's just like knife, spoon, hand.
Yeah, like God gave you hands for a reason. That was his argument in the sermon, God gave you hands. I guess he liked Ethiopian food.
There we go, Yeah, I get.
Some TIBs and so what's that amazing bread in Jira?
Oh yeah, I don't remember the name.
That's the you know, like the yeah, oh man, we should go to an Ethiopian restaurant and then play wingspan.
That's what God wants us to do.
It's what God wants us to do. And as we are further exploring ridiculous clothing trends of yesteryear, we're moving down the body and then we're going to something that remains a hot button issue for a lot of people today. Shoes like hats can wax and wane in the world of fashion rights. As you noted and anybody, any cinophile can see in you know, like the Golden Age of Hollywood and you know, other earlier iterations of fashion. It
was common for guys to wear hats. It was considered kind of low and working class if you didn't have a hat. But no matter how ephemeral fashion can seem, people always need shoes, right, most of the time.
You need shoes, absolutely, and those shoes can become ridiculous. To use an appropriate word, they can get they can.
We invented that word. We coined it.
Can you believe it nicely done? I've I've been found it very useful. Yeah, either in height or in length, these shoes seem to have grown in different ways. Height Wise, there were the probably the height no pun intended of the he was the chopines. I believe I'm prodicing that correctly. So this was around Shakespeare's time, sixteenth century. It was in Europe, especially Italy, and these were women's shoes that were elevated. And if you go and google the images,
they're hilarious because they grew and grew and grew. Originally it was to keep the shoes out of the mud, and they would have these little platforms of wood, but they grew to be like almost two feet tall, like twenty inches. They were like stilts. They were wood and cork and velvet, and these women were walking on stilts and they needed a cane or they needed a servant, because you can't just walk around on two foot tall stilts unless you're a circus performer. And they led to
a lot of of course, injuries and spills. They were mocked by Shakespeare himself who said in Hamlet, he said that the shopine was near made women near to heaven altitude of the chopine, which is sort of like the higher the hair, the closer to God, sort of that. And eventually they caused a backlash as well. The Puritans, of course, hated them tools of the devil.
Think, hang, I'm going to stop us here real quick, because from what you're describing about these Puritan folks, they.
Seem kind of uncool, not great.
Or like very strict.
They are tough, Yes, they have their pros and cons. I probably wouldn't want to be a Puritan, but uh.
Because you're so you're super into forks, right, it's just love it.
And I love high heels and ruffs. But yeah, I mean the good part is they were very against the corruption of the Church of England and all of that, so they had that going for them. They didn't like, uh, or at least some of them hated monarchy. I'm not a big fan of manarchy, so you know, everyone has their pros and cons, but I probably would not want to party with them on a Saturday night.
Yeah, yeah, I think they probably also would find parties as a concept ungodly and evil.
But then you know, yeah, there are.
Strong reasons to object to monarchies. We're with you on that one. Just as a concept, it's a weird idea. And this leads us to one of the most glamorous, one of the most diva esque, one of the most extra monarchs in European history, a guy humbly called Louis, Yes.
King Louis the fourteenth. He was the Sun King, right, wasn't that him? He was self.
Proclaimed super humble dude, super right.
Super humble, and one example of his humility is that he didn't want anyone taller than him. He didn't want no one could wear heels that were higher than his heels, and also red heels. He was banned those for some reason. It reminds me of Actually there was a friend of mine.
I've never been to this party, but apparently a friend of mine threw a party where everyone was required to be the same height, so you sent in your height before the party, and he would provide these little platform stilt shoes so that everyone was the same eye level with the tallest person. I love that idea. I think that's really interesting. How would that change social dynamics? But King Louis the fourteenth would not throw or attend that party.
That's my point. That's why I brought it up. It just seems so.
It seems so unnecessarily weird to say, Like, imagine if you were the president of a country and you say, I like Air Jordan's and no one else can have them, you know what I mean? Like, that's bad for the Nike company, This is weird for the folks making the cobblers, making King Louis shoes. And it sounds like, again, as you maintained earlier, there are some reasons that the French revolted.
Right, And there's a hole that actually is a phrase called sumptuary laws, which you've probably heard of. Yeah, the laws that ban certain clothes and sometimes there because they it's a religious band, so that you don't look to you don't look you're not too much like a peacock,
you have humility. But sometimes it's the powerful people saying only we can wear these clothes and that you had a lot with the color purple actually was banned in Rome, and I think in England only the nobles were allowed to wear the color purple because yeah, don't want these peasants to upstage you with their colorful fashion.
Yeah, and there is I hate the devil's advocate here, but we could argue in sumptuary laws back in that time, we could argue that there was a serious state concern that people dressed a certain way might be able to impersonate an authority figure.
Right there you go.
So there's a feels so weird to defend what I think is just a cartoonish policy. But maybe maybe that was it because not everybody had the internet, right okay, sorry, fact check us. Before the email, no one had the internet technically the truth, they just had the town crier. They had the town crier. That's an excellent point. Yeah, they had the guy who would run out and say, some.
People are wearing purple.
I picture I picture the town crier always, you know, I I know we all have this this trope of some guy going here, ye hear ye, But I always like to think of the town crier as just like a grizzled early nineteen eighties comedian.
You know, he's in the South Square. He's like, stand up, that's it's really true.
Be here, Max. He's like, USh, what else? Okay? Check this scroll? And he's like, yeah, the plague.
Huh?
You ever noticed that the play? You haven't noticed. That's a great point. They were the first stand up comedians.
Love it.
I mean, they probably had a high turnover rate depending on their material.
But we do know.
These sumptuary laws are are things that can be found continuing in some places today. Sometimes there might be a hard law against it, but then I would argue often we talked Nolan, I talked about this a little bit
a while a while ago. Often they're these sort of social agreements that are not legally enforceable on what is or is not considered a costume versus regular clothing, Like we're wearing tricorn hats now, and if we got together and we walked out to you know, just go hang out in a public park, people would assume that we are having a party with a theme, or that we are like filming a music video or something. So do you see sumptuary laws continuing into the future.
Well, first of all, that's a great point. I am very grateful for my tricorn hat because as part of my year of living constitutionally, I also bore a musket. And if I had borne a musket without my hat, I think I would have been arrested and throwned. But people were like, oh, he's just dressing up. Well I think, however, you define saw.
The gun and then they saw the hat, and the cops said, ah.
Let's keep going.
Exactly, I would say, I mean there, as you said, there's always going to be laws about what people can and cannot wear, Like you can't you can't just go out and wear you know, nothing, for instance, even in modern day America, that's uh, there are laws against that, obscenity laws, and they're probably it's sort of like the First Amendment. There there's gonna be exceptions. There's always going
to be exceptions. And although I will say that was the final chapter in our history of ridiculous clothing, is just that no clothing at all. Yeah, the naturist movement to be a little more what they like to call themselves. But I was fascinated and I only learned this while researching the First Amendment. But one of the big cases of First Amendment rights, and this was when the ACLU was just starting, was nudism. There were all these people in New York City who were nudists, and they weren't
hippie dippy. They were in fact, they were more Marxists. They were socialists, and they believed that clothing was an oppressive capitalists conspiracy because.
I could get behind that agree. You know.
Well, they said, you know, the rich people can afford clothing and differentiate themselves. So the solution is get rid of clothes. That's the solution. And the ACLU went all in and supported them in there in several court cases in favor of nudism. So that is and I think that still remains something that they're case built.
You know. I think that it's such an interesting kind of protest because it represents a lot of things, Like, on the one hand, it seems to be a strike against kind of puritanical ideas and sort of body shaming notions and the idea of like, you know, our naked human forms being somehow unclean or you know, against God or whatever, even though you know God supposedly, if he exists,
created this, why is this such a horrible thing? So I think that's interesting because it's striking out against sort of oppressive fashion notions and the idea of only being considered an active member or a I guess, upstanding member of society if you dress the part. But it also strikes out against this idea of like our bodies being something to be ashamed of. I mean, maybe I'm overthinking it, but I know it's interesting.
I mean, it's variant, and in fact, this swayed me more towards the side of nudism. In the nineteen thirties, the Nazis in Germany went on a campaign against nudism because it threatened the morality of the voke and it deadened women's natural feelings of shame that nice, and destroyed men's respect for women. So uh, And they wanted to destroy it because it was sort of a socialist Marxist movement. But listen, if the Nazis were against it, maybe there's something to it.
I think that's true.
Nazis are against it in general. I think we should be for it. It'll call me bias, but I don't think they were great. Uh. This also, this is something that we can all learn more about in Aj Bahamas Jacob's newest book, The Year of Living Naked.
Right, that's it exactly, I'm doing it now. Let me take off my shirt.
Constitution Year of Living Naked. Incredible, incredible.
I hope you do most of your research in the summer, right, just for weather purposes.
That's true. Mann's a lot. Well, that's why I'll be visiting Atlanta a lot.
Yes, please do.
And in the meantime, Aj, this is likely going to be a two part series. We cannot thank you enough for joining us on Ridiculous history this week. One of the big themes that you taught us this week that we can all agree on is that fashion is a conversation, and perhaps the most important point is that we must be hesitant to dunk on fashion of yesteryear too hard, because history proves we're about ten days or ten years away from all the stuff we like being made fun of on shows like.
This exactly, and maybe not even like crocs. For instance, you were. I think people are mocking it even as we speak. But yeah, no, listen, I love being on your show no matter what I'm wearing, whether it's or if I'm wearing nothing at all, you provide such a delight full product. Can I call it a product?
For a podcast product?
I love that it's a cork and can I just say I think I said this off Mike, but you make Thursday feel like Friday, A friend.
My goodness, that is well, thank god it's Thursday. I'm sure right t G.
I t a prodcast uh a j before we before you hop out for further adventures. Where can people learn more about your work?
Well, there's the Puddler podcast with guests such as the one Michael and Black. Yes he was one, but but I was mentioning. I was going to mention Ben Bowen, Noel Brown of our favorites.
Flattery will get you somewhere.
But yeah, I'm on. I have website a J Jacobs dot com. Oh, I have a substack. So that's end to me.
What a substack is?
It? Is? It just like a like a gussied up male lists. There we bringing back the nailing list exactly.
It's a newsletter, but just called the substack. And you're supposed if I were a good substacker, I would make people pay for my stuff, and substack doesn't like me because I'm I'm not aggressive enough with my sale. I give it all away for free.
On the contrary, well that makes you an excellent substacker. You're a substacker for the people.
Substacker for the people.
Yeah, like the nudists, I'm a socialist SUBSCT officer.
I'm naked for the people right now.
And weirdly, substack is also a euphemism for the penis.
There you go, There you go.
That's all I got said.
Of course, we can't thank you enough for joining us today. Also big thanks to our super producer mister Max Williams. Big thanks to It's weird because we usually shout you out.
In the credits.
Believe that right now we're so thirsty, So big banks. Also to our our composer Alex Williams, Jonathan Strickland ak the quist or Hey no, it will be interesting to get those guys together.
Can you imagine?
It would open up a black hole time and space, a rifts suck us all into our death. Now I think it would be fun and worth testing because as.
Nice and Jonathan Strickland aka the Quist is.
He's a real grouch. Do like I had just stopped on that. It's okay, it's okay. I'll say it for both of them.
Hughes Taks Chris Frosciotis and he's Jeff Coats, both here in spirit as perty usual. Let's see what you got your buddy, Rachel big Spinach Lance underwater.
That's true, that's true. We need to bring her back. She's so cool. Have you heard about this person?
Aj she's an underwater explosions expert what not that she makes them, but she studies the history of them, and she, I believe wrote a book about the Hunley, the Civil War era submarine and the sinking thereof that Clive Custler was so fascinated with.
No, okay, I'm a real class expert. Yeah, but you've had her on right.
I'm gonna listen one once. And yet we thank her at the end.
Of every episode because the fame got you her. No, No, we're kidding, and also ridiculous historians joined us. Next week we have we have even uh more stuff to check out with you in the meantime, tune into the Puzzler and Noel.
Thanks to you Man, Dang you as well, Buddy. We'll see you next time, folks.
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