fashion history, a talk with richard thompson ford [video]

This episode features a discussion between Emma Chamberlain and Richard Thompson Ford on the intricate relationship between fashion, identity, and power dynamics throughout history.

1. Fashion is deeply intertwined with personal identity and social power structures.
2. Legal and societal dress codes have often discriminated against marginalized communities.
3. Changes in fashion norms reflect broader shifts in societal values and norms.
4. Modern fashion consumption has significant environmental and ethical consequences.
5. The conversation challenges listeners to rethink fashion as a complex social phenomenon rather than a trivial concern.

1: Introduction

Emma introduces the episode and her interest in fashion history. She discusses her background and her excitement about learning from Richard Thompson Ford. Emma Chamberlain: "I love fashion right now. I love fashion in the current moment."

2: Fashion as Identity and Power

Richard discusses fashion's role in identity formation and social navigation, particularly during his youth and professional career. Richard Thompson Ford: "Fashion and clothing was a way to kind of navigate the social scene. It was a way to set myself off, a way to exert some personality that wasn't just my race."

3: Legal Battles Over Fashion

The conversation shifts to how legal issues surrounding fashion reflect deeper societal biases and discrimination, particularly against women and racial minorities. Richard Thompson Ford: "Dress codes that require women to wear makeup or tease their hair or wear high-heeled shoes can be challenged as sex discrimination."

4: Historical and Modern Fashion Consumption

Discusses the evolution of fashion consumption from bespoke to mass production, highlighting the social and environmental impacts of modern fast fashion. Richard Thompson Ford: "The fashion industry is one of the larger contributors to environmental pollution and degradation."

5: Concluding Thoughts

Emma and Richard discuss the potential for fashion to empower individuals while recognizing the ongoing challenges posed by societal norms and expectations. Emma Chamberlain: "It's interesting that you say that. You never can imagine. Like, you don't think there'll ever be a time where it doesn't matter what we're wearing."

1. Explore the history behind your fashion choices to understand their broader social implications.
2. Consider the environmental impact of your fashion consumption and opt for sustainable brands.
3. Challenge discriminatory dress codes that perpetuate gender, racial, or religious biases.
4. Use fashion as a means of personal expression, while being mindful of its social context.
5. Engage in discussions about fashion to raise awareness of its significance beyond aesthetics.

[video available on spotify] i love fashion but i wouldn't consider myself a fashion nerd. i'm not super educated on the history of fashion and so that’s why i'm excited to speak to richard thompson ford. he’s a stanford law professor and fashion history expert. richard’s also the author of several books, including “dress codes: how the laws of fashion made history.” he’s dug deep into fashion as a system of power, how the written and unwritten rules of fashion have evolved and influenced what we wear today. so let’s welcome richard thompson ford.

People

Emma Chamberlain, Richard Thompson Ford

Books

"Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History"

Guest Name(s):

Richard Thompson Ford

Content Warnings:

None

Emma Chamberlain
Fine, I'll admit it. I just love fashion. Ah, sorry. Okay, fine, I'll admit it. I love fashion.

I love fashion. But I wouldn't consider myself a fashion nerd in the sense that I'm not super educated on the history of fashion. I love the technical side of fashion, for example, like how to balance the colors of an outfit, or even the intricacies of how things are constructed, or the intricacies of how different fabrics work and how they lay on the body. Like, I love fashion in a very current way. You know, I love going to fashion shows and watching new collections come down the Runway in real time.

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

We've been wearing clothes for a very long time. And that's why I'm excited to sort of develop my knowledge about fashion history, which is why I'm so excited to be speaking to our guest today, Richard Thompson Ford. He is a Stanford law professor, Bay Area, Palo Alto represent. I'm not from Palo Alto, but I am from the Bay Area. So, you know, I feel close to him in that way.

I've never met him, but I think we're going to love each other. He is a fashion history expert. He also has expertise in many other, many other categories. But today I'm going to be talking to him specifically about fashion specifically. Richard has dug deep into fashion as a system of power, how the written and unwritten rules of fashion have evolved and still influence what we wear today.

He's written several books, the most recent one being dress codes, how the laws of fashion made history. And I'm so excited to learn more about fashion today beyond just like when did they create the corsets and why are they so snatched? Like, I, that's more than we're going to dig a little deeper than that today and really, really become fashion nerds together. And maybe you don't want that, maybe you don't, but I do. So to come along for the journey and I will welcome in now Richard Thompson Ford.

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Emma, we're gonna have a fashion day, you know, because you have so many things that you do, so many amazing things that you do. But I'm so curious about the fashion piece of it, because I think a lot of people look at fashion as something that is sort of materialistic. When you hear the word fashion, what comes to mind? It's like, it's materialistic, it's capitalism. It's this, it's that.

But there's so much more to it. What initially drew you to fashion and what particular piece of fashion was the most interesting to you? Well, what drew me to fashion initially was being a kid growing up. I grew up in a town called Fresno, and, yeah, no way oh, my God, my family. Yeah, I have family in Fresno.

Richard Thompson Ford
Oh, is that right? Yes. Yeah, yeah. I grew up in Fresno, and I went to a high school, which was great in many ways. I was one.

One of a very few african american kids there. And right away, fashion and clothing was a way to kind of navigate the social scene. It was a way to set myself off, a way to exert some personality that wasn't just my race. And I found that really useful and powerful. And so it got me interested in fashion trends.

I had a preppy phase. I had a punk rock phase, you know, I mean, all the stuff that kids go through. Yes. So it initially, the interest sort of started with how you could use it to sort of create, like, manipulate identity in a way. Like, you know, it's like you can go in and your clothes can speak for you in some ways.

Emma Chamberlain
Okay, so it started there and then. How did it sort of evolve to today? Sort of fill in the blanks from that initial moment of, like, I love this. This is, you know, maybe in a way, sort of an art form or a way to speak. What then made it such a focus, I guess, in your career?

Richard Thompson Ford
Well, a couple things. One's personal and one's professional. My father was also stylish person. He had great clothes and a great sense of style. Yes.

You know, I wish I could have worn some of his clothes, but we were not the same size because he had some great stuff. He studied as a tailor. He was a professional. He was a university professor and administrator, but he actually studied as a tailor at a historically black college at a time when they insisted that the students learn a trade as well as a profession in case they needed something to fall back on. So he always talked about clothing.

But the thing I saw as a kid was he used clothing as a way to navigate his surroundings. He was one of the only black people at the Cal State university, Fresno, where he worked. So I noticed that. And the way clothing mattered for him. It was fun, and he liked it, just his style, but it also had this very serious side, and that was powerful.

Professional side is I teach a variety of classes in law, including employment discrimination, and there are a lot of lawsuits around clothing. People suing their employers for a dress code that, for instance, requires them to wear something they don't want to wear. So dress codes that require women to wear makeup or tease their hair or wear high heeled shoes can be challenged as sex discrimination. Dress codes that forbid head coverings might be challenged as discrimination on the basis of religion. If your religion requires a head covering.

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

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

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

There was a case involving an african american woman who had locks, and the employer had a dress code against unprofessional hairstyles. And so it said that hairstyle is unprofessional. You have to change your hairstyle. Now, the way the courts typically would analyze that would be to say, well, is the hairstyle part of her race? If it's part of her race, then maybe she has a legal claim.

But if it's not part of a race, then it's just a workplace rule, and you've got to change your haircut. But what they left out was all the ways that that hairstyle might be important to her that weren't directly about race, might have been indirectly about it, but also the way it would be. They didn't care about the fact that it would be impossible for her to change her hairstyle and put it back, because the nature of that hairstyle, they didn't think about the fact that what they were really talking about wasn't just, you have to show up for work with a different hairstyle, but you've got to change your hairstyle permanently. Because that hairstyle can't be switched back and forth. It just kind of went right over the head of the court.

And so there are a lot of cases involving things like that where they just seem to not get it. I guess that is sort of part of the problem is this sort of misunderstanding of what fashion, and, I guess, identity as a whole really is. Like, I think, I guess, and this can even just be a personal opinion. How important is it that we protect our, you know, our fashion choices, our choices with our hair, our choices with our makeup? How important is that?

Emma Chamberlain
And is there any moment when we should be like, okay, I guess. I guess I have to change? Like, you know, what sort of. There is no manual for life, but what is sort of your ideal? What's the mantra?

What's the. You know what I mean? Yeah. You know, I'm not against all dress codes, so I think there are times when the dress codes perfectly reasonable, it's necessary people should just comply with the dress code. But I think that what people don't get, it's what you're getting at with, why is it important to the individual and why is it not trivial?

Richard Thompson Ford
And when you need to navigate the world, and maybe it's a cert authority, maybe it's a cert competence. The way you come across matters, how you feel in your own skin matters. And I think people who don't understand that are usually people who almost always feel comfortable because the norms and the rules are set up for them. So they've never confronted a situation where someone says, you know, something that is kind of central to your identity is. Is banned.

So a lot of the, in the book, I try to talk about examples. A lot of them involve women where the dress code is really working against their ability to do their job or to be successful at something that, you know, you have to wear this outfit, and that outfit's going to make it psychologically or symbolically really hard to accomplish what you want to accomplish. So your clothing's working against you, and that's a problem that only certain people face in certain circumstances. This episode is brought to you by bumble. Dating can be exhausting.

Emma Chamberlain
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Can we kind of dig into the history of women's fashion? Because I think it's so fascinating and there's so much. I think we all just think of the corset, right? And we just, and you know what? Sometimes my stylist still puts me in a corset and it's fashion and we hate it.

And every time I put one on, I'm like, how in the world did women wear this every day? Like, I'm grumpy when I'm in a corset for like a photo shoot or something. It's a nightmare. Anyway, little women's fashion history, what are the key points? So I guess the key point I'd begin with is that there's a moment in history where men's and women's fashions, or a couple moments, actually, where they diverge in really important ways.

Richard Thompson Ford
So one of them is in the late middle ages or early renaissance, and there's a moment when fashion starts to really take off. Tailoring becomes a big deal throughout Europe, and it's happening for men. So for a long period in history, all of the innovative fashions, the newest fashions, the sexiest fashions, they're for men, not women. So the men get all this tailored clothing, they get leggings. They can show their legs in public.

And the women are still in draped clothing, which used to be what everyone wore. That's an important moment. And up until about the 17 hundreds, women's fashion is following trailing men's fashion. And they're getting little pieces of what the boys got, but not everything. And the one big one is the women always have to be draped below the waist.

Pants are forbidden, and a woman wearing pants could be subject to arrest in the middle ages, in the Renaissance, they had a crime in England called misrule. So a woman wearing pants would be liable for sexual misrule. And it was assumed that wearing pants meant that she was also engaged in other morally objectionable behavior just for wearing pants. So, wow, this was a big deal. And so it's a big part of masculine privilege to be able to wear this fashion and an insertion of masculine power.

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

Push, pull there. So that's the one important moment. The second one happens in the late 17 hundreds. And it's a moment that some historians describe as the great masculine renunciation. And so the great masculine renunciation is when men start to become unfashionable, they start to reject fashion.

So men used to wear brocade, jewels, makeup, high ranking, very macho men are wearing makeup, eyelash, curler, blush, powdered wigs, the whole works, love. Yet it's normal masculine fashion for elite men sometime in the mid to late 17 hundreds, men throughout Europe. It starts in England, and it kind of spreads. Start to renounce all of that, and you get the kind of precursor to the modern suit. It's streamlined, it's sober, it's dark colors.

And it's a really important symbolic thing because political ideals are changing. And so rather than societies based on aristocratic privilege, you're getting the enlightenment and the norm of industriousness, sobriety, rationality, that's important. And so the clothing starting to match that practical. I'm sober, I don't care about fashion. So this is probably familiar, right?

That's the typical masculine ideal. Now I don't care about fashion. Then suddenly women are the fashionable ones, and the women have the ruffles and the brocade and the jewels and all the rest of it. So they're still, in one sense, kind of trailing behind, in the sense that the modernized fashion is now this masculine fashion that's redescribed as not fashion at all, but just being well dressed. And the women are frivolous and fashionable and silly.

Emma Chamberlain
Zachary, you mentioned that, you know, at one point, if a woman was wearing pants, she could go to jail. When did. Like, I feel like now we can wear. I mean, in America, we can kind of wear whatever. Like, there's.

There's really no laws. I mean, yeah, you might have dress codes at school, but I feel like now it's. It is so vastly different. It's like we have so much freedom, you know, now we can wear anything. So I'm curious about how we got from such extreme to such extreme, you know, like it.

Which is amazing. Happy to be here now, but there must be a lot that happened in between there. Yes, there. So several things happened back. If we go back to the late middle ages and the Renaissance, there were all kinds of laws about what people could wear.

Richard Thompson Ford
Some historians call them sumptuary laws, and they had to do with who could wear fine, elaborate clothing. It was regulated according to social rank, so you had to be of a particular aristocratic status in order to wear certain things so that people would know on site what part of society you belonged in. And then those kind of sumptuary laws start to go by the wayside. So by the 17 hundreds, there's not much of that left, but you still have laws about public indecency. And so those kind of pick up as the strong legal prohibitions where the women wearing pants all the way up through the early 20th century would be considered indecently dressed and therefore subject to arrest for that, even though there are no comprehensive dress codes.

Those kind of laws continue until, you know, the sixties and seventies. And in the 1970s, you start to get a lot of pushback against that based on changing norms about personal expression, changing gender norms. A lot of interesting cases involving people who were, you know, what they called back then? Cross dressing. So wearing clothing not pertaining to their gender, and they would challenge those laws as a violation of the right to freedom of expression and as vague what counts as male and female gender in terms of clothing.

I don't understand what you're talking about. So those cases started to break down enforcement of public indecency laws. So at this point, they're pretty rarely enforced. They're still on the books, and there are still cases where these laws were enforced. You know, sagging pants, kind of that hip hop style.

Yeah, I mean, there are some cities that are still enforcing bans against those as either public indecency because, you know, you're showing your undergarments. They passed new ordinances banning that kind of fashion, so they're still out there. But, you know, you're right for the most part. Yeah, we're kind of past that. What do you think about, for example, you know, that rule against sagging pants?

Emma Chamberlain
Like that one specifically? Let's just dig into that for 1 second. Do you think that showing, say, undergarments is, is wrong? No, I don't. And I mean, a few things about that.

Richard Thompson Ford
I think that when that started, it was new and shocking. And new uses of fashion are often met with moral disapproval. Always, you know, so, oh, my God, she's wearing her underwear. But, you know, there was a time in which a t shirt would be considered underwear and scandalous to wear, so there's that. Certainly this was racially targeted.

I mean, there's really no doubt that the targeting of the sagging pants in particular was about young african american men who were also considered to be a social threat in other ways. And that's why that was targeted. Yeah, there are a lot of problems with that 1000. Yeah, with those kinds of laws, it. Must be a very challenging battle to fight when there are, say, these sort of dress codes that are targeted.

Emma Chamberlain
But maybe they're, they're not blatantly targeted. It's a sneaky way of targeting because it's not, it's not blatant. Like, there are certain things that I think are blatant. For example, like, you know, there are certain hairstyles that say, you know, are traditional to, you know, whereas, say, sagging pants. It's like that might be a trend within a community, but it's like, it's something that maybe everyone.

It's challenging to navigate when it's not something that's obvious on paper. Like, do you see what I'm saying? Yes. Oh, absolutely. That's what's so challenging.

Richard Thompson Ford
Yes. When it's like, yeah, but anyone can sag their pants. I guess it's like, how, how has that been fought? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. When some of these sagging pants bands and the criticism and, you know, during the 1990s, 1980s and 1990s, the criticism was ferocious.

You know, everyone for a while was talking about sagging pants. Politicians, you know, running for president, all kinds of people talking about sagging pants. Like there weren't more important issues to deal with, but it was, and people of all races, by the way, which gets to your point about it being challenging to confront this because you'd have a lot of black people saying, yeah, the sagging pants, they're terrible. We've got to do something about that. So then how can you say it's racist?

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

The style starts to spread. You get athletes wearing it. You get people of different races wearing it. And after a while, everyone starts to understand that this is just another style and it's not a symbol of a social menace. But I think people have to get used to seeing it in a lot of different places first.

And it's really hard to fight that idea when it first appears that, you know, oh, my God, this is actually something that's quite, quite threatening. There's so many different sort of dress codes for different things. Like, there's dress codes for work, and then there's dress codes for school, and then for. For going out to a party, and then for hanging out with friends, and then even pajamas. Like, there are so many different sort of, many little dress codes that are peppered into our day to day life.

Emma Chamberlain
Do you foresee sort of different informal dress codes changing in the future? Like, and in what ways do you, would you predict? Oh, that's tough. Okay. I know.

I mean, it's impossible. I know. So the easy part is I definitely, there will be informal dress codes in the future. I have no doubt about that. I do not think we will live to see the day when it really doesn't matter what you're wearing.

Yeah. I think people will care about it, and there will be lots of informal expectations, and they will be informally but powerfully enforced. Now, what exactly that's going to look like is trickier. You know, I mean, one thing, you could kind of begin to parse the symbolism of certain types of clothing by looking at norms in the past and how things have evolved. So, for instance, the, you know, this kind of a jacket is called the sport jacket because it used to be worn for sports.

Yeah. And so there's a pretty consistent historical trend over hundreds of years of clothing that was once sporting clothing, later becoming, you know, business attire. And I think we still see that today. Yeah. So that, like, investment bankers who used to have a suit and tie dress code until very, very recently, now, there's no dress code in most of these banks, but they've all gravitated towards something called the midtown uniform.

Richard Thompson Ford
I don't know if there's an Instagram page. I don't know if you've seen it, but it's a patagonia fleece and a button down college. They all wear exactly the same thing. They're everywhere in Palo Alto. Yeah.

Emma Chamberlain
That uniform is everywhere. Yes. Right. There's no dress code. They're all wearing exactly the same thing.

That's true. It is interesting how humans just. We like to feel like a part of a community, and I think that the, you know, the whole Patagonia vest and the. That whole uniform is. It's no more, like, effective than a north face vest, but it is.

That is the uniform. It's interesting that you say that. You never can imagine. Like, you don't think there'll ever be a time where it doesn't matter what we're wearing. And that tells me that it's because it holds more value than I think we think it does historically.

What is, like, the through line? Why is it so powerful? Like, why? Because it just shouldn't be that big of a deal. When you really break it down, it's like you're just staying warm, covering up your.

Like, why does it matter so much? Yeah, I think it matters because clothing, at least since this moment that I described as the birth of fashion, when tailoring really takes off, it becomes a way, in one sense, to transform the human body. And this was really clear in the, let's say, in Tudor era England, when Queen Elizabeth I would wear these magnificent gowns, and they were architectural. You know, they had shoulders that were sculpted and skirts that were built out, and a lot of the fashion in that period of time for both men and women, had these characteristics. If you were in the elite and people commented that she looked otherworldly, she looked superhuman.

Richard Thompson Ford
And that power of fashion, I think, has never gone away. So there's that. And then fashion allows us to immediately make associations with other periods of history, other people, other groups. So you can communicate an enormous amount in a split second by what you're wearing, including communicating things that you wouldn't want to say out loud. So fashion lets you do all of that, and I think that's why it's extremely powerful.

And as long as we are embodied, flesh and blood human beings, until we can upload our consciousness into the cloud or something, that's going to matter. Yep. It's so true. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Imagine you find something that you love.

Emma Chamberlain
Maybe you see your friend wearing a cool t shirt, and you're like, oh, I want that. And then they give you the website and you go onto it and it just doesn't feel quite right. That doesn't make you want to buy that t shirt. A good website is crucial when it comes to selling your product or a brand. Squarespace is the all in one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online.

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Do you think it's important for people to pay attention to fashion, or do you think it's sort of like, do you think it's optional? I think it's not not optional when we speak of fashion in the broadest sense. So when we're talking about, do you care what you're wearing? I don't think that's optional. And I think people who say that they don't care, are not self aware or not being honest.

Richard Thompson Ford
I'm sorry. Some people would be upset at me for saying that, but I don't buy it. Yeah. I think that they may dress to look as if they don't care about fashion. Yeah.

Emma Chamberlain
And that is, but that is also a choice. Exactly. Wow, that's a great point. For example, like, Mark Zuckerberg wears a gray t shirt, you know, really famous example. And people would say, you know, come on, fashion doesn't matter.

Richard Thompson Ford
Look, you know, the CEO of a billion dollar, multi billion dollar corporation just wears a great t shirt. Yeah. But when you hear what he says about why he said something like this, it's not a direct quote, but I wear this great t shirt because if I wasted my time thinking about trivial things like fashion, I wouldn't have time to do my job, to be the best CEO of Facebook, and I would devote all my time to that. So what's the gray t shirt now? Is it a matter of indifference?

No, it's a symbol of the work ethic. Right. And so if you're not wearing a great t shirt, if you look like you care about fashion, that suggests you're wasting your time on trivial things when you should be working. Yeah. And people actually said that.

So when she was then the CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer got a vogue fashion spread. She's a fashionable young woman. Of course she's going to do it. It's lots of fun. People in Silicon Valley said, look at her.

She looks like she's going to a party or on vacation while everyone else is working. Working. So people do care. Yeah. You know, and there's just another, it's like an inverted dress code at this point.

If you look like you care now, that's a problem. Yeah. What would you say to people who get really, like, I'm remembering even like Miley Cyrus, for example, when she came out and all of a sudden she's like, you know, wearing really revealing clothes and like, you know, whatever. Everybody was up in arms, like as though she killed their family. What are your thoughts on that?

Emma Chamberlain
Like, what people get really just angry about what other people wear. Number one, why do you think that is? And number two, is that healthy or. No, I think it's. No, but I want to hear you elaborate.

Richard Thompson Ford
I think it's often unhealthy. And I would say, I think it's, sometimes it's inevitable and sometimes people dress in order to provoke a response and then it's not surprising that they are successful in doing that. But I think that often it's unhealthy, particularly when it's directed at women. So I'm going to come back to this point about the way women are forced into catch 22s around their attire constantly and criticized no matter what they do. And so I think a lot of women, when they dress in a way that might be considered provocative, are trying, in an odd way, to take control of the gendered norms around clothing.

You know, that they've lived their lives being pushed and pulled in these directions. You know, either you're too frumpy or you're too sexy, your outfit's boring or it's slutty. It's back and forth, and they're just like, you know, I'm just gonna wear something where there's just no argument about it and call me what you want. Do you think that it works? That's a hard one.

Yeah, I think it can work for some women if they are ready for the reactions. But I do think that often it doesn't work because you don't opt out of the judgment. I mean, it's also not for you at the end. Yeah. It's still not for you.

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

Emma Chamberlain
This is like an, I want to empower myself, so I'm going to go ahead and do this, but then that doesn't do it either. It's almost like, I think ultimately to set yourself free. And maybe it's not this simple, but I'm curious to hear your, your thoughts. It's like, maybe to set yourself free, you have to do something that's just completely a reflection of your personality, whatever that is. So it can't, it.

Not any extreme, necessarily, but it must just be the truest representation of you. So it's like if somebody's dressing as an act of rebellion, but then they're like, this doesn't even feel like me, then it doesn't work. It's almost like the biggest act of rebellion is to address, however, what is the most truly you, maybe. I don't know. Yeah, it's so I hear what you're saying about how it's like there's nowhere to win, right?

Richard Thompson Ford
That you're reacting. So if you're reacting to something, that you're not in control, you're, you're now in a responsive posture to some other thing, patriarchy, whatever, the male gaze, all of that. And I do think people are often buffeted back and forth by that kind of thing. I mean, I would love it if there were a way for people to dress only for themselves, but I have to say, I skeptical that that's possible. I think I agree.

Emma Chamberlain
Yeah, I completely agree. I think one is always dressing for other people and to communicate something. And maybe the only, to the extent it's a solution, solution is to recognize that and decide what you want to say, decide what you want to communicate with your clothing. Now, that doesn't solve, that doesn't help women out of the catch 22. And I think that's a matter, honestly, of political activism.

Richard Thompson Ford
You mean that's a case where there needs to be sustained pushback against unfair gendered expectations around clothing. What do you, what do you think about sort of the way that we're consuming fashion today compared to how we used to consume fashion, you know, a few hundred years ago? I mean, it's definitely different. Yes, because it used to be like, what? You'd buy a new pair of shoes every five years.

Emma Chamberlain
I mean, who knows? How is the way that we consume clothes different back then versus today? I mean, I think it's obvious, but I'm curious the sort of details of that. For a long period of time, any fashionable clothing was custom made and therefore very expensive and only available to the elite or people with lots of money. So you get mass produced clothing in the 18 hundreds.

Richard Thompson Ford
The Brooks brothers suit is one of the first examples of mass produced clothing. So now you're not going to the tailor and having something made. You can buy it in a catalog. It's cheaper. Europeans commented on the way Americans were also well dressed because this was the first country where you had this mass produced, cheap clothing.

Everywhere. Everyone's wearing a nice waistcoat. So one person said, a mob in the United States is a mob in silk waistcoats. Yeah, because rabble can afford this. Shoes were still really expensive.

So you mentioned shoes, and that's where the term well heeled comes from, because, you know, you're rich if you've got nice shoes. Those weren't easily mass produced. And so our real disposable attitude toward clothing, I think, is pretty recent. Yeah. And, you know, that disposable attitude for everybody, as opposed to just the very, very wealthy, fashionable set who would have a new, follow the new spring fashions and what have you.

But it's a tiny sliver of the population now. Almost everybody can do that if they go to some fast fashion store where they're copying the high fashion clothing at a very low price point. Yeah. And, you know, as to how I feel about it, there's a lot of waste involved. It's not great for the environment.

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

Emma Chamberlain
I know. I'm so about that right now, where I'm like, buy one really good thing instead of five really shitty things. Go in, like, you know, and. And make it a part of your uniform in a way, and, like, you know, have fun with accessorizing and, like, do other things. I.

Cause I. I was such a consumer, you know, I was like, I love fashion. I need to have everything. This is the cheaper option. Like, in high school, I was ordering fast fashion stuff all the time.

I. You know, then eventually I found thrift shopping, and I was like, this is actually more fun. And then. Because thrifting was not cool when I was little, and then now going to the thrift store is, like, cool. Isn't that wild?

Yeah, it was not that way when I was a kid. I actually do think it's kind of cool, though, that now it almost feels like fashion is less about. It's about having a cool outfit, period. People are less concerned about, what brand is this? What brand is that?

It is more about, at least with Gen Z, like, I don't know. It's more about, like, just wearing a cool outfit because thrifting is cool. It's almost like a weapon now to be like, I thrifted this, you know? So it's interesting to see that it's becoming almost, in some ways, more of something to brag about when you got something for a deal, and it's cool. And I still look cooler than you.

Like, that's the flex now, but maybe that's just a smaller. Cause. I still do think that the big designer brands and all these, you know, expensive sorts of things still have societal impact. But maybe we're going in a direction where it's lessening a little bit. I also think it's lessening a little bit because there's a lot of fake designer that looks pretty real.

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

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

So it's an issue. And I still think the fashion brands have got a lot of cultural clout and it's interesting how they navigate that. So I'm thinking of Gucci and their collaboration with Dapper Dan. I don't know. Do you remember?

So dapper Dan during the, the eighties and nineties was the hip hop tailor up in Harlem who made clothing for artists like Eric B and Rakim and Salt and Peppa. And they were. He used fake Gucci and fake Louis Vuitton fabrics to make these jackets and suits and clothing, really cool stuff. And they sued him. Of course they did.

They sued him for trademark infringement and they put him out of business. But now he's collaborating with Gucci and so it's kind of come back full circle. So they're trying to figure out now they realize this stuff was cooler than most of the stuff that we put out officially, totally. And we want to be associated with it. It's always been true that part of the status of fashion has been about the expense, and part of it has been about savoir faire.

You know, what do you know? Do you know what to wear when you know what's appropriate? Back in the day, it was all about the appropriateness of clothing so that you would know that someone was from the wrong social class if she wore diamonds to a garden party. Because, you know, a truly elegant woman would never wear diamonds except to the theater or at night, and she'd know to wear something else. So there was this kind of thing.

But I think your thrifting example, to go back to that, it's still got a little element of that without all the class snobbery, where what's cool is to know how to put together a cool outfit, not just to have enough money to go and buy out the Gucci boutique. Yep. It's almost like that's what I do love about sort of that section of, like, fashion right now is it is more about, do you know how to put something together that's cool and feels different. Cause it's so saturated and everyone's wearing the same thing. It's almost more about having something that no one else has than it is about, at least in some corners of the fashion world.

Emma Chamberlain
But, yeah, it's more about that than it is about having the hottest new, you know, designer bag, because it's like, anyone can get that, whereas not just anyone can find, like, this random Betsy Johnson pair of heels from 1996. Like, you just, like, only you have those. And that's almost a currency of its own. What is sort of your wish for the world when it comes to our. Our human relationship to fashion?

Where would you like to see it change and evolve? And what does that look like? And it can also be like, I know that this needs to change. I don't know how, but just anything. The answer can be whatever you want the answer to be.

But I'm just curious what a bright future looks like in your eyes. I'd love to see a world where people can dress in the way that empowers them, understanding that you've got to navigate. And it's a social relationship. You know, fashion is a relationship with other people. So it's not all about the individual, but we're dress codes and expectations and norms around fashion that are designed to produce hierarchies, that are designed to reinforce class snobbery, that are designed to put women on that catch 22 treadmill.

Richard Thompson Ford
Those are gone. And what's left is a landscape in which people can use clothing in order to, you know, express themselves, their connections with other people in a variety of ways. I don't want to say any way they see fit because that's not realistic. Yeah. But that there are a variety of ways where people can find a way to be comfortable.

And I'll throw in sustainability, so maybe better clothing, but less of it. Yeah. Took the words out of my mouth. This was amazing. Thank you.

So fun. So much. Thank you. Oh, my God. I learned so much today.

Emma Chamberlain
I learned so much. That's great. This was really fun. Awesome.

Richard Thompson Ford
Awesome.