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Dressed: The History of Fashion
Fashioning the Guinness World Records with Benjamin Hollingum (Dressed Classic)
00:49:09
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- [00:01]
A
This episode is brought to you by Prime Obsession is in session. And this summer, prime originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories, and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice off campus. Elle every year. After the Love Hypothesis, Sterling Point and more, slow burns, second chances, chemistry you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on prime. Ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play. You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit red bull.com brightsummerahead to learn more. See you this summer.
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B
Please enjoy one of our favorite episodes from the Dressed archive of over 500 plus shows. With over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common. Every day we all get dressed.
- [01:28]
A
Welcome to Dressed the History of Fashion, a podcast where we explore the who, what, when of why we wear. We are fashion historians and your hosts,
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B
April Callahan and Cassidy Zachary. April, hello. Hello. I am curious, if you were going to attempt a Guinness World Record, what would it be and why?
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A
Oh gosh, that's really hard. Actually just coming to mind immediately, I would say maybe most books ever read, maybe world's longest nap. I don't know, I suppose those two things are rather antithetical to each other. Maybe I could stay up for a few years reading and then follow it with that nap. I don't know. If you gave me longer to think, I bet I would come up with a few more things.
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B
Yeah, I was actually going to say I bet you could get the world record for like most lipsticks in a purse at one time or something like that Largest lipstick collection.
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A
It did get rather ridiculous the other day and I stopped myself from texting you and I was like I have nine, there's nine lipsticks in my backpack. But I guess same question to you. What about your Guinness World record?
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B
I think I would like to apply for the record for largest collection of fashion history related books.
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A
Oh, I bet you're plugging away on that slowly over there.
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B
I think my husband would say that yes, I have the world's largest collection of fashion history books and they it keeps growing every single week.
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A
Yes. Speaking of fashion and dress related Guinness World Records listeners, there is a surprisingly long list of them ranging from the famous A category which includes records such as the most expensive sweater ever sold at Auction. This happens to be Kurt Cobain's gray mohair cardigan, which was worn on MTV's Unplugged in 1993, which apparently sold for $334,000 in 2019. And not just celebrity related, there's also the historical Guinness World Record holders for clothing types items like the world's oldest shoes. And those happen to be a pair of ancient sagebrush sandals associated with several different North American indigenous groups. And some of those casts have been carbon dated to 9,300 to 10,500 years ago. We're not joking when we're saying ancient here.
- [03:53]
B
Yeah. No. Yes. So these and 15 other records are part of the Dress to Impress spread featured in this year's annual publication of the Guinness Book of World Records. And something that I am pleased to say I worked on as a consultant, collaborating with Ben Hollingham, senior editor at Guinness World Records, researcher extraordinaire, and today's guest.
- [04:15]
A
Yes. And I remember when you guys were working on this and I was always like, what are they up to? Extra.
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B
So much fun.
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A
You were keeping it under wraps. But this is why we. I am so excited for today's episode, and we are pleased to welcome Ben to the show to talk all things fashion and Guinness World Records. Ben, welcome to the show.
- [04:36]
B
Ben, welcome to Dressed. Thank you so much for joining me today.
- [04:40]
C
Hi.
- [04:42]
B
So I am so excited to talk to you. We, of course, collaborated over the past year on this fashion spread for Guinness World Records that we're going to dive into. But first, I'd love to just introduce our listeners to you and what you do, starting with how does one become a senior editor for Guinness World Records? What kind of led you to this job?
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C
I got into the publishing industry the traditional way, which is through random chance. I think I stumbled into it by accident. And that seems to be generally how people end up in this line of work. They're either like, very diligent and they worked very hard to get where they are, or they just ended up working as an editor somehow. I had a job moving boxes for a company that were moving offices. That company happened to be a publishing firm. I was just out of university and confused, and they said, do you want to be an editor? And I went, yeah, that's what I've been doing ever since. Yeah, it's a strange job.
- [05:40]
B
Yeah. But and particularly for Guinness World Records, which is not a job that you come across every day. There's only a handful of people who get to work for this company. And it's such a Fascinating and interesting kind of pocket of popular culture that's been around for I think 60 plus years now.
- [05:58]
C
Nearly 70.
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B
Oh, wow. Can you tell us a little bit about the history of Guinness World Records? For people who might not know, this is really fascinating, like how the origin story of Guinness World Records and how it came to be.
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C
So it begins with a man with the wonderful name of Sir Hugh Beaver, who was the director of the Guinness Brewery. And he was at a country house somewhere in Ireland shooting birds of some kind. It was all very Downton Abbey, lots of tweed and break action shotguns. And he and another guest at this event got into a argument about what was the fastest game bird in Europe. And he was left afterwards thinking, if only there was some sort of resource where I could definitively say which was the fastest. And that idea stayed in his head for a few years. And then in 1954 he had the idea of what if we made a book that's like the ultimate argument settler and distributed it to pubs and bars as a sort of fun little gimmick? And they recruited a pair of eccentric twins called Ross and Norris McWhirter who ran a fact checking agency in London. And they put together the book and it was a runaway success and they ended up selling it, which wasn't the original plan. I think they'd originally planned to distribute it to pubs and it became a huge runaway success and it's just been part of things ever since. We're not owned by the Guinness Brewery anymore. We became our own separate thing about 20 years ago, I think. But we keep the name just because it would be confusing if we weren't Guinness World Records.
- [07:38]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I guess I should have known there was somehow a connection, but I never in a million years would have made it, I guess because it's.
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C
It is quite a strange beginning for a publishing firm. Yeah. As an aside, I had a quick look on the system and we don't actually have a record for the fastest game bird. Never have. We don't categorize animals into whether or not you can shoot them.
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B
So not anymore.
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C
I'm afraid I don't know the answer to Hugh's question.
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B
Fast forward to today. Right. Guinness World Records has expanded exponentially, I would say. It's known all over the world, obviously, and is billed as the ultimate authority on record breaking achievements, which it absolutely is. And these categories include Space Extraordinary Exploits, Entertainment and Space Sports. So I'm just curious what qualifies and in many cases quantifies someone or something as a record.
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C
The Main things we look for with records is we want them to be something that can be standardized. So is it something that can be like a scientific experiment? Can the conditions be replicated by other people? If they want to break it, it needs to be breakable. You can't just have a thing where it's like the fewest fingers, none, and then where are you going to go from there? Although there is the exception to that. We deal with quite a lot in my work as a researcher, which is firsts. Although they can actually get broken, because sometimes we find older things. But yeah, and then there's. It needs to be verifiable, it needs to be measurable. So there needs to be a number, effectively, like, how many of the thing, how long is the thing, how much does the thing weigh? And you need to be able to measure that and come up with a specific figure for it, which is something that, in our research, I found myself quite often getting quite annoyed with writers when you'd come across a reference to, like, the biggest, biggest plume on a feathered headdress. And there's all these writers who wrote about how amazing it was and how it outraged London society and yet. But how big was it? You haven't given me a number. Like, enormous. Yes, yes. But Was it like 40 centimeters, 60 centimeters? That was huge. So, alas, that's a record that never made it into the book because I couldn't get a number for it.
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B
And you've given us some insights into your job. And something I loved about working with you and something I learned about what you do is that you do a lot of historical research into history and around the world to find these firsts. And you and I worked on locating some of these firsts in fashion history. But can you tell us a little bit more about your job? What is your process for research? And then how do you produce historical records? Do you come up with them as a team? Or is it whatever pops into your head that day or something you're reading that inspires it? Because I feel like the world's your oyster for these records.
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C
One of the things you're saying about something you read that inspires it is that once you've been doing this for a certain amount of time, you can't switch it off. So you'll be just going about your business, listening to a podcast, reading a book, and you'll go, that's a superlative, definitely measurable. And you make a little note on your phone, and it just means that you never quite switch off to the Point where you find yourself avoiding podcasts, where you're like, I think they're going to talk about record things. And I don't want to be thinking about that right now. But yeah. So the normal way we do it is we start with just me and my colleagues, Craig, Adam and Aishwarya. We sit down and we just think through what would we like to talk about in this year's book? And we then work forward from there. We find consultants, so people like you. And then we will often go off and start looking for potential avenues. And obviously that starts the same place everywhere starts, which is Wikipedia. And you start with things like that and you start pulling on threads and looking into things. And for historical stuff, I often make a lot of use of newspaper archives. And we're also. I also have a membership to the London Library, which is a research library in London that has a wonderful collection of stuff to do with fashion history, because it's a kind of fascinating place. It came out of a. Similarly came out of an argument, but a much more acrimonious argument between philosopher Thomas Carlyle and the head of the British Library. He basically was like, this is rubbish. I'm going to start my own library and it's going to have fireplaces and comfy chairs and Thomas. Yes. So we would go. So I go there and I just look through books, I just grab stuff and go, that looks interesting. And I spend a day reading through those and trying to. Just making notes on things that sound interesting and. Yeah, and then I put ideas to you and I send lots of emails and I just generally badger people until they tell me answers. It means that I often ask very eminently qualified people stupid or childish questions. So I did have to talk to the sort of keeper of historical armor at the Royal Armouries Museum, which is part of the Royal Collection, was like, what's the biggest codpiece you have? And they were like. I was like, really big one. You have, like, metal ones? Do you have, like, separate, like, velvet ones? Or have they all fallen apart? And, yeah, she. She was a little confused by that line of questioning.
- [13:03]
B
Yeah. But it's really actually a fun exercise, I would say, for me, as someone who has now worked with you to do this, it's really fun to look back and see, okay, how can I find this record? And can I even find this record? Can I find something like the first sunglasses? And how would I qualify that? But I love when we could talk a little bit about you and I collaborating. You, of course, reached out to me, I think it was last summer, although with COVID it all kind of condenses, but I believe it was last summer. And we went back and forth for almost a year, maybe several months, developing this fashion spread. And obviously I really enjoy that you have an interest in fashion and dress history. And I'd love if we could geek out over that a little bit and maybe start with you telling me what inspired you to do this dress to impress spread and this 2023 Guinness World Records book.
- [13:54]
C
So it's a bit of a long and convoluted story for me. Weirdly, it starts with making guitars, which is a thing I do. And that got me interested in making things. When you start making things, you start looking at everything that is a made thing in a kind of slightly different way. And I was invited along to. My wife runs the workshops at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, which is big theatre school in London. And she invited me along to the final show that they do at the end of every year where all the students show off their wonderful things. And I found myself just fascinated by the costume designers and makers and their exhibition because they do a lot of historical costuming, they make corsets, they make period dress. And it's just a. It's a very good way, if you're a costume maker, to show off your skills is to make a sort of robe a la francaise or something like that, do all of that work and all of the enormous embroidered fabric and everything. And I found those just really interesting. And I started looking more into this and thinking, I wonder if there's. Because I also looked on our enormous database and was struck by how we don't really have anything in this area or didn't before last year. And I was like, this seems like a large chunk of human activity and history to not represent.
- [15:22]
B
Yeah. And to be clear, you do have a lot of fashion and dress records. I was looking through them before we got off the chat. These are the things that Guinness is known for, right? So you have the largest high heeled shoe, which is 12ft tall and 9 or 12ft long, 9ft tall. There's also the largest pair of blue jeans, which are 214ft and 10 inches tall or long and 140ft wide, which were made in Lima, Peru in 2019. So those are those records you're used to maybe associating with Guinness, but you did this wonderful dress to impress fashion spread that we collaborated on. And what's really fun about it is that it's basically a dressed mannequin that has then been populated with all of these different records that you and I did developed. And I'd love, if you can talk to us, what was the inspiration behind the mannequin? Because I thought that was such a unique and fun idea as like an entry point to this.
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C
So it was a bit of an issue of necessity being the mother of invention, because I've done this a few times now where we have started covering a subject we've never covered before, or at least not to any significant degree, and that it's always hard to build up. So our standard spread has seven or eight pictured records. It has 20, 25 records on it, and that's a lot to conjure from scratch. And so when we first do a subject, we often have to come at it from a slightly less content intensive way. And one of the records, first records you sent to me was the dress form slash mannequin of Tutankhamun. And I thought that was a really interesting thing. And I was thinking, like, how can I display, how can I picture that? Because it's a neat thing. But it does seem a bit weird to just have, ooh, I could put stuff on the mannequin. Yes. And then I have. And it was just like having coming up with a context. And it was also just generally tickled by the idea of dressing Tutankhamun up in a big dress.
- [17:29]
B
Yes. And so you're talking about what you qualify as the oldest mannequin, a life size torso and head that was discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun. It was stored by a chest of clothes and is thought to have been used to display outfits for the young pharaoh. And as we mentioned, this is the dress to impress spread, which I think is a first for the publication and obviously tickles me as a fashion historian to see you highlight fashion history in this way. Expedia and visit Scotland invite you to come experience the beauty that awaits in Scotland.
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- [19:17]
C
I was just looking for. I think it was actually one that we already had on our system, but it was quite a long way out of date. It had been broken a few times since we last updated it. But yes, it is discovered that Napoleon's hats. Hats is the key thing. It wasn't hat. He went through a hat about every three or four weeks and he used to give them to people as presents. So they show up at auction quite often. But it was a very fascinating thing because I discovered, you know, obviously we didn't get to mention much about this in this photo because he got so few words, but which was discovering that Napoleon's hat was a very conscious bit of personal branding. He wore a bicorn hat the wrong way around. You're supposed to wear it with the peaks front and back. He wore it with the peaks on either side. And he also had one that was comically large. It was this huge, enormous oversized hat. And this was his personal specifications. And he did this because it made him made his silhouette very distinctive, which made him easy to find. If a messenger needed to get a message to him. You would just like find the little guy with the giant hat.
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B
And he's of course anonymous with bicorn hats too. That's interesting. And I'm reading the record now that it was sold at auction for $2.3 million. Just this one hat, which you write is one of around 120 hats worn by Napoleon. And then we go down the way and we have the first sunglasses, which is a record that I worked on referencing Inuit snow goggles dating to the first century CE that were found in Alaskan and Siberian archaeological sites. So those are really fascinating. And of course were worn to protect the eyes from the glare of the snow. Made of wood or bone. Eye mask perforated by thin slits. They protected the wearer's eyes, as I said, from dazzling sunlight reflected off the snow. And then below that you have So a record I did not work on which was most valuable grill jewelry.
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C
Yes, that is Katy Perry's diamond encrusted grill. Where it's that thing of once you have the mannequin, you start thinking what else can I put on it? And you do find Yourself looking at the face and going, ooh, I think we have something for the face.
- [21:36]
B
Yeah, I'm thinking about that now. I guess you could have done earrings, you could have done a nose ring, but maybe that would have. Didn't have room obviously to put all those records, but it's kind of endless.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Below that we have the oldest jewelry, which is a group of 33 perforated shell beads from the sea. Sea snail Tritia gibbosula. Sorry if I butchered that.
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C
No idea.
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B
Were created and worn at least 142,000 years ago during the early Middle Stone Age. And these shells were excavated in a cave near Morocco from 2014 to 2018. So just really a symbol and emblematic of how dress has always been part and parcel to and adorning the body. People have been doing it for time. Immoral. So I love really the span of this spread, which also includes the oldest woven clothing, which is a V necked linen shirt found in the Tarkan cemetery south of Egypt of the Egyptian capital of Cairo that's dated to 3482 to 3102 BCE, which is this kind of pleated bodice that's thought to maybe have been a dress they're not entirely sure of. Hand woven linen. And then that's actually worn under something that you have put on top of it. Which is the most expensive sweater sold at auction. Do you want to tell us about that?
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C
That record I actually worked with. This was a few years ago. Worked with terribly. I can't remember his name, but he runs an auction house that do a lot of the rock and roll memorabilia. And this came up, which is Kurt Cobain's cardigan. And one of the things I find fascinating about it is the way that kind of association with a person can transform something that on the face of it is very much not appealing. Take a look at it objectively. And it is a slightly manky stained cardigan bought from a thrift store and worn sort of all the time. But because it was Kurt Cobain's cardigan and he used to wear it at gigs and things, it's notable. And it's also interesting because it says quite a lot about his own personal approach to fashion. Because he would just go to thrift stores and buy old clothes. And it wasn't an affected grunginess. The grunginess was entirely real. They were weird old clothes that he got from Goodwill, which is.
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B
Tells you something. Everything you need to know about fashion, which takes these personal and street styles and then makes this high end, fancy version of it. I think it was Marc Jacobs who brought grunge to the high fashion Runway at Perryalis and was promptly fired for it. This sweater was given meaning right off the street. Maybe first glance, you're not going to notice anything special about it, but it really speaks to the meaning that we embed in clothing and the cultural value, because this belonged to such a seismically important musician who died very young, just 27 years old. So 1993. Worn for his MTV Plugged appearance in 1993, and it sold in 2019 for $334,000. Wow, that is amazing.
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C
Probably the highest, highest value ever attained by an item of clothing that has mysterious, crunchy stainless steel listed in the description.
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B
But again, specifically speaks to this human. And that's part of the reason it's valuable. I love this spread too, because you're playing fashion history stylist, which is something I like to do, where you pick and choose things from throughout history, style them. So you have the cardigan over the oldest tunic and then you've paired it with the oldest trousers, which are 3,300 years old. Can you tell us what you learned about those pants, as we would say in the us?
- [25:36]
C
Oh, now, I think this might be an interesting little glimpse into the difficulties we always have. I think the final version of the spread, the oldest trousers were replaced with a pair of ancient Levi's because. And this is one of those interesting bits of practicality, which is we just couldn't get the picture for the oldest trousers, but we were able to find a pair of Levi's from 1887 or something. I can't remember exactly when that were. That were the most expensive Levi's. And we had to just mention the oldest trousers in passing. And that's one of those things we have whenever we're putting together these. These kind of features of where we're always. There's the difficulty of getting the right pictures and having stuff that works. And it can, because we're a picture LED book. It can sometimes lead to the sort of unfortunate things where someone comes up with a great record. And the problem is you're facing to the left in the picture and if you're just facing to the right, the composition would work much better.
- [26:36]
B
But yeah, and obviously you pointed out that I'm looking at one of the first spreads that was sent to me to look over. And now that I'm comparing it to the actual book, that was not the only thing that did not make the final cut. Actually, I am very Disappointed now because the Largest Chatelaine is no longer there.
- [26:54]
C
What happens again? That was a pictures problem. We couldn't get the rights for the pictures of the Largest chatelaine, which was very disappointing for me because I loved that record. I spent a lot of time digging around in big books called, like a history.
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B
Yeah, we talk a lot about chatelaines on the show because April and I are huge fans of them. They're just one of those fashion history objects that has gone away and doesn't remain, but they're so fascinating. So I was thrilled that you were working on that record. It was a decorative belt hook with 14 unique items from the 1860, I think, to 1880s, possibly made for Princess Alexandra of Denmark, wife of the future British King Edward vii. I'm sorry to have seen it go.
- [27:41]
C
This is the thing, which is, as I was saying, this was very much the kind of our first run at doing this subject, and I think we'll probably be revisiting it again the next year or two.
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A
Please do.
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C
Because as you're saying, there's a lot of material there, and it's just a question of finding the right people to badger about things.
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B
Continue to badger me. I had a blast. Tell us what you learned about the most toxic makeup.
- [28:06]
C
Oh, that's always fun. That's the. Was it white lead? You just smear heavy metals on your face to make your skin look whiter, and then it would make your teeth fall out, and it would make you really irritable and forgetful and confused. And interestingly, I think a lot of people associate that with Elizabeth I of England, but as I recall, I'm not sure if she actually wore it. I think it's. No one's really clear on that, because I think, interestingly, Elizabeth I is one of those ones where a lot of the accounts from her personal wardrobe, I think it was called Survive, And I don't think there are any references to that makeup, but I might be misremembering that. But, yeah, it's an interesting one of just. It's one of those topics that's often used as a. An example of sort of vanity and the dangers of. And it's. Yeah, I find it very interesting.
- [29:03]
B
But how accurate is it? Right. That's always the question we have, because you can find documentation of anything anywhere. People who sold these products. But how often did people actually use them?
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C
Right.
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B
That's really the question.
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C
How often did they wear them? How toxic were they in reality? And one of the things that often comes up is how Much more toxic than everything else. Were they? Because there was that. Interesting. I was reading again, I think it was Napoleon thing, talking about someone testing it for arsenic because they had this theory that maybe he'd been poisoned. And they were like, there's really high levels of arsenic in his hair and his sweat. And they're like, no, that was normal for people in the 19th century. Everyone was just slightly covered in arsenic at all times.
- [29:44]
B
Permeated a lot of different things. Including fashion. Green fashion, specifically. As we have talked about on the show. I also happen to know you had a lot of fun with the longest fashion shoe record. Oh, yes, the a.k.a.
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C
the Pike Shoe.
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B
Or Krakow.
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C
Yes. I love the fact that it was one of the things I did enjoy about it. It is that a lot of the narrative about fashion history focuses on this idea that it's something frivolous that women do. Whereas the pike chew was an almost exclusively male thing. And it was utterly ridiculous and to the point where I think it was. Several countries actually passed laws banning it. And it didn't seem to be for any reason other than this is stupid and annoying. Why are you doing it?
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B
And it was a status symbol. Right. And then it just became about who has the longest Krakow.
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C
Yeah. Look how long and pointy my shoes are. They're so long I have to have strings tied around my knees to stop them from dragging along the ground.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Yep.
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B
Super fascinating what people have done to decorate their bodies throughout time and history. Including the codpiece. The aforementioned codpiece.
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C
Yeah. I was writing about armor a bit recently, medieval armor. And that led me back to the codpiece and learning that apparently codpieces in sort of period dramas downplay how eye catchingly large they were. Apparently sort of 16th century codpieces were quite something.
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B
Yes. A symbol of power and virility. And we're coming out of that period where men used to wear long floor length robes like their female counterparts. But then they shorten, shorten, and then they become this doublet and you're revealing the legs and the package and dress. Listeners, we've done a fashion history mystery on the cod piece. If you want to go back and learn more about that, you can listen to that. That episode. Super fascinating. We've also of course, done an episode on the Chatelaine. So now we've made it all the way down and there's four different examples of footwear. Can you tell us about the oldest socks? I love socks. I think. I don't know what it is about the fact that there are socks that survive that are extant from like thousands of years ago. But I just find it incredibly fascinating.
- [32:02]
C
One of the things that is particularly interesting about socks is that unlike a lot of garments, they are quite complicated. It's not two panels of cloth sewn together. It's fiddly. And especially these ones, they have separated toes, these ancient socks. So quite a lot of work and effort went into these ancient socks.
- [32:21]
B
And they're dyed red, which again, as we know historically is. I don't know if they dyed it with cochineal, but dyeing something in the past thousands of years ago was a very labor intensive process. And let's see, these are a pair of red woolen socks that would have been hand woven. They were discovered in an ancient Egyptian city and date to the 4th century CE. And as you said, they're divided into two toes which enable them to be worn with sandals. And then you've paired that with the most expensive shoes from a film sold at auction, which I'll give our listeners a to think about. And maybe guess what these expensive glittery red shoes are. But I think I've just given it away. Do you want to tell us about these ruby slippers?
- [33:06]
C
They are a wonderful thing because they're a great sort of confluence of all sorts of things. Where they were the color film and the very. They were very just interesting thing where they were a fashion object and they had this sort of the weird significance in the story and yeah, the way that they have taken on this kind of life of their own because they have been an incredibly valuable collector's item for quite a long time. They've changed hands several times along with a few other things from that film. And I do find that the kind of significance they've taken on as objects quite fascinating cultural and pop.
- [33:42]
B
Cultural significance, of course. Worn by Judy Garland in the wizard of Oz in 1939 sold for 660, $66,000 on May 24, 2000. And it's actually one of five pairs that survived from their production. Dorothy's slippers were silver in Al Frank Baum's original novel and were likely changed to better stand out against the technicolor yellow brick road. How do you condense? This is something I found with working with you. We had the record we created and then there was additional information because obviously you're condensing as a fashion historian. This is really hard for me. You're condensing maybe as a podcaster. Museum curators have to do this all the time for museum labels. But like you find all this research did all this information and then you're like, okay, now tell me, give me two sentences.
- [34:31]
C
It can be, it's, it's one of the things that I'm always trying to explain to new consultants, which is the thing that the further information, all of those words are important for the writing of the incredibly short thing because you know, you get things like you need one word, you need to say like you say it was made. You're like, was it made? Was it cast? How was it assembled? You need the word and you need all this information to know how to condense it down without saying something, without changing the meaning or getting something wrong in the act of condensing it down. And so it is quite strange because you end up writing. I think the longest record I've written was more than a thousand words of further information. And the actual thing that made it into the book is about 42 sentences at most.
- [35:20]
B
But if you're like me, that research is the fun part, right? It's getting into those archives and transporting yourself back into history and imagining these people who are.
- [35:30]
C
I wouldn't have written that much if I hadn't gotten carried away.
- [35:36]
A
So good, so good, so good.
- [35:39]
B
Everything you want for summer is at Nordstrom rack stores now and up to 60. 60% off.
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A
Stock up and save on the brands
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B
you love like Vince, Sam, Edelman, Frame and free people. Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more.
- [35:54]
A
Plus buy online and pick up at
- [35:56]
B
your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack girl. Winter is so last season and now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs.
- [36:13]
A
You're thirsty for the sun on your
- [36:15]
B
shoulders that perfect hang on the patio sundress.
- [36:18]
A
Those sandals you can wear all day and all night.
- [36:21]
B
And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done. Hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope. It's time for a little in person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic. So I'd love if you could just tell us a little bit about. Do you have any particularly special or meaningful discoveries, records you've encountered? Do you have favorite records? Fashion and non related fashion records? It's fine.
- [36:49]
C
So there are. One of the things that happens quite often is that I will have an idea for a record and I'll go digging through the archives and the frustrating thing is that I will often find things that are amazing stories that don't have the records a few years ago. I cannot remember how this idea popped into my head, but I was like, I wonder when the first getaway car was used,
- [37:16]
B
like in a heist. Getaway?
- [37:17]
C
Yeah. When was the first time that somebody committed a robbery and then had a car specifically to get away before the police arrived? So the accepted wisdom was that it was in 1911. And I always thought that that doesn't sound long ago enough. So I started searching through all these newspaper archives, phrases like automobile and escaped and things like that, and eventually found a case from 1903 involving a robbery at a church in northern Spain somewhere. But in the process of finding that, I discovered a group called the Red Auto Gang who were based out of New York City in 1905 or 1906. And they consisted of two men who were, I think, both chauffeurs by day and burglars by night, and their girlfriends who were both Broadway showgirls. And it was this amazing sort of Gilded Age scandal involving the showgirls and this. They were driving out into Long island and robbing the mansions of the incredibly wealthy oil barons. And it was this amazing story. And it didn't have the record, unfortunately. It was like two years off. So I had to just file that away in a one day. I'll have to revisit that story.
- [38:34]
B
Yeah, that sounds fascinating. We're always looking for stories like that. The scandals are crimes of fashion and passion. So we can have an excuse to write kind of one of those really fun episodes about, like you said, criminal escapades throughout history. Any other particularly meaningful discoveries or records that you love or types of records that you like to explore.
- [38:57]
C
So I think my favorite record I've researched recently is. It's another first. I shouldn't do. So many firsts. Firsts of what we try and avoid. But which was the first photograph of a snowflake, which is one of those wonderful records that sounds quite simple on the face of it. You think, oh, it's just anything. Oh, maybe it was someone in the lab or something. And you discover that it was a man called Wilson Bentley, who was a farmer who lived in northern Vermont somewhere. And he had a fascination with weather and with the natural world from early childhood. And his mother was a former schoolteacher and she had a microscope. And he developed this weird, elaborate process involving keeping the microscope in a freezing cold shed. And he'd run out into the snow and collect snowflakes on a little glass panel. And he'd run back in and he'd look at Them, and he'd try and sketch them because he thought they were beautiful. And he'd try and draw the pictures of the snowflake before they melted. And he could never quite do it. And he eventually found out that you could get cameras that could be fitted to microscopes. And he spent years perfecting this technique to try and take photographs of snowflakes. And it was his life's work, was this wonderful little thing. And he just appeared at a university one day and was like, I have pictures of snowflakes. And everyone's just amazed by them because we know of the symmetry and the patterns, and we think of that as just a thing that everyone knew. But until the late 19th century, no one had ever seen that before. And people were amazed.
- [40:32]
B
Oh, and they're so beautiful. Yeah. The magic of it.
- [40:36]
C
Yeah. And he spent his whole life living on this farm, working. It was a working farm, and he ran it with his brothers, I think. And he. Yeah, just. He would. He had a notebook where he kept incredibly detailed information about storms and patterns of weather. And he ended up doing some quite important research about what kinds of snowflake form in different kinds of storms and different sorts of this. But he was just. He just liked snowflakes. When asked about why he did it and what motivated him, he said, he remarked to an interviewer, I am a poor man, except in the satisfaction I get from my work. In that respect, I am one of the richest men in the world. I would not change place with Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller for all their millions. I have my snowflakes.
- [41:28]
B
That is such a beautiful and unexpected story. Yeah, I know.
- [41:32]
C
And that's the sort of thing that I find is these sort of little. Funny little. Huh? I never thought of that. And, yeah. But yes, it's a lovely, strange little story about one man's sort of passion and his life dedicated to beauty and the appreciation of beauty and finding beauty
- [41:52]
B
in kind of the everyday. Right. Things that you take for granted. Then I have a suggestion for you that I don't know if you've ever considered this, but I think you need to start a podcast about all so you can share with us all of the history and all of these beautiful stories that you cannot possibly ever convey in the Guinness World Records books, where you only have two sentences. Because these are fascinating stories. You've just told us two. I'm sure you have many more. So, just an idea.
- [42:24]
C
We did try it for a while, but I think what we need to do, ultimately, I need to commit to a podcast that's just Ben goes off on weird tangents where I can tell people all about the Red Auto Gang and, yeah, all of the other bizarre stories I've encountered over the years, I'm
- [42:39]
B
telling you, each of those could be podcast episodes. Both of those stories are so fascinating and I could have listened to you talk about them all day. And I want to know more. I'm immediately looking up these first snowflake photographs. So, anyways, just a thought. This has been so fun. Thank you so much for talking to me today. I actually don't think I can let you go, though, because I'm sure a lot of our listeners will want to know if they want to submit or compete for a world record. So submit an idea for a world record. Compete for a world record. How do people go about doing that?
- [43:10]
C
So you create an account@guinnessworldrecords.com and you. I think there are. There is. Yeah, you just look for the title. You can put in applications. There's. We have this. Quite the one thing that I would always say is that you need to talk to us, then do the record attempt. If you do it the other way around, it becomes very complicated and difficult. And it's. Yeah. But no, we have a whole department whose job is to just look through applications from the public. And it's funny because I focus on the research. I don't do that stuff very much. But it is quite amusing where I'll be sitting there being like, I need to find a record related to this. And then someone come along and be like, this person, this member of the public just asked me, is this interesting? And I'm like, oh. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's good.
- [43:53]
B
And really, it can be anything.
- [43:55]
C
Yeah. And it is quite fascinating the way that you'll be looking at records for, like, space science or something, and someone from NASA will drop an application, the inbox, and go, oh, okay, that makes things easier. We can just talk to them directly. And, yeah, it can be a lot of fun.
- [44:15]
B
Or you have people who have managed to put 100 pencils in their beard, which was featured in this most recent. So people. It really has this amazing breadth and range of kind of fun to like, science, like you said, and of course, to fashion and history. I've had so much fun revisiting Guinness World Records. I don't think I'd opened one in probably a couple decades. So thank you so much for this opportunity to work with you, and thank you so much for talking to me about it. This has been really fun.
- [44:43]
C
Thank you.
- [44:44]
A
Thank you so much Ben for joining us. This was an extremely fascinating and very fun episode.
- [44:50]
B
Cass yeah, it was. And it was such a fun and unique experience in my career. It's not every day that you get to contribute to a publication of this magnitude and with such a long history behind it. And I have to say that I worked on a couple of records that didn't make the cut for the publication, but are on the online database which you can check out yourselves. And this included the first designer perfume. So many people associate Chanel with this accolade, but it actually belongs to Joire, as you know, April, who launched his Persian night perfume in 1911, an entire decade before Chanel no. 5. So I also wrote a record on the fragrance first or original high heel. And this is of course something we know from our Men in Heels episode with Bata Shoe Museum curator Elizabeth Semmelhack. You know, high heels are most commonly associated with women today, but evidence suggests that they were first worn by men in Persian horse riding cultures in the 10th century AD used as a means to prevent the foot from slipping out of the stirrups.
- [45:49]
A
And not all of the fashion related records are actually historical. Something that is so interesting about Guinness World Records are those more obscure and bizarre world records such as the world's longest eyelashes, hair and fingernails. And Guinness World Records apparently first opened a file for nail records in 1960 to recognize an unnamed Chinese priest whose fingernails reached 1 foot 10 inches. And if you think that is long dress listeners, that's that's actually nothing compared to today's world record holder nails that are 43ft long.
- [46:28]
B
You heard that correctly, April. There are records for anything you can possibly imagine and apply for. So the Guinness Book of World Records listeners, the world your oyster. Maybe we can achieve our world record dreams after all, April.
- [46:45]
A
I mean to get on that world's longest nap right away. That does it for us today. Dress listeners, may you consider what fashion Guinness World Records you would compete for. Next time you get dressed,
- [47:00]
C
please head
- [47:01]
A
to restpodcast on Instagram or Rest podcast without the underscore on Facebook to check out the visual content associated with each week's episode.
- [47:12]
B
And remember, we always love hearing from you. So if you'd like to write to us, you can do so@hellorusthistory.com DressedHistory.com is also our website where you can sign up for our monthly newsletter, our in person tours and online fashion history courses. And you can check out whatever else we have up our finely tailored sleeves.
- [47:30]
A
We get so many questions from you all about our recommendations for fashion history books. So if you are interested we you can always find a link in our show notes to our Bookshop Bookshelf. So that address is bookshop.org shop dressed and there you can find over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles and
- [47:51]
B
do you love Dressed but want to skip the ads? You can now sign up for ad free listening with any tier on our Dressed History Patreon.
- [47:59]
A
We are also excited to now be part of the Airwave Network and their premium ad free history subscription Airwave History plus available on Apple Podcasts. The subscription brings dress and also 27 other popular history podcasts ad free for just $5.99 per month. More information on Patreon and Airwave is available at the link in our bio.
- [48:22]
B
Thank you as always for tuning in and more dressed coming your way very soon. The History of Fashion is a production of Dress media. Did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees. Turn the temperature down with blinds.com and get up to 50% off custom window treatments like solar roller shades and more during the Memorial Day Mega Sale. Whether you want to DIY it or have a pro handle everything, we've got you free samples, real design experts and zero pressure. Just help when you need it. This is your last chance to shop up to 50% off site wide during the Memorial Day mega sale@blinds.com rules and restrictions apply.
- [49:03]
A
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