May 1, 2025 • 36 mins
What's the weirdest pair of shoes you've ever seen? If you were King, would you force everyone else to be shorter than you? In the second part of this week's special two-part episode, returning guest AJ "Bahamas" Jacobs, creator of "The Puzzler," regales the gang with a wide-ranging exploration of history's most ridiculous clothing.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show,
(00:27):
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
(00:48):
our goodpal aj Bahamas Jacobs.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Indeed, why don't we just join the conversation already in progress.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
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.
(01:26):
Toll wigs like big big old wigs big old.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
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.
(01:52):
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,
(02:15):
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,
(02:38):
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.
(03:01):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
And of course a lot of insects because you had
the beef tallow and it was just the delicious.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
So the insects a non consensual ornamentation.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
They were meant to be there, but they added to
the fun.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
And gosh, I love your locust contessa. Yeah, I love you.
I love your cat.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Your hair is moving around so interesting, so active.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
Oh gosh, this idea.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah, someone took something off the top.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Right, exactly more than just.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
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
(04:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Store, just corsets and all of that stuff just constricting
your movements and just like the idea of suffering for fashion,
you know.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
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,
(05:45):
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,
(06:07):
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
(06:29):
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
(06:53):
has produced generations of invalids and bequeathed to posterity suffering
that will not vanish for many decades. Generational suffering.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
That's what I'll not pass from the earth exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Store, the foot of the lower back of the second
person helping you strap it up.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
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
(08:00):
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
(08:24):
just during the day, they'd have to wear them at
night so that they would train their waste.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
That's just it's okay.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
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
(08:57):
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
(09:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
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
(09:53):
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,
(10:16):
serve no purpose.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
A crevass.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
It's it.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
I wear it. I wear Camo ones, so I look
really cool and military.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
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.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
Oh and like so.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
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
(11:18):
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
(11:40):
and white party, and if you don't participate in the silliness,
then you're not at the top.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Now, wait, what is a cravat versus a necktie? I'm
not sure. I know.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Interesting, Oh yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Yeah, and then you got the you know, the windsor
and whatnot for your typical day trader tie.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Right, And one other tie question was was there any
truth to that it was a napkin?
Speaker 4 (12:11):
At one point I would say.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
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
(12:35):
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?
Speaker 3 (12:48):
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
(13:09):
these crazy white collars that they had in Elizabethan times.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
Which were not napkins.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
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
(13:38):
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
(14:05):
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
(14:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
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
(15:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Love it. Yeah, I've heard you. I've heard it from many,
including people who actually do like birds.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
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
(16:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Attachment, like like a space helmet.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
So it's just like knife, spoon, hand.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
There we go, Yeah, I get.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Some TIBs and so what's that amazing bread in Jira?
Speaker 3 (18:21):
Oh yeah, I don't remember the name.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
That's the you know, like the yeah, oh man, we
should go to an Ethiopian restaurant and then play wingspan.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
That's what God wants us to do.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
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
(18:55):
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,
(19:17):
people always need shoes, right, most of the time.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
You need shoes, absolutely, and those shoes can become ridiculous.
To use an appropriate word, they can get they can.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
We invented that word. We coined it.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
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.
(19:57):
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,
(20:18):
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
(20:41):
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
(21:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Think, hang, I'm going to stop us here real quick,
because from what you're describing about these Puritan folks, they.
Speaker 4 (21:24):
Seem kind of uncool, not great.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Or like very strict.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
They are tough, Yes, they have their pros and cons.
I probably wouldn't want to be a Puritan, but uh.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Because you're so you're super into forks, right, it's just
love it.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
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
(22:02):
their pros and cons, but I probably would not want
to party with them on a Saturday night.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Yeah, yeah, I think they probably also would find parties
as a concept ungodly and evil.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
But then you know, yeah, there are.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
King Louis the fourteenth. He was the Sun King, right,
wasn't that him? He was self.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Proclaimed super humble dude, super right.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
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.
(23:10):
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
(23:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
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,
(24:08):
making King Louis shoes. And it sounds like, again, as
you maintained earlier, there are some reasons that the French revolted.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
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,
(24:39):
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
(25:01):
peasants to upstage you with their colorful fashion.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Right there you go.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
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,
(25:45):
they had the guy who would run out and say, some.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
People are wearing purple.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
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.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
You know, he's in the South Square. He's like, stand up,
that's it's really true.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Be here, Max. He's like, USh, what else? Okay? Check
this scroll? And he's like, yeah, the plague.
Speaker 4 (26:19):
Huh?
Speaker 3 (26:20):
You ever noticed that the play? You haven't noticed. That's
a great point. They were the first stand up comedians.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
Love it.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
I mean, they probably had a high turnover rate depending
on their material.
Speaker 4 (26:38):
But we do know.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
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
(26:59):
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
(27:22):
are like filming a music video or something. So do
you see sumptuary laws continuing into the future.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
The gun and then they saw the hat, and the
cops said, ah.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
Let's keep going.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
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,
(28:16):
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
(28:36):
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
(29:01):
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
(29:21):
oppressive capitalists conspiracy because.
Speaker 4 (29:25):
I could get behind that agree. You know.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
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
(29:49):
that still remains something that they're case built.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
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,
(30:16):
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,
(30:38):
but I know it's interesting.
Speaker 3 (30:39):
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
(31:02):
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.
Speaker 4 (31:15):
I think that's true.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Right, that's it exactly, I'm doing it now. Let me
take off my shirt.
Speaker 4 (31:43):
Constitution Year of Living Naked. Incredible, incredible.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
I hope you do most of your research in the summer, right,
just for weather purposes.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
That's true. Mann's a lot. Well, that's why I'll be
visiting Atlanta a lot.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
Yes, please do.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
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,
(32:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
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
(32:59):
delight full product. Can I call it a product?
Speaker 4 (33:03):
For a podcast product?
Speaker 2 (33:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
My goodness, that is well, thank god it's Thursday. I'm
sure right t G.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
I t a prodcast uh a j before we before
you hop out for further adventures. Where can people learn
more about your work?
Speaker 3 (33:30):
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.
Speaker 4 (33:46):
Flattery will get you somewhere.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
But yeah, I'm on. I have website a J Jacobs
dot com. Oh, I have a substack. So that's end
to me.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
What a substack is?
Speaker 2 (33:57):
It? Is? It just like a like a gussied up
male lists. There we bringing back the nailing list exactly.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
On the contrary, well that makes you an excellent substacker.
You're a substacker for the people.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Substacker for the people.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Yeah, like the nudists, I'm a socialist SUBSCT officer.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
I'm naked for the people right now.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
And weirdly, substack is also a euphemism for the penis.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
There you go, There you go.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
That's all I got said.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
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.
Speaker 4 (34:47):
In the credits.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
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.
Speaker 4 (35:03):
Can you imagine?
Speaker 2 (35:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Nice and Jonathan Strickland aka the Quist is.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
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.
Speaker 4 (35:33):
That's true, that's true. We need to bring her back.
She's so cool. Have you heard about this person?
Speaker 2 (35:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
No, okay, I'm a real class expert. Yeah, but you've
had her on right.
Speaker 4 (35:58):
I'm gonna listen one once. And yet we thank her
at the end.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
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.
Speaker 4 (36:17):
Thanks to you Man, Dang you as well, Buddy. We'll
see you next time, folks.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show,
(00:27):
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
(00:48):
our goodpal aj Bahamas Jacobs.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Indeed, why don't we just join the conversation already in progress.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
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.
(01:26):
Toll wigs like big big old wigs big old.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
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.
(01:52):
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,
(02:15):
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,
(02:38):
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.
(03:01):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
And of course a lot of insects because you had
the beef tallow and it was just the delicious.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
So the insects a non consensual ornamentation.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
They were meant to be there, but they added to
the fun.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
And gosh, I love your locust contessa. Yeah, I love you.
I love your cat.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Your hair is moving around so interesting, so active.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
Oh gosh, this idea.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah, someone took something off the top.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Right, exactly more than just.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
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
(04:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Store, just corsets and all of that stuff just constricting
your movements and just like the idea of suffering for fashion,
you know.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
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,
(05:45):
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,
(06:07):
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
(06:29):
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
(06:53):
has produced generations of invalids and bequeathed to posterity suffering
that will not vanish for many decades. Generational suffering.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
That's what I'll not pass from the earth exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Store, the foot of the lower back of the second
person helping you strap it up.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
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
(08:00):
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
(08:24):
just during the day, they'd have to wear them at
night so that they would train their waste.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
That's just it's okay.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
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
(08:57):
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
(09:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
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
(09:53):
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,
(10:16):
serve no purpose.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
A crevass.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
It's it.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
I wear it. I wear Camo ones, so I look
really cool and military.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
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.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
Oh and like so.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
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
(11:18):
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
(11:40):
and white party, and if you don't participate in the silliness,
then you're not at the top.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Now, wait, what is a cravat versus a necktie? I'm
not sure. I know.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Interesting, Oh yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Yeah, and then you got the you know, the windsor
and whatnot for your typical day trader tie.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Right, And one other tie question was was there any
truth to that it was a napkin?
Speaker 4 (12:11):
At one point I would say.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
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
(12:35):
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?
Speaker 3 (12:48):
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
(13:09):
these crazy white collars that they had in Elizabethan times.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
Which were not napkins.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
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
(13:38):
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
(14:05):
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
(14:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
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
(15:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Love it. Yeah, I've heard you. I've heard it from many,
including people who actually do like birds.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
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
(16:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Attachment, like like a space helmet.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
So it's just like knife, spoon, hand.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
There we go, Yeah, I get.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Some TIBs and so what's that amazing bread in Jira?
Speaker 3 (18:21):
Oh yeah, I don't remember the name.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
That's the you know, like the yeah, oh man, we
should go to an Ethiopian restaurant and then play wingspan.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
That's what God wants us to do.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
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
(18:55):
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,
(19:17):
people always need shoes, right, most of the time.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
You need shoes, absolutely, and those shoes can become ridiculous.
To use an appropriate word, they can get they can.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
We invented that word. We coined it.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
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.
(19:57):
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,
(20:18):
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
(20:41):
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
(21:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Think, hang, I'm going to stop us here real quick,
because from what you're describing about these Puritan folks, they.
Speaker 4 (21:24):
Seem kind of uncool, not great.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Or like very strict.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
They are tough, Yes, they have their pros and cons.
I probably wouldn't want to be a Puritan, but uh.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Because you're so you're super into forks, right, it's just
love it.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
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
(22:02):
their pros and cons, but I probably would not want
to party with them on a Saturday night.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Yeah, yeah, I think they probably also would find parties
as a concept ungodly and evil.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
But then you know, yeah, there are.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
King Louis the fourteenth. He was the Sun King, right,
wasn't that him? He was self.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Proclaimed super humble dude, super right.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
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.
(23:10):
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
(23:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
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,
(24:08):
making King Louis shoes. And it sounds like, again, as
you maintained earlier, there are some reasons that the French revolted.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
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,
(24:39):
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
(25:01):
peasants to upstage you with their colorful fashion.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Right there you go.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
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,
(25:45):
they had the guy who would run out and say, some.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
People are wearing purple.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
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.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
You know, he's in the South Square. He's like, stand up,
that's it's really true.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Be here, Max. He's like, USh, what else? Okay? Check
this scroll? And he's like, yeah, the plague.
Speaker 4 (26:19):
Huh?
Speaker 3 (26:20):
You ever noticed that the play? You haven't noticed. That's
a great point. They were the first stand up comedians.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
Love it.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
I mean, they probably had a high turnover rate depending
on their material.
Speaker 4 (26:38):
But we do know.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
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
(26:59):
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
(27:22):
are like filming a music video or something. So do
you see sumptuary laws continuing into the future.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
The gun and then they saw the hat, and the
cops said, ah.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
Let's keep going.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
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,
(28:16):
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
(28:36):
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
(29:01):
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
(29:21):
oppressive capitalists conspiracy because.
Speaker 4 (29:25):
I could get behind that agree. You know.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
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
(29:49):
that still remains something that they're case built.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
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,
(30:16):
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,
(30:38):
but I know it's interesting.
Speaker 3 (30:39):
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
(31:02):
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.
Speaker 4 (31:15):
I think that's true.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Right, that's it exactly, I'm doing it now. Let me
take off my shirt.
Speaker 4 (31:43):
Constitution Year of Living Naked. Incredible, incredible.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
I hope you do most of your research in the summer, right,
just for weather purposes.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
That's true. Mann's a lot. Well, that's why I'll be
visiting Atlanta a lot.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
Yes, please do.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
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,
(32:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
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
(32:59):
delight full product. Can I call it a product?
Speaker 4 (33:03):
For a podcast product?
Speaker 2 (33:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
My goodness, that is well, thank god it's Thursday. I'm
sure right t G.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
I t a prodcast uh a j before we before
you hop out for further adventures. Where can people learn
more about your work?
Speaker 3 (33:30):
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.
Speaker 4 (33:46):
Flattery will get you somewhere.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
But yeah, I'm on. I have website a J Jacobs
dot com. Oh, I have a substack. So that's end
to me.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
What a substack is?
Speaker 2 (33:57):
It? Is? It just like a like a gussied up
male lists. There we bringing back the nailing list exactly.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
On the contrary, well that makes you an excellent substacker.
You're a substacker for the people.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Substacker for the people.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Yeah, like the nudists, I'm a socialist SUBSCT officer.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
I'm naked for the people right now.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
And weirdly, substack is also a euphemism for the penis.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
There you go, There you go.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
That's all I got said.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
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.
Speaker 4 (34:47):
In the credits.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
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.
Speaker 4 (35:03):
Can you imagine?
Speaker 2 (35:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Nice and Jonathan Strickland aka the Quist is.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
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.
Speaker 4 (35:33):
That's true, that's true. We need to bring her back.
She's so cool. Have you heard about this person?
Speaker 2 (35:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
No, okay, I'm a real class expert. Yeah, but you've
had her on right.
Speaker 4 (35:58):
I'm gonna listen one once. And yet we thank her
at the end.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
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.
Speaker 4 (36:17):
Thanks to you Man, Dang you as well, Buddy. We'll
see you next time, folks.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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