The Rest Is History - 158. Killer Fashion

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

How much do you know about the lethal price people have paid over the centuries to look fashionable? In today's episode Tom and Dominic are joined by Dr. Alison Matthews David to discuss the dark secrets behind the history of garments. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producers: Tony Pastor & Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the of course, as ever, is Dominic Sandbrook. And Dominic, you remember in the episode we did on Valentine's Day. Remember it well, Tom. You, of course, bring this amazing expertise on the post office and you talked about how the invention of basically of the kind of, you know, the penny post revolutionized the sending of Valentine cards because everyone could send them anonymously and all that. Exactly. That and the pillar box, two great

inventions that are underestimated. Well, it set me thinking, which of course you do all the time, but this really set me thinking that in, in so in central london just i should think five minutes walk north of maybe 10 minutes walk north of saint paul's cathedral um there's a statue of roland hill postal reformer the father of the penny post absolutely and it marks a spot where there was that it was the the main post office in victorian time so the mid-19th century and next door to it there's this very sweet very kind of discreet park called Postman's Park. And obviously, and I looked up to check this, it's because all the postmen went there to have a rest after they'd done their rounds. I'm keen to hear where this is going, Tom.

Okay, I'll tell you where it's going. postman's park is the fact that in 1900 the um the artist george frederick watts you know he did kind of great victorian slight you know uh canvases he did burning burning summer i think was it yeah he did but he was very kind of slightly sort of post pre-raphaelite kind of very lush kind of stuff i kind of huge metal statues i think he's got a bronze in hyde park anyway he he set up this wonderful thing that was a memorial to heroic self-sacrifice. And they are kind of little, well, they're little memorials that are on the side of the wall commemorating people who sacrificed themselves saving fellow citizens in Victorian London. And the very first one to appear,

the first one to be mentioned, is Sarah Smith, pantomime artiste at the Prince's Theatre, died of terrible injuries received when attempting, in her inflammable dress, to extinguish the flames which had enveloped her companion, January the 24th, 1863. And the reason that this particularly sticks in my memory is that I saw this and was very, very struck by it. And I mentioned it to my younger daughter, Eliza, who you know well. And she said, oh, well, in that case, you must read this amazing book I've got. She has this incredible library of books about fashion. And this book, she said, absolutely her favourite book.

And it was called Fashion Victims, The Dangers of Dress, Past and Present by Alison Matthews David. And she pressed it on me. And I have to say that her commendation was entirely merited because it is a brilliant book. Well, Tom, I've got a great surprise for you. Oh, yeah? Yeah, you'll be absolutely astounded to find that we have with us right now alison matthews david no joining us from toronto in canada i think our first canadian guest on the well our first canadian based guest we've had canadians before andrew preston of course

but um alison uh tom has been banging on about your book for, I would say, about 18 months. He's very excited about it, as am I, because it is a brilliant book. It's about killer fashion, basically, isn't it? What brought you to this sort of strange subject? Well, I suppose I've been a fashion or dress and textiles historian for about 20 years. And actually, I have been to Postman's Park and I've seen that plaque. It's quite, it's very moving. But the story does start in the UK because I started my academic career at the Winchester School of Art.

And we took field trips up to Manchester. And that's where I really, the scale of how much harm the textile and fashion industry had done to the people who worked in it and wore it really hit me. Because that's where I first saw sort of the cotton machinery that, you know, children would get trapped in, would deafen the workers, you know, tuberculosis transmitted through shuttles. So really that kind of the harm caused by the mills really inspired me to look more deeply into all of these harmful things that harmed health through fashion. Yeah. And so you wrote this incredible book, Fashion Victims, which is absolutely lavishly illustrated as well as being full of, I mean, literally killer facts. So we should just say you're now a professor in the School of Fashion at Ryerson University in Toronto. You're working on a second book which sounds equally brilliant has an equally brilliant title the fabric of crime uh and you've got a you've got a show coming out exhibit a investigating crime and footwear which is opening at the battersea museum in toronto so

um very disappointing for people in britain that we won't be able to get to see it. But perhaps it will travel. Well, let's hope, let's hope. But the fab, so you're obviously brilliant at your titles, but let's for the moment stick to fashion victims. And if we could just continue to look at the idea of tutus as killers. I mean, Alison, we should say that we've just done

an episode about the 10 worst parties in which actually the tutu does feature. We featured one of them, a very formal dinner in a hunting lodge in the Black Forest attended by the Kaiser in, I think, 1910, when the head of the German staff wandered out, dressed up in a tutu, came back in, did some pirouettes and then had a heart attack. So that's the sense I suppose. I don't think it's fair to say that the tutu killed him though, Tom. I mean, in a manner of speaking, but that's not what we're talking about here, is it? We're talking about the fact that, I mean, you have this amazing statistic, 10,000 deaths worldwide from theatre fires between 1797 and 1897, of which most were dancers. So what's going on there? Oh, it's a complex story, but certainly an important one, I think. And it's tied to so

many things, literally, including the fact, again, to go back to the kind of industrial production, one of the things was that tulle, you know, the kind of that net fiber that we associate with the tutu could first be mass produced in 1808. John Heathcote invented a machine to weave. It was one of the most complex textile machines that have ever been invented, but it was a mechanical way of weaving tool. And so this luxury fabric that was then, you know, for the rest of the 19th century became an incredibly important both a fashion fabric for net dresses, it was called bobinette, but also for dancers, because this light fabric in combination with the lighting,

created this diaphanous, beautiful, you know, kind of figure of the romantic ballerina, whose legs were who could, you know, dance en pointe, which was the, you know, kind of figure of the romantic ballerina, whose legs were, who could, you know, dance en pointe, which was, you know, the first time that this was happening in her light tool tutu, and, you know, layers of different kind of petticoats. And she created this sort of enchanting figure wafting around the stage. But of course, these same materials in the same form of lighting. Also, unfortunately, you know, these tutus were starched, you know, they were open weave. You can imagine an accommodation with gaslighting created an incredible fire hazard on stage. And people knew it. You see, that to me is one of the amazing things about your book,

is that it's not just about, you know, us retrospectively saying, oh, I mean, there are some cases of that, saying, oh, actually, these things killed you. But at the time, so The Lancet, there's an article in 1868, The Holocaust of Ballet Girls. Ballet Girls themselves knew that there was a very, I mean, it's not a very strong possibility, but there is a possibility. But they do it anyway. I mean, I suppose it's that just because they feel they have no choice. The theatres are refusing to flameproof themselves or whatever. I mean, what's the story? Yeah, it's a complex story. And it does relate strongly to occupational dress in a way that we don't think of dance costumes or theatre costumes as occupational dress. But in order to create your character or to be a dancer, you need to wear a costume that has a certain allure and whether or not that allure is physically dangerous.

And certainly theatres were not wonderful or uniform in having, you know, sort of any kind of flame-proofing, fire-proofing, even water buckets to put out flames, you know. So it was inherently, and people were, you know, the audience members were also throwing cigars on the floor and things like that. So, you know, there was just not the same concern with safety at the time and safety for the workers, because these most of the, you know, the ballerinas came from working class backgrounds. And of course, you probably know, in Paris, they were even called rats, the little rats. So, you know, they really often came, they were workers with their bodies, right. And so they came from the working class for the most part. And, you know, a lot of the descriptions of them are in kind of, you know, dingy tool, but still, that was what they were expected to wear. And I think that's a,

and they kind of often took on the risks of that knowingly, because that was how they earned their daily bread, I suppose. And they were, yeah, it's amazing throughout this study how much was actually known about the hazards that we, you know, that people were exposed to. And they did try to fireproof fabrics. There's a huge history in there of sort of how fabrics were, how people attempted to fireproof fabrics. There's a huge history in there of sort of how fire, how fabrics were, how people attempted to fireproof them. But gender is also a very important consideration, because men's clothing was inherently, if you're wearing a woolen suit, it's inherently flame

proofed, and it kind of fits your body. Whereas women's dress in the Victorian era, as you can all vision, envision and kind of imagine, especially dress that was worn for, again, dance or evening dress was often very gauzy, very layered, loose from the body, you know, crinolines, we can get into that. But, you know, it wasn't fitted to the body, it was made of these light fabrics that were often incredibly flammable. So, yeah. Well, so Alison, you mentioned crinolines. So again, the Lancet seems to be quite hot on this. So again, I mean, in 1860, it described the wearing of women who were wearing crinolines. It described, again, that this is causing a holocaust. So this is long, obviously, before the Shoah. This is referring to, you know, burnt offerings. And what is it about crinolines that are so dangerous? Yes. I mean, I was actually shocked to find those articles called the Holocaust of Ballet Girls or the crinoline, because I didn't know that it came from the, to be meant to be burnt whole. And so

that, but it was a word that came up in the 19th century press a lot in relation to these fire deaths. But the crinoline was also a culprit. The crinoline also called a skeleton petticoat, ironically, perhaps, or the hoop skirt as we know it more in North America. But the crinoline was a device that was a skirt supporter. And many people may be familiar with it. But what was new about it, I suppose, was that it was made from steel hoops. So it used steel technology in the 1850s and replaced layers of really heavy, you know, horse hair, horse hair, petticoats that dragged around. And so on the one hand, the crinoline was fantastic. A lot of women loved, you know, you had to have a bell shaped skirt. You had to, you know, show off all the textiles you had and all your lace and all your trimmings. And also because men couldn't reach over and molest them, right? You just kind of physically

repel them. Exactly. I mean, it was amazing to me with the pandemic, how many people tested the crinoline as a kind of social distancing measure, actually. A lot of people went out in public with them and kind of, you know, just to keep people away. And so they would have done that in a world where women were, you know, touched and molested and things like that. It was a natural space. You know, women claimed their space, which made it very unpopular for men and in the caricatures. But I mean, I'm always torn. And women did find it because it was light steel, you know, attached by tapes. It was actually apparently much more comfortable to walk in. It wasn't as heavy.

So it did have a lot of pluses. But one of the biggest dangers, and I think one that gets, as I think, increasingly on this got picked up on by the press and the caricaturists, was that it was, and the Lancet, and the medical experts, was that it was a fire hazard. And indeed, it actually was. Because, you know, if you think about it, people compared it to a chimney flue, you know, so it would just, the air would whoosh under it, you know if you think about it people compared it to a a chimney flew um you know so it would just the air would whoosh under it you know if even a spark caught it the air would um you know whoosh under it and and you know kind of blaze up and so there were actually and it was worn across the social spectrum like in the past this is the thing that's different from the tutus right because the people wearing the tutus are working class girls who feel they

have no choice but to go on the stage and a ballet being a ballet dancer as you'll root up but some of the victims with the crinolines the archduchess of austria archduchess matilda's it oscar wilde's sisters who die at a ball one of them goes past the fireplace i think it is and catches fire and then the other one tries to to put her out i mean these are so that's the difference these are high these are upper class. I mean, certainly in the case of the Archduchess of Austria, the very highest class in the land. You don't get higher than that.

But still, but still, it goes on. That's the extraordinary thing. Exactly, because, you know, we think that as an upper class or middle or upper class woman, you might have a choice to wear something a little bit more, except that the social pressure to conform to fashion was such that i would argue that they didn't particularly have a choice either right um and so i mean again it's interesting too that the archduchess matilda was you know again the young young woman apparently she was hiding a cigarette from her behind her back. She was smoking.

And the press records say, oh, she stepped on a match. They didn't want to say that she had been smoking. So, you know, this fast behaviour, I suppose. But everyone, when I read reports, everyone from, yes, the Archduchess to cooks were wearing it. You know, imagine wearing these, or a maid who had been cleaning the fire grate had her crinoline, her skirts catch on fire. So crinolines, therefore, weren't intrinsically expensive. No, no. Most women owned about two of them, even in the lower classes. And it wasn't really,

the only women who didn't wear them were, you know, hopeless, like the pre-athletes, the, you know, the bohemians or the artists. And so, you know, so really you were expected to wear them. And Alison, it's, it's a bit like the tutus in that you have this new kind of style of fabric that makes the tutu possible. Isn't also the same with the crinoline, that it's a kind of new light kind of metal that makes it possible. And you have the, again. I believe it's the Bessemer steel process that's used for it to spin. Yeah, to spin. It's exactly, it's new technology feeding into fashion. And then, you know, who's making the profit from it again?

And then who's satirizing it? I think it's a very interesting, you know, it's like, oh, these silly women, how dare they wear these things? And it's like, well, who is profiting from this? And who's inventing these things? Perchet, right? I mean, Perchet, they have an entire factory. Perchet factory known for their cars now opened an entire new factory

just to make steel cage crinoline hoops. And just one last on the subject of skirts before we move on to another way of killing yourself with items of clothing, the hobble skirt. Yes. Tom loves this story. I love a good hobble skirt.

So tell us how hobble skirts, well, first of all, what is a hobble skirt? I mean, it's kind of self-descriptive, isn't it? But, and how do they come into being? Fashion, the origins of certain items are complex, but I like one of the versions of this is that in the early 20th century, I mean, we associate, again, with skirts, we associate, you know, women starting to wear trousers and, you know, the dress reform movement and, you know, women's suffrage movements and things like that. And so this sort of liberation and dress for women does become more functional, except that it's never a linear progression to, you know, the mobile flapper. So around 1908 to

1910, a new kind of very tightly fitting ankle length skirt comes into fashion called the hobble skirt. And if you want to picture what the hobble skirt looks like, you have merely to imagine the Coke bottle, which is also called the hobble skirt bottle, the traditional kind of, and you can see how that's cinched in at the ankles. And so they were skirts that were the opposite of the crinoline, really. They were incredibly narrow in diameter. And you add to hobble, I mean, it hobbled women, you had to, you know, there are postcards mocking them saying, I can't kick because the other thing,

of course, you'd hobble would be horses or mules. And so, and enslaved peoples. So, you know, it had negative connotations, but it became a huge fashion. And one of the, I have found a great picture of Mrs. Edith Berg, who was the publicist for the Wright brothers with her skirts. She was the first female passenger on an airplane in 19, I think it was 1908 or nine. And she had to, of course, the plane was open. So she had to tie her skirt with ropes to prevent it from flapping up when she was on in the air as a passenger, you know, for modesty and probably practical reasons as well. And one legend sort of says, well, you know, I saw the woman get off the plane and she hobbled and I thought that was very attractive. One of the famous French fashion designers, Paul Poiret,

says, you know, I freed the bust from the corset, which is a whole other story, but I shackled the legs. So he claims that he invented this hobble skirt. I take it with a grain of salt. But the result was that, you know, there are all sorts of, again, caricatures of women hopping to catch the train and actual incidents of women, you know, breaking ankles, getting off the streetcar and things like that. Or, you know, trying to be mobile in the streetcar and things like that, or, you know, trying to be mobile in the city in these hobble skirts was a real challenge. So the hobble skirts don't kill you, but they'll break your ankle. Is that basically the story? Well, one woman did fall into a lock and then couldn't swim. So she drowned. Another woman couldn't escape a wild horse, ironically, from a race course. And, you know, she died with the

horse running her over. So, you know, no, there weren't as many, you know, she died with the horse running her over. So, you know, no, there weren't as many, you know, actual documented deaths, but I think it's a kind of interesting example of, you know, plus ça change. You know, the hazard can be from either something too tight or too loose, but women are often, as wearers, are often subject to more dangers so so on that topic i do think that um it can be an important aspect of fashion precisely that it is uncomfortable and dangerous and awkward and i guess the the really the the classic item of footwear that is always cited as the illustration of that is shoes well it's the only item of footwear there is tom yeah you're right of course yeah sorry yes yes yes yes it's the only item of footwear there is tom yeah you're right

of course yeah sorry yes yes yes yes there's the boots well no boots as well i see boots as a subset of shoes frankly yeah you're right of course sorry i meant clothing um the the shoes are well we're feet so so high heels all that kind of stuff and it's not just women is it let me just say this tom i've been looking forward to saying this the other week listen some listeners may know that we did a walk around london a historical walk and you knew perfectly well that i had to go to a function that evening and was very smartly dressed and i actually still have deep scars on both ankles because i was wearing as tom knows i hate the fact that he's laughing so gleefully at this. I was wearing a pair of new boots and the bloody walk would never end.

Well, you suffered to look beautiful, whereas I was wearing sensible walking boots. So I did it. I mean, I look terrible, but I don't have blisters. Regular listeners will have seen the photos and what they won't know is that I was concealing, I was dealing with enormous pain. As the blood dripped, seeped out of the letter um

so the middle ages you know you have these kind of very faint notoriously long kind of um yes which the church is always fulminating against but i suppose the most notorious uh example of this is foot binding in china or is it not is that a kind of a western myth or did that really happen what's the kind of story behind that? Oh, it's so it's such an interesting story. And again, I keep stressing that they're complex stories. It's not just sort of like people from, you know, women from Asia were binding their feet. European men and women were also actually we found out when we were doing research for the exhibition that we did called Fashion Victims at the Bada. That I mean, we looked at these incredibly narrow-soled

European shoes as well. And, you know, they were so narrow, and they had wear on the soles, so they must have been worn. But we were trying to sort of imagine, and boots, stylish, again, it was class-related. A narrow foot was considered elegant, a tiny foot for both men and women. And so we were trying to think, you know, how did this happen? And we looked into things like chiropodists manuals, and it was talking about how people would actually, you know, European men and women would literally bind their toes, you know, and kind of stack them on each other just to get into these shoes and keep them bound. So I think there was a lot of foot pain historically in Europe. But the example of China, which was used as a comparison often, especially as missionaries going into Asian places where this like into Asia, we're trying to ban it and trying to, you know, but we're also fascinated by it.

That practice was the curator of the Bata Shoe Museum, I think, gives a good analogy. It was sort of something like orthodontics. It was like trying to actually change upper class practice, but, you know, it was only in certain regions of China. They would bind the feet and pull bands around it so that the toes would sort of fold under. And you would create this very small and attractive, what was called a lotus foot. And so this, you know, and certainly women could walk. I mean, that's the kind of the legend that, you know, no people couldn't walk like this. I mean, it's certainly there's lots of good literature on it, I think. And women would embroider these beautiful slippers to wear with these feet to kind of show them off. that was just like the binding of toes in European society. It was meant to show how elite you were. And of course, the less mobile you are, the more elite you are, right?

You don't have to walk and perform labor. And so, you know, this is conspicuous display, as Thorstein Veblen would, or he coined the term conspicuous consumption, but there's also conspicuous display. And a lot of his work talks about how the more you can display your white shirt front or any, you know, your clean cuffs and collar, it shows, you know, how little work you have to do or the dress that you don't have to move in, you know. The obvious thing that I think will have occurred to a lot of listeners is we listen to that about the foot binding and we kind of shudder and say how crazy

in our sort of condescending way. But of course, I mean, lots of listeners, maybe while they're listening to this podcast are wearing very impractical high heels. I don't know how many high-heeled listeners, how many people put on their high heels to listen to our podcast. But anyway, do you see them as being on the same sort of continuum in a way as kind of foot binding, trying to shape the foot, trying to create an impression, but also something that, frankly, to me as a non-high heel wearer, looks kind of crazy. Never, Tom. Never. Never even tried it. Looks kind of crazy.

I mean, my wife always, when she wears high heels says i'm in agony um i mean do you think future generations will look back on that with as much sort of stupefaction as we look back on our predecessors well i think particularly in the context of the pandemic where we've ditched a lot of uncomfortable things um and constraining things including my i don't think I've worn a pair of heels since it started. I think dress has become much more casual, comfortable. We have had an emphasis on comfort that wasn't there in past eras and other cultures. Like it just, it's, I don't know. I mean, I think maybe, I mean, on the one hand, one could say, oh my goodness, this seems even more shocking, you know, now to us as we have this comfortable dress. But I think it's best not to kind of judge because we all know the sensation of, you know, having something fashionable.

And that's what was fashionable. That was what was stylish. That's what made people feel also good at the time. So about their appearance isn't there always a slight cachet if people suffer for their fashion it becomes more valuable do you not do you think i mean do you think there's a sort of i mean because there's also this kind of like pleasure pain thing going on a little bit isn't there certainly the sort of the fetishization of high heels is part of that the fact that they're painful is part of the pleasure and i suppose detail with corsets yeah with corsets exactly i think i mean that's incorporate i mean again especially for us i think that's how we make that distinction um some people feel more comfortable in corsets too though they feel

structured they feel supported um so my phd student who wrote her thesis on corsets she did her defense in a corset and she's you know she she gives conference presentations in corsets. She did her defense in a corset and she's, you know, she, she gives conference presentations in corsets because they make her feel, um, supported and comfortable. She calls them a hug. So, you know, it's, it's sort of all relative, I think, to, um, now to what you're comfortable with. Whereas in the, in the past, I mean, not everyone was tight lacing their corsets or, you know, um, necessarily squeezing themselves into those shoes. Although if you wanted to present a fashionable facade, you had to. So I don't know. I don't have a, I guess it's part of our myth about fashion, I think, you know. With heels, I mean, it raises you. So there's this amazing vase, kind of pot from um persia about i think about 800 bc 900 bc um and it has two feet

and the it has kind of you know two legs coming off the the bottom of the vase so you stand it on on the legs and the feet have high heels and dominic you'll remember we did an episode on persia with yes sorry talking about how everything said it invented high heels well specifically platform platform shoes obviously and the kings wear them to make them taller to make them tower over the rest of the courtiers and i you know that seems to be a feature of of kind of courtly life in in many different cultures many nicholas nicholas sarkozy wore high heels yes he did he did yes like yes my co-investigator elizabeth um samohack says you know, cowboys wear heels, but we don't call them. We don't think of them as wearing high heels, but they do.

You know, they're the kind of epitome of masculinity. But she did a lot of research on Persian footwear. And it's interesting because, yes, they were something that, you know, the British, it was a military fashion to keep your foot in a stirrup. And so, you know, it was adopted in the UK first by men. And only 30 years later, women, you know, yeah, it was a power symbol, women appropriated it. And they, they thought, you know, they wanted to be like these men in heels. So it's become very gendered feminine, but it depends on, you know, if you think of Sarkozy, if you think of, you know, if you think of, you know, the cowboy or, exactly. Then, um then yeah i mean heels are more um

exactly yes elton john yeah elton so i but i suppose something else that makes you look tall if you're a man is a is a top hat uh yes or you know or any kind of hat uh hat wear headwear god i'm getting my wares all over the place um and just but before we come to the break in a way i mean one of the most extraordinary stories of the lot that you tell in in fashion victims is the story of the hat and how these are lethally dangerous and i had i mean until i read your book i had no idea just how dangerous they are although of course i should have done because the mad hatter in yes in lewis carroll of course i again i hadn't thought why hatters are mad just tell us what the hell's

going on with hats because it's a very weird story i love hats um uh well we should we should tell the listeners that you actually have a hat with you that because we were talking about how dan jackson wore his capitalist hat. A magnificent look. That is a good hat. It's a very good hat. I have a very nice hat made for me by the saucy milliner in Ottawa. Shout out to the saucy milliner.

A shout out to her. And she told me it had magic properties. And I'm assuming it's non-toxic, which is great. Yes, but it doesn't kill you. It would be one magic property. Exactly. I don't know, peacock feathers were used in its making here, apparently. But I hope the peacock wasn't harmed. But I wore it for my book launch, actually.

So that was a special Top Hat book launch extravaganza. But I have always been fascinated with hats. I have my grandfather's top hat from the 1930s. And it's a silk top hat. So I think it's all right. But in fact, what I realized doing this research, you know, we think of the silk topper, I think it was actually meant to be, nothing talks about this, but I think it was actually meant to be a kind of a non-toxic alternative to the traditional fur felt hat, the beaver or rabbit fur felt hat. And the other little tidbit, I guess I would have that came out of this research was understanding that, you know, animals, basically, they say, you know, any animal that walked by a hatter was in danger

of its life. So all sorts of different animals were used to make felt. So this material for these hats that were fashionable from the medieval period to the 1960s, when that's the only time that the whole mercury issue stopped because hats went out of fashion. So, you know, centuries of mercury were used to create, well, not were used to create the hats that adorned the heads, mostly of men, not were used to create the hats that adorned the heads, mostly of men, not exclusively, but mostly. And men didn't leave the house without, just as a woman wouldn't leave the house without her, you know, her crinoline or what she needed in that period. A man would not leave the house without his hat. And so, and certainly a fur felt hat was originally a luxury. It was made of beaver fur. And just to interrupt a second, the mercury, the point of the mercury is what? That it softens the fur, basically. Is that it, effectively?

Yes. Well, you know, hat making was a very complex trade. You had to go through many operations to turn this sort of pelt that you would start with into a lovely, lustrous, waterproof, beautiful hat. And if you were doing that with beaver, beaver had a natural felting ability, it was wonderful. But when you start to run out of beaver in the 18th century, for various reasons, I mean, it had been killed off in Europe, you know, by the Renaissance. And then, so people turn to that huge, you know, people know about the fur trade, it was all in service of mostly men's European men's hats. They start to run out of beaver supplies in the 18th century and they need to turn to more locally available and cheaper hats

or cheaper fur, which meant hare and rabbit for the most part. You know, they reproduce, they breed like rabbits, you can eat them. But the problem is rabbit fur or hare fur does not felt very well. And so this is when the whole mercury situation started to happen, because they realized that by brushing the fur with mercury, it changed the chemical composition. And it was mercury and nitric acid, which is also pretty nasty. And you would just brush this onto the pelt and it would turn it orange, actually. It was called kerating, which I think is quite funny in relation to rabbits. But it was kerating. In French, it was called secrétage because the ingredients were secret. So this is one of the reasons it isn't that well known. It was a process that was kind of kept secret and kept within the hiding industry. And so yeah, that would transform the fur and allow you to felt it. But as you can imagine, the fur is just imbued with this horribly toxic quicksilver.

And, you know, to make a hat, one of the steps, for example, is called a planking kettle. You immerse it to shrink the felts in this hot water. And just the vapor coming off of that kettle, you would be inhaling it and it would land on roofs. It would go into water supplies. It would poison all of the local soil and water and for a long long time right i mean the mercury is still there in places where there were it is it's you know it still is released into long island sound from danbury in connecticut which was a fur felt uh hat making kind of area in connecticut and yeah they they i mean the hats themselves are still toxic so and and and brit and British hatters, am I right in saying British hatters?

English hatters were using mercury still in the late 1960s. Yes, it was never banned. It was just simply, you know, they tried to invent ways to circumvent it and better solutions, but it was just the cheapest and the most efficient way to create headgear for men. Again, it's a bit like the tutus. People knew that something was wrong. and the most efficient way to create headgear for men. Again, it's a bit like the tutus. People knew that something was wrong because hatters went mad. I mean, is that basically the – is that too simplistic or is that really what happened?

I mean, they had a reputation, certainly, for, you know, heavy drinking and kind of eccentric behaviour, I think. Hanging out with hares at tea parties and all that kind of stuff. Exactly tea parties exactly hanging out with the hairs that would have been turned into hats actually thinking about it of course yes i hadn't thought about i know and actually um the other little side note sidebar here was that i realized the magic trick the kind of epitome of magic of pulling the hair out of the or the rabbit out of the hat that was actually a 19th century trick. And in fact, the joke was that, you know, the dead rabbit was, he was reanimating it and bringing it magically back to life, which I, when I realized that I was like, oh my God, how did I not know?

But, but of course that's magic. I think that's a perfect note on which to have a break. And when we come back, we'll look at another cheery aspect of fashion, which is its fondness for um poisons other than mercury uh chiefly uses dyes cosmetics and so on so um lots of fun to come i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our qA we pull back the curtain

on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. In the 1827 dialogue between fashion and death by the Italian romantic poet Giacomo Lepardi, he has a personification of fashion who claims that she is death's sister. She says she's proudly playing many deadly games, crippling people with tight shoes, cutting off their breath and making their eyes pop out because of their tight corsets now i've talked about corsets we've talked about shoes what we haven't talked about though um are colors and i guess the color green is a good place to start basically i mean this is a very very simplistic way of putting it but in the 19th century green

will probably kill you i mean green, green hats, green fabrics, if you work in a factory using green dye. And Alison, why- Who is wearing green. Yes, who is wearing green. I am wearing my emerald green dress. Boldly. Again.

What's going on there? Why will that kill you? Oh, and just as a preface, I would have been the person dying of emerald green because as you can tell from the dress I'm wearing today, I'm not the radio listeners, but green is my favorite color. But yes, in the 19th century, I mean, if we think about it in a broader perspective, it was a period that saw so much urbanization and industrialization. And you can imagine kind of people coming in from a green countryside and entering an urban environment where it was green

might have been a lot harder to come by. And so green was sought after, I suppose. But it was also technically one of the hardest colours to achieve. Because historically, and now I've taken up natural dyeing during the pandemic. So as a hobby, I now know that green is very difficult to create, because you really do have to have two dye baths, you have to have a yellow, which is easy to find, but you also need a blue, which would come from like mowed or imported indigo. And the shade that was created by Sheila, who was a Pomeranian chemist in 1770s, was only achievable through chemistry. It was not like kind of a new form of chemistry. And, you know, green had all sorts of other problems, like you would have a green outfit, but and it might look nice in daylight, but it would look gray, either on the stage or at night.

So you didn't want a green gown, because it would kind of not be very colorful in most lighting situations that you'd want to be splendid in. This new green that Sheila created had many different names, but it was created using arsenic trioxide and copper, which had long been used in the making of greens. But the arsenic was, I think, somewhat new. And he managed, and it was kind of improved and they added different, made different formula. And then by the 1820s or so, it was being used for so many consumer goods. It was being used for paper, wallpaper, paint, you know, as a pigment, toys, candies, you know, just by the Victorian period, it was everywhere.

And it always has arsenic in it, just to be clear. But the arsenic is a key ingredient, isn't it, that people are using a lot? Yes. So have I got this right, that a ball gown would have enough arsenic to kill 200 people? Well, I mean, if you think about it, this is exactly the same period of the crinoline. So, you know, a ball gown would be many, many layers of different fabrics, including one called tarlatan, which, you know, was also used for tutus, not green. But it was kind of a rough weave and they would just have the pigment would kind of dust off of it. You know, you'd have yards and yards of this bright green fabric and the pigment wasn't that solidly attached sometimes. So a dress like that, maybe, potentially, they certainly, people who are

trying to kind of argue that this was harming the flower makers and dressmakers and the people who dyed the fabric were getting the foremost, you know, analytical chemists in the world and forensic chemist Hoffman, who is also a dye chemist, to test these things and to use these kind of techniques that had been developed for arsenic poisoning trials, the Reinsch test and the Marsch test, to test textiles and fabrics. And those were the results that they came up with. So I don't know if it was exaggerated, but it's quite possible. There was a lot of arsenic.

Because, Alison, I mean, again, and this is a theme running throughout this discussion, people knew that these dresses were potentially dangerous. So you have a joke in punch and the jokes in punch are never really, I mean, they never seem particularly funny to us, but this seems positively, I mean, the opposite of funny. We think a man would be as green as the dress of his fair partner if he either waltzed or polked with a lady in shields green in fact girls in these green dresses ought to be marked dangerous or to have beware of poison embroidered in red letters right across the back i mean it's a making it as a joke but that seems to be saying yeah we know these dresses are absolutely lethal advice columns for women saying you know bring some ammonia in

your smelling salts bottle if you want to see if the green has arsenic so if you pour the ammonia on it um it will turn blue because of the copper and that's probably arsenical so don't buy that one so you know there was consumer advice on but people surely aren't going into like you know late victorian department stores or something armed pouring chemicals no although we did try it in the lab with some lemon scented ammonia and it worked it did turn blue we were playing with the arsenic in the long run this this does kind of start to percolate through and and you say is that am i right that this is why coco chanel hated green she never used green yes i think these i've heard since many stories of you know people entering sort of the danish theater wardrobe department you know, being warned off using green thread. And this is in the 20th century. So or 21st century, even. So there are lots of suspicions still that and Chanel being one of them, the House of Chanel, Chanel thought it was an unlucky color, but she was trained as a milliner and as a seamstress in her teachers would have probably encountered um encountered arsenical greens in the course of their work because it was especially bad for

artificial flowers and leaves in particular um that that were powdered with this green pigment to make them you know seemingly lifelike but very harmful and i also wrote an article called tainted love on oscar wilde's green carnation which, yeah, I love titles. But on the Green Carnation was a symbol of homosexuality because a kind of coded symbol, because it was an artificial green, right? You could, and you know, a lot of people refer to them as dipped in arsenic. And yeah, it's complicated, but people hadn't made that connection. So just a last point about arsenic, Alison, and a theme that I think runs through your book and through this story, the people who are most at risk are often the people who are making these things, aren't they?

A bit like with the hatters. So these people who are working with arsenic, I mean, they have the kind of dust on their hands or whatever, or they have. So do you think there is a sort of silent death toll of people who were dressmakers and textile workers and so on? Definitely. I mean, the conditions of that kind of work were horrific to start with. But if you were working in particularly dangerous corners of it, including, you know, hatting or artificial flower makers in particular, were very much exposed to these. I think a lot of them would have, you know, had, well, a lot of them did have die early deaths, had chronic illnesses. And in fact, I think what's interesting as a

contrast is that, you know, because the consumers weren't harmed in the case of hats, you know, men were not aware that their hats had mercury and they had linings. And so they were kind of protected from this. And if you were a working class man, you were sort of expected to take on the risks of many dangerous jobs, whereas the young girls and women were often working as artificial flower makers, it was very ill paid. And so there was an idea, not only was, you know, were the wearers getting harmed, like people would wear green gloves to the ball gown, and then they'd get a rash or they'd, their wreath would powder, you know, onto their shoulders, their hair wreath out of artificial flowers, and they'd get, again, a rash. So they called the doctor.

And the same doctors were seeing the flower girls coming into their hospitals for the poor, you know, the next day. And so they were making that connection between the fashionable green and the workers who made it as well and kind of trying to call it out because women, you know, obviously needed more protection. And it was also much more visible, right? Everybody could kind of look for these greens. So Alison, we actually, we have a question on this theme from Lauren MGM on the Discord, who asks about unions and to what extent were our garment worker unions effective in proving worker and consumer safety? So do unions, does the rise of unions play a part as well? It's not just kind of doctors pointing out that these are dangerous. Is it actual, you know, it's workers organizing together and saying, you know, even as early as the 18, one of the things I found fascinating was, you know, in the 1850s, when Baudelaire's writing Les Fleurs du Mal, or The Flowers of Evil, which seems all that more apt, the workers are actually going to protest

at the police prefecture about the danger of their conditions. And, you know, kind of it gets, it does get, arsenic gets banned in France and in Scandinavia and in Germany because it's considered so hazardous. But in the UK, I mean, certainly unions are on the rise and do change conditions, you know, as of the late 19th century and early 20th century in garment industries, I would say. I mean, not that there weren't strikes before and unions, but in terms of the UK, arsenic was such an important good. And they actually, after Matilda Scheurer, who was a 19-year-old flower maker who died of arsenic poisoning from working with Emerald Green, after she died, there was a huge, you know, investigation. And they said, well, you know, really only one person has died. This is, you know, too important to industry, we can't actually ban it. And so it did go out of fashion, because it was, you know, there were kind of ladies, the Ladies Sanitary Association was, you know, again, getting these chemists to prove scientifically about that these things were, you know, toxic and advocating against it. But there weren't, it wasn't, the workers themselves,

as far as I know, in the artificial flower industry, didn't themselves in the UK protest or unionize. So, although, you know, I did find that eventually after her death, the particular flower shop she worked in, which was near the British Library where I was researching, did move to more spacious and airy premises. So there was slow change. But again, a lot of these girls were minors as well. They didn't have any political power. And it's an ongoing thing, isn't it? Because you have the extraordinary story about the um the the belt sold by asos uh inspired

by alexander mcqueen uh which was studded and the studs had cobalt 60 in uh and um they were radioactive and um therefore give you a radioactivity you know radioactive poisoning like a superhero's belt if worn more than 500 hours so so it's a kind of ongoing thing and another on i mean really i think this the the kind of the last, and in a way, perhaps again, perhaps up there with foot binding is one of the most famous way through into the present day as well. So the cosmetics that Elizabeth I wears, is it true that it kind of basically, I mean, kind of poisoned her face? As far as we know, it is. And as far as I've been able to see, I mean, and she was certainly not the only one. I mean, having a white complexion, I mean, there are so many racial dimensions to that, I whitening your skin and class as well right i mean it's a class oh definitely you would sun tans didn't become fashionable until the 20s and 30s so 1920s and 30s so definitely until then you wanted um to have if you were uh european or north

american uh you know you wanted to to have the lightest skin possible. That was a sign that, again, just like the constricting and constraining fashions, you weren't out in the fields harvesting things and being exposed to the sun. And you have it in India as well. There's kind of lightning powders that, again, are kind of very dangerous. And they're still sold. Exactly. Some of them also contain mercury i mean yes there's a there's still toxic products used in a lot of these um uh cosmetic products actually and there's still an emphasis on on whitening and lightening which is very harmful

um so many of these case studies have still have you know continue to have resonance i think today but um but yes i mean having if you think about lead, the properties of lead, I mean, that's why lead was in paint, right? So lead white, because it creates a kind of opaque surface that reflects light as well, right? And so as an ingredient, it gives you this desired, it masks things and makes them look light optically. And that's why it was such a commoning. I mean, it was easy, easily available. So it was, and it wasn't too expensive. So, you know, that was one of the reasons why lead figured in cosmetics, I was still finding in the 19th century, pearl white skin creams that caused

hand drop, and like it was called lead palsy, I believe, in terms of, you know, women putting it on their skins and not being able to move their hands um so there were still products you know i mean historically later on that that uh that contained this um these contained lead and continue to today yes because you have this um amazing figure that a 20 a 2011 study by the fda so it's in america found lead in all 400 of the lipsticks they tested i know i have to admit after that i brought some of my lipsticks to be tested in our physics lab just to see and worked with a friend. And what happened? Well, interestingly, yes, they were because I kind of buy natural brands. But I had my then young son come in with his, he'd gone to circus camp and he had clown makeup and that did have lead in it oh really that's interesting

so not so not so funny yeah um but uh but and in fact i as i investigated more and worked with my partner eric de silva in physics um we realized that lead is part of the pigments that color it like it's a natural if you like it's natural ingredient. So it's not required to be listed. It's kind of considered a contaminant, not something you have to list on the label. So it's really quite impossible to know. But what's interesting too, is the FDA also considers it something topical. In other words, something you only put on the outside of your skin. But of course, as we all know, or anyone who's ever worn makeup knows we are eating things and we are you know the the lipstick gets ingested um and you know our skin is only a fine barrier so um anything that's

considered adornment is not protected as well as anything that's considered you know medical or anything like that so there's still kind of a bias against that and there still is lead in some cosmetics i mean it's not very well regulated well i i hope that this um so that's actually a chilling thought isn't it that uh we could do this podcast in a hundred people doing this podcast in 100 years and they'd be talking about us well what they'd be talking about botox and well they would i mean these people whose kind of bottoms explode and stuff because they've i mean that's an example of killer fashion isn't it i mean people i mean that's like the foot binding

thing, but also with chemicals. Right. Again, take a second thought when we look at our contemporary society and the things that we do, or the new, I mean, I always think when we were talking about kind of comfort of fashion now, it may be much more comfortable for the wearer, but it's still, you know, our blue jeans are often being sandblasted and causing silicosis in the lungs of the workers blasting it with beach sand. Or, you know, we may have comfortable shoes, like we may love our trainers,

but they're often put together using adhesives that are neurotoxic for the workers doing that. Yeah, and also who's making your trainers? Exactly. Are they comfortable? So there's a question from Nathan Hogg, friend of the show. Are the true fashion victims the many sweatshop workers? Definitely. As someone who teaches fashion students, I felt that it was really important. And as a historian, I felt it was really important to say, you know, these labor and, you know, environmental and health problems that we, you know, that are still going on and often unseen to those of us in the global north.

They're still happening. They're just we see them less in the in the 19th century. These problems were much, you know, as when London and Manchester and Paris were big centers for the production of fashion, the medical establishment was seeing what was happening and they were often trying to kind of raise awareness of these problems. Whereas now, whereas now, you know, we're aware of them, but they're still happening. And they're happening on a global scale. So yes, the sweatshop, I mean, it's a long history, and it's still going on. Brilliantly explicated in your book, Fashion Victims, and you said you love titles. I mean, just looking at the chapter titles, you've got toxic techniques, mercurial hats, poisonous

pigments, arsenical greens, entangled and strangled, caught in the machine, inflammatory fabrics, flaming tutus and combustible crinolines and that kind of, and as I say, just magnificently illustrated as well. It's an incredibly fascinating book. Thank you so much for coming on. Tom, you should, your daughter should choose more of our topics. That's the great lesson of this podcast she maybe i'll get to come back with my crime book we would love you to come back with your crime book wait wait so you don't know yet when it's going to be out maybe give us a sneak preview i'll let you know the next two or three years that'd be great but my titles are still shot and stabbed and struck so there we are and stained

okay well hopefully the podcast will still be running in time for you to come and do that. Alison, thanks so much. Your book, Fashion Fiction Tips. Thank you. Rush out and buy it, guys. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip

and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad free listening bonus episodes

and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com