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Dressed: The History of Fashion
The Red Menace: How Lipstick Changed the Face of American History, an interview with Ilise S. Carter, part I
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- [00:00]
April Callahan
Please enjoy one of our favorite episodes from the Dressed archive of over 500 plus shows.
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Kim
The history of Fashion is a production of dress media.
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Cassie
With over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common.
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Kim
Every day, we all get dressed.
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Host/Producer
Welcome to Dressed the History of fashion.
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April Callahan
A podcast that explores the who, what, when of why we wear. We are friends, fashion historians and your.
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Kim
Hosts, Kim Cassie Zachary and April Callahan.
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Cassie
So, Cass, you know my fondness for quotes to begin episodes these days, and I have a few great ones for today. The following words have been attributed to one Ms. Coco Chanel, who apparently at one point said, if you're sad, add more lipstick and attack. Kind of fabulous. And also Elizabeth Taylor once quipped, quote, pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick and pull yourself together. And yet another woman who definitely knows a thing or two about the art of cosmetics, Dita Von Teese, has said, heels and red lipstick will put the fear of God into people. Okay, wooden. And lipstick as a weapon to face the world. Clearly, all three of these beauty icons have latched onto the inherent power assigned to the tubes of cute and portable color now carried regularly in the handbags of more than 80% of American women. But how did such a cosmetic staple acquire said power, you might ask? Well, as today's guest has written, quote, makeup was political, it was financial, it was civilization and science.
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Host/Producer
Yes, today we are happy to welcome Ilise S. Carter to the show to discuss her soon to be released book, the Red Menace. How Lipstick Changed the Face of American History. Ilise is a professional copywriter working in the beauty industry, and her book is a tour de force of historic research. Stress listeners tracing the history of lip color from the 1700s all the way up until the present day. She uses lipstick as a lens to examine the hopes, dreams and anxieties of American society. We cannot say enough great things about this book. Elise, welcome to the show.
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Cassie
Ilise, welcome to Dressed.
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Ilise S. Carter
Thank you for having me.
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Cassie
Yes, yes. And I am so thrilled to be speaking to you today about your book, the Red How Lipstick Changed the Face of American History. And our regular listeners will know that I am massively lipstick obsessed right now. I am wearing Mac in the shade of mangrove. But even during quarantine, when things were like, you know, the deepest, darkest hours and things were very strange and no one was going anywhere, I was. I was still putting on lipstick every day because it's a source of happiness for me. So thank you for this book.
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Ilise S. Carter
One of my favorite expressions about it is the film critic Molly Haskell. I studied with in one of her essays, she describes it as a cheap pie and it just buying a lipstick or, you know, and I can't, I can't say that that's wrong. Although I don't want to. If you don't like lipstick, you don't have to wear it. I. I'm not pressuring anybody about it.
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Cassie
Yeah, but it's true. There's something a little bit thrilling, you know, and shape shifting about when you put it on. It's very, very transformative, I think.
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Ilise S. Carter
Yeah, definitely. That's a good way to put it.
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Cassie
So I'd like to speak first about the very early history of lip color because it wasn't always lipstick per se. Could you tell us a little bit about the types of lip color products that we might see in the 1700s and the 1800s?
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Ilise S. Carter
Yeah, lipstick generally. Then there was sort of two ways to come by it. There were a lot of recipes for homemade items and I in one, in the book, I feature one by Martha Washington, the first verse lady and hers was made from. Do you remember when I found the recipe people were like that's disgusting. And I was like, yeah, this raisins lard basically earwax from whales, alkanet root and a bunch of other things and some raisins. And the alkanet root gives it a sheer redness. I found online somebody had actually attempted to make it, although you can't get whale earwax readily anymore. But it was like a bomb because you know, people still had dry lip and that. You'll find that in a lot of recipe books. Any domestic guide for women will have thing what we would now use as cosmetics, things for chapped skin. You know, you had a rough life, it was a frontier and people made things for or you know, dry skin or dry lips. So there were do it yourself recipes and they might have had some coloring you could also buy from. One ad in particular I found was from. I choose a milliner. So she made hints or supplied people with hat trimmings. And she had what was called either rouge or rouge and powder. And it was what we today think of like as an all over color. You know, that's lips and cheeks and eyes and it would just be red. It was made from cochineal. Cochineal is the shells from beetles. You just grind it up, it's a red color. And then it would either be powdered and you could mix it with something or it was in pomade, which meant it was mixed with something like paraffin or wax, other waxy substance or lard or Lord knows what all. Because there's no, There was no FDA until late 18th, early 19th century. So that's basically what you had until the late 19th century. Is this all over color? If it's rouge and powder or pressed rouge, it's very dry. If it's in a pomade, it's probably very oily and smears. And it was, you know, there was no, like, oh, I'm more of a winter. So I, you know, I'm a cool, I have cool skin tones. Then that wasn't a thing. It was just red.
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Cassie
Yeah.
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Ilise S. Carter
And it was just whatever they had, they made it from the goal really wasn't. It wasn't, certainly wasn't exactly self expression in terms of like, this plays up my best features or, you know, I love wearing a black lipstick. It was really, the idea was to maintain that flush of youth that when you're young, your lips are bright and red, your cheeks are rosy. And it was really a way of recapturing that with varying degrees of success.
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Cassie
Yeah, we at FIT Special Collections have a whole host of beauty manuals that some of them date back to the 18th century with all these recipes in them. And it is really fascinating some of them. And we have more of a preponderance of them in from the 19th century. But just like you were saying in terms of all these beauty recipes, people were making these things at home for all sorts of different complexion problems or makeup or hair products. And this is something you would kind of collaborate with, with your pharmacist, I guess, because these ingredients aren't necessarily just like super readily available to us walking into a store today.
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Ilise S. Carter
No, and I think pharmacists, you know, I mean, you're also talking, you know, your pharmacist also may have done some bloodletting or some leaching. So, you know, certainly the, the trade of pharmacy has gone. It has become more modern. But I think they stocked a good number of odd things because they're like, oh yeah, you should definitely put some like Spanish moss on that. It looks good. So they did carry a lot of odd items. Like I have no idea what alkanet root is or where I would get it if I needed it today.
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Cassie
Right, right.
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Ilise S. Carter
No clue.
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Cassie
So who was wearing lip color in this kind of early period, 18th, 19th century. And I'm hoping that we can talk about how the wearing of cosmetics was viewed from a moral standpoint.
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Ilise S. Carter
You know, that is one of the things that I found fascinating about the research. What I found in my research, because I had always Suffered from the notion. And I think it's very common in our collective understanding. And I'm not, you know, I'm not talking about scholarship. I'm talking about, like, you know, if you ask any person on any street in any town in usa, you're like, when did women start wearing makeup? And they're like, the 1920s. Before that, you were a whore. And that's not exactly true. It's. It's actually not very true. There is an element of truth to it. Like, there we are a very puritanical nation. We were founded by, to some extent, by religious wing nuts. And that will always be there. So they're all in. You know, the Puritans of Europe were. Makeup was verboten. And they're always. If you are a very religious person, there is a lot of backlash against any artifice. You know, it's. You're tricking. You're tricking a husband. But if you look closely, the association with sex workers and the idea that there was a before and after, and then regular ladies started wearing lipstick, I think that actually is something modern, a modern way of viewing history, which is. Doesn't exactly line up with the historical record. If you read the newspapers of the early 1800s, there are basically two arguments against makeup, and one of them is moral. That will always be there. It's still there. And the other one is health.
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Cassie
Yes, I was going to ask about that next, so thanks for bringing that up.
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Ilise S. Carter
Yeah. Because the truth is that there was no fda and it was the Wild west. And even a pharmacist understanding of modern chemistry was not what it once was. You know, all every American knows about the origins of Coca Cola and that we used to have, like, radium drops. Like, we have put some pretty horrific things in cosmetics. And actually everything in the US in the pursuit of health and beauty, most cosmetics were probably loaded with arsenic because everything was loaded with arsenic. Like your. The paint you used on your house and fabric dyes and any number of things. Women used to die on warm, humid days from inhaling Paris Green. Like, it would leach out of the wallpaper. And they could get poison that way.
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Cassie
No wonder everyone was fainting all the time.
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Ilise S. Carter
Yeah, I mean, there's any number of reasons for that, but, like, yeah, I mean, if you took hair samples from the average, like, 19th century American, it was probably loaded with arsenic. So certainly cosmetics weren't. Arsenic is incredibly destructive to the skin. It causes pockmarks. So the idea was you started wearing makeup and then you could never stop because you were covering up more and more and more to cover up the damage you had done. You know, it wasn't an unreasonable fear because this, this stuff was poisonous. You know, it was loaded with terrible things, you know, like, you know, arsenic is what I know about. And there could have been any other number of things. And forget about sanitary, you know, there was no hair nets and gloves.
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Cassie
Right. And lead, I think is common, was commonly used in. In these preparations at that time, too.
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Ilise S. Carter
Yeah, tons of heavy metals probably, and tons of like, you know, Lord only knows what formaldehyde. I. You know, formaldehyde was used up until very recently in nail polish and hair treatments. I mean, there's some pretty toxic things in the. In these concoctions. And there was no telling, you know, there was no central. There was no babeling. There was no central quality assurance for one company. So the objections really were less about. If you read the papers, women are still very interested in it. And they talk about, you know, like the social season. The debutantes are coming out and they come out to be introduced to society and meet husbands. And so they're powdering and they're blushing and they're, you know, maybe wearing a lip. And there's no condemnation of these women as sex workers. There's no slut shaming of them. They are just simply to try to catch husbands. Right. And these are some of the upper class. So women of the upper class wore makeup. You know, even if you go. One of the periods that particularly interested me is we think about the frontier, the Wild west, as, you know, the saloon girl and then the schoolmar. There's just nothing in between, which is not at all true. But if you read the papers, like I remember reading a paper, and it was literally from a town that was called, like, Tin Cup Arizona. Like, not even Denver, not even. Or, you know, Oklahoma City, not even a bustling metropolis like that. And they talk about, like, the makeup that's going on in Paris. And not in a judgy way, just like, this is what's happening this season. You know, it's also just really impractical because if you think your makeup wears off on your Starbucks cup now, like, imagine if you are plowing a hundred acres up the plains, if you live in a house, it's just milking path. Yeah, it's just a very impractical item. But there is this notion of, like, consumerism, that women are interested in it and they want to know about it. And those are just everyday wives, daughters and school teachers and whatever women are doing in the west, they're still interested in what's happening in Paris and cosmetics while we're still settling the planes. So I think this notion that it was like hookers and then everybody is, is a myth and it just sort of doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It was kind of the upper class, maybe some women of the upper middle class, and yes, probably sex workers and actresses too, but not, not only them. You know, it's interesting because even dating back as far as the early 1800s, like, we're already talking telling women to exercise more and to mind what they eat, like, that is not at all a new thing. We' like before we had invented the rubber sole for shoes, we're telling women to walk a mile every day before breakfast.
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Cassie
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We see it in those beauty manuals that I was referencing earlier. They, they talk about exercise at length and, you know, it's not necessarily exactly the same exercises maybe that I did at the gym this morning, but there is that dialogue that's happening there.
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Ilise S. Carter
Yeah. And it's interesting because it's also, it's a very American notion that you can improve your lot. Like, if you don't like the way you look, you, you can take control of that. It's not just genetic, you know, like, this is the base I got. That's what genetics or God dished out. It's that you can take control of it and improve yourself through due diligence, through hard work.
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Cassie
Yeah, absolutely. I have to ask you about this one little tidbit in your book that I had never heard of. And it is a little bit, it's fascinating, but it's also maybe a little bit terrifying as well. And this kind of going back to that, you know, health. Objection. What is this practice called? Enameling.
- [15:13]
Ilise S. Carter
Oh, enameling is fascinating to me. If you want to see what enameling looked like, I suggest everyone Google John Singer's Sargent's portrait, which is known as Madame X. It's actually Virginie Gauffre. As far as I can tell, the. It was literally painted ladies and it had by function, it had to be an upper class phenomenon because, you know, when drag queens talk about a face crack, you can face crack. It is literally enamel applied to the skin. And it's, you know, the Victorian ideal was this very literally statuesque. You're supposed to look like white marble. And so as pale as you could possibly be, as untouched by the sun as you could possibly be. And these women would have themselves enameled or painted. And it took a while because it was hand applied and they would, you know, blot out your skin, your own skin tone, for something much paler and ethereal. You could even get the blue lines that were supposed to represent veins sort of painted in on top, because you're like, oh. Oh, look at how unearthly she is. And you had to stand really still because it would black, and they would leave the fingertips and the tips of the ears undone so you could see, like, oh, she's a real person. But it was, like, incredibly impractical. You know, like, it really was someone, like, who was not lifting her own children or, like, had to haul water.
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Cassie
Right.
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Ilise S. Carter
You couldn't have done anything then. And it was enamel. I mean, it was basically, you would go to a salon and someone would paint on your skin. It really was to just make the complexion perfect. You were sort of a living painting. And, like, again, you know, it had, like, some women did a slightly lavender tint to it.
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Cassie
I have read that Virginie actually also used lilac powder to kind of like, heighten that effect as well.
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Ilise S. Carter
Yeah. Because it, you know, that makes a white have that just, like, otherworldly ghostly glow. And, yeah, if you look at that particular painting, you can see that the tips of her ears are actually quite red. I don't know if I'm irritation or what, but, like, yeah, it's the tips of her ears and the tips of her fingers are unpainted.
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Cassie
I'm, like, dying to delve into this.
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Ilise S. Carter
A little bit further. Yeah. It was such an elaborate process. And it's just, you know, like, admittedly, I will occasionally watch the Real Housewives or something or other, and I'm like, these women all look incredibly. Their makeup is super elaborate. Like, I get up and put on makeup, but, like, clearly these people have contoured themselves within an inch of their lives. Just go about their day. And I'm like, don't you get makeup smears on anything? Or, like. And I just. I guess it was sort of the equivalent of being a Real Housewives is that it's just this incredibly untouchable, impractical but fashionable look.
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Cassie
So when is the point in time when we start to see the general public's attitudes towards makeup become increasingly open about women wearing cosmetics? And I want to say. I'm saying women wearing cosmetics here because men, makeup and gender, that's a whole other ball of wax. And I think we'll tackle that here a little bit later.
- [18:30]
Ilise S. Carter
Yeah. Equally fascinating, but, yeah, also, it's a. It's an old animal. Okay. There are a bunch of things that are baseline to that, and one of which is technology. Lipstick and technology have always been imaginary in heaven. They really are, even to this day. And I, you know, I'm seeing like AI come into lipstick manufacturing and that's like, it's a whole thing. But like at the changeover from the end of the 19th century into the 20th century, you see a few things and one of which is just women in the public space. That is the point at which America tips over from being a country where most of the people live in rural areas to a country where people lived in cities. If you go into, let's say like in New York city, there's Old McSorley's Ale House. And for years, up until like I think the mid-70s, they did not admit women.
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Cassie
Yes, I used to live right around the corner from there.
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Ilise S. Carter
Yeah. And you'll notice that there is no lady. The ladies room is a later addition because there was no ladies room because there were no ladies and things like department stores are the first public spaces to have ladies rooms. Women really just don't have that many spaces to literal spaces to be. Like, women were not supposed to be out walking alone. And the Industrial revolution changes that. More women move to the city, more women take jobs. You know, more women are in factories and offices and schools, pink collar job, they're nurses and so on. And then there is the technology of the lipstick itself, which lipstick and stink were it not for the changes in its formulation and its packaging. It's interesting because the author Edith Orton describes putting on lipstick in public as a filthy habit. Not wearing lipstick, putting it on in public because it was a boudoir item, you know, like you didn't bother people, you wouldn't brush your teeth at the table, at the dinner table. So you wouldn't put on lipstick there either. It's a very private act. And I think it's not the application of lipstick that changes. I think it's the reapplication of lipstick. So at the end of the 19th century, you get the stick form and it's really like a crayon. It's a crayon wrapped in wax paper like a crayon. And then it's in a little box so you can carry it with you in your purse. And the other thing is women start carrying purses. Women's pockets start being built into clothing. Before a certain era, women's clothing, it didn't have pockets you wore. It was like a fanny hat. You know, you wore it under your clothing. Your pockets were like on a belt. And There were slits in your skirt. If you had.
- [21:15]
Cassie
We've done a whole episode on tie on pocket.
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Ilise S. Carter
So yeah, it's, it's a whole thing. And like, you don't have until that era mass manufacturing of clothing, you know, so there's the whole pocket issue there. And even still, like again, are you. It's a very impractical item if you're a farmer's wife. But if you're a woman in the city and you're going out socializing, you're dating is a very, you know, going out of the house to date is a very modern concept. There's a great book by my college advisor, Beth Bailey called Front Porch to backseat about how dating evolves. And because you now have this middle class who has free time and disposable income and they live close to each other because they're in the city. So you get things like Coney island, you get the movies, you get soda fountains, you get places people can go in public. So making up goes from upper class women have the time and disposable income to do it and the lifestyle that will support it to more middle class, upper middle class working women who are out in public and they're splitting from their mothers. They start to split. You know, America becomes obsessed with this idea of modernity. You know, we have the light bulb, we have the streetcar, we have all of these things. And so as we move into the 20th century, women really start to embrace this idea of modernity, of being Americans, of splitting from, like identifying as American rather than wherever you've, if your family is immigrated from Western Europe, whatever that is, you know, that means. And so this idea of it's very modern, so it's, it becomes by degrees more acceptable. Starting at the end of the 19th and moving into the 20th century. The thing for me, I think if you just ask the average person, they'd say the twenties. And I think the thing that makes that possible and really kicks it into high gear are two things. One is the lipstick tube. 1917, we get the first patent of the lipstick tube. It comes from New Jersey. And what guy patented it? Didn't. I don't think it made him enormously wealthy because I can't remember his name. I always forget it. But the lipstick tube makes it possible to carry it and reapply over the course of the day if you are outside of your goal. So it goes in your purse, it goes in your desk, if you're a secretary, if you have a car, it can go in the glove box. So suddenly Lipstick is a very portable item. Before it was portable, it was waxy and it would melt and it would stain everything. And good luck getting that out. So the. It's not the application of lipstick that people objected to in earlier years. It was the reapplication of lipstick and the reapplication in public. And where do you go to apply it if you don't even have ladies rooms? What are you out in public? Anyway? So as women start to enter the workforce and these. The US Becomes increasingly urban and people have pocket change. Those are all the factors you need to have a population that will embrace this. And I think one of the reasons they embraced it, just as a concept like it just caught on, was the birth of mass media and the birth of the movies. Like, there is no separating the movies and the modern idea of the star or the sky, Charlotte. Like, that was an idea. There were certainly famous people before there were kings and queens and generals and founding fathers. There were certainly famous people. But like, never anything like we had after the movies. Like, they had to invent the concept of stardom. Like the. I always. I bring up the first real movie star with the Biograph Girl. And they didn't. It didn't even occur to the people at Biograph to put her name on the marquee because there was no, you know, I mean, yes, there was Sarah Bernhardt and Cinderberg Snyder and Lillian Russell, but there really was nothing like a movie star. Like, that concept had to be invented and developed. And so that you have. The first movie star is the Biograph Girl, which I always think is such a shame because her actual name was Florence Lawrence, which great name that was. Her mother gave her that name. So it wasn't even like her stage name exactly. But these things come together at the same time. And so by the time we Finnish World War I, you have a whole population that is pretty much wearing lipstick or a huge percentage of the population that's wearing lipstick.
- [26:00]
Cassie
And just to touch back on this, this, the early Hollywood starlets cosmetics was incredibly important to this overall aesthetic that they were projecting on screen. Whether they were, you know, playing the part of the vamp or whether they were playing the part of the ingenue. How would you describe the look worn by silent film actresses of the 1910s and the 1920s?
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Ilise S. Carter
You know, that look is interesting to me just because, one, I was. I was a film history major. And two, you know, they are adapting to the theater and not street. Like, they are not looking that way. The makeup is very exaggerated on both men and Women, because they're figuring out the technology as they go. And you're talking about an era when studios, rather than lighting or in addition to lighting, they were open to the sky, they were using the sun. One of the reasons it ends up in Hollywood is just there's so much daylight and it's bright and it's clear. And it started, you know, some of it started off in New Jersey and Queens. Like the light is just not as reliable. So, you know, really what they're doing is exaggerating the look. You know, if you're the bam, your eye is very dark, your lip is very dark. It's a very. You think of that tiny twenties bee stung lip that's just in the center and that's because again, it was waxy and it melted and it moved. And so to keep it in place, you just started with a smaller lip outline. It's allegedly the thumbprint, the size of the thumbprint of X Factor. I couldn't find anything to confirm or deny that, but it's a great story. It's the lower lip and then the two halves of the cuticle. And then if you're the ingenue, if you're the merry Kickford type, you want that, you know, bright eyed, very soft, with a, you know, pencil in the mouth somewhat. So it would show up childlike. It's still very Victorian in a lot of ways. I think people think we went straight to the bob, but that's actually a little later the teens and certainly even in the 20s. And that was a very fashion forward look. Like the short hair was really cutting edge. So what they're really trying to do is very similar to what you would do on stage, which is try and get the actor's emotions to really come across. And so they're learning as they go. One of the reasons Max Factor became such a big deal, what really established him as a, a force to be reckoned with in terms of, you know, there are dozens of makeup artists working in Hollywood at the time. In the early 20s, they moved to what's called panchromatic film, which picks up light better. And suddenly you can see, you can really get a pretty good sense of what the actor's makeup looks like. And it's very limey and it's very like Halloween adventure. And it, it's wrinkly and it's grotesque and it settles into everything and it's just, it's pretty gross. And so he's like, well, I'm gonna. He went in his workshop and he created something that was just much more flexible and so looked more like skin. So they looked less nightmarish under the new lights and the new film. It was like when we went to hd and suddenly I was like, oh, I have to blend back beyond my chin. Like, I have just this mask of makeup. So he developed panchromatic makeup, which would eventually become called pancake makeup. And that was just genius. And that he had been working in the field for a long time already. He was established and he had his own store, but that made him an expert, and that made him a beauty expert. And he, you know, he had the backing of the studios, and he had access to starlets and to people really, that people wanted to be like that. And he. He would send representatives into department stores and they would teach you, you know, his makeup. He had trained. He trained a fleet of makeup artists to teach women, like, if your eyes are too close together, do this. If your eyes are too far apart, do that. You know, and to teach people tips and tricks. And then you would. Of course, it was a great way to get people to buy makeup because you were like, well, I want to, you know, I certainly want to look like, you know, Marion Davies or. Or. Or Joan Crawford or, you know, whoever he was working with. So it really established this. That link between Hollywood and glamour and beauty expertise. And the other thing that that did was it Americanized it, because before that, Americans had always really looked to the French for beauty expertise. Like, just having been born French was the metallic. You get all these makeup and estheticians who take the name Madame because it sounds French, and it's, you know, Madame Helena Rubenstein was Polish, and she took the name Madame Helena Rubenstein because it gave her that European, like, flair and, you know, trustworthiness and, like, secret knowledge of beauty things. Yeah.
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Cassie
But I think this is so interesting, too, because, you know, here we have all these legions of women who were unaccustomed to the, you know, quote, unquote, making up. And at some point, there has to be this push to educate women about products and how to apply them. And Max was sending out representatives, and there were many other countries. You've just mentioned Helena Rubenstein. She actually had a school, like a beauty school. And in, like, the 1930s and the 1940s, you start to see all these little beauty schools pop up all around the United States.
- [31:38]
Ilise S. Carter
Yeah, it becomes an industry, and it becomes an industry with experts and things you can pass on. I think that's part of it is like. I remember, like, the earliest Vogue mentions of makeup, which are in the late 1800s. Whoever was writing it with like, it was a marquee. It was someone who had a French name. It was Marquis of something. He's like, well, if you're going to make up, don't be a disaster about it. And you, you know, it's. There is a lot of advice from the late 19th century on into the, at least the Depression and maybe to it, you know, just rejiggered to the current moment, which is we're by all means wear makeup, but you have to do a good job of putting it on, which is a great way to sell an industry, is that we have occult knowledge that we possess that we can pass on to you. It's been certainly very democratized with the YouTube video. But it sort of works along the same lines of we have makeup secrets and you can learn them. And I think again, that was a idea of modernity. And Americans love self improvement. They love it. It's just such a part, it's such a part of our ethos. And this is self improvement for women. You know, diet, exercise, stenography, all of these things are useful things that you can learn. And makeup is, becomes one of them.
- [33:09]
Cassie
Well, and they were paying for it too. Because you write in the book that quote, in 1920, it was estimated that American women and probably a few men spent a collective $750 million for rouge, lipsticks, powder, perfume during the year of 1919.
- [33:31]
Ilise S. Carter
Foreign.
- [33:39]
Kim
Listeners, so many of us have pledged to start anew in 2026. And for me, this means reorganizing my closets and taking note of what needs a refresh. And I've spoken about this many times on the show before, but I mainly wear vintage. And also that doesn't necessarily mean that I don't buy new things. I just buy from sustainable brands.
- [34:03]
April Callahan
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- [34:17]
Ilise S. Carter
Yes.
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Kim
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Kim
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April Callahan
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- [36:17]
Cassie
You actually go on to say also that lipstick was now as political as it was popular. So what is that political aspect?
- [36:25]
Ilise S. Carter
Well, in the context of even that quote I found that one state senator had said, well, we can't be socialists. We spend so much money on makeup. So consumerism is always going to be that bulwark against socialism, we think. And coming into the 1920s, you have these amazing things. Women are given the vote and we have prohibition. But again, we have just ended World War I and we have given women the boat we have gotten over the flu pandemic of 1918. So the more things change, the more they stay the same. And more women are in. Not all women, not a majority of women, but more women are in the workforce than ever. And so I think America in that moment, things are happening fast. The country is booming, the economy is booming. You know, the technology, you know, we have radio, we have movies, mass media. Any given city will have half a dozen paper, different papers for different languages, different classes. So America is really coming into its own as a world power and, you know, just as a force for modern culture. And what does that mean for women? And you see after women are given the vote that they're, you know, some of them are tongue in Cheek. But I think people are. I think some people treated it as, what if you woke up to our own Congress and decided, you know, the nation had decided as a collective, like all dogs. And then you'd be like, well, how do we court the dog vote? Or will dogs just, you know, will they outlaw cats? You know, people are treating it like it's that alien and that insane. And will they trick us with their lady hypnosis? And, you know, are they. If they're too pretty, will we accidentally end up putting a woman in the White House? And some of it is tongue in cheek, but some of it is really like, well, what happens when we give women this very basic form of power? And it is frightening to a lot of people. I mean, it's always frightening to have women, you know, think about the abuse that Nancy Pelosi takes, whether she deserves it or not, in the public sphere. So that's what you're coming into in the 20s, and it's this sort of the old school, old generation versus the flapper. And the idea of women going to college and boating and drinking and dry. Not drinking and driving. Drinking comma and driving.
- [38:48]
Cassie
Maybe sometimes. Unfortunately, yeah, not dog, former, but like.
- [38:53]
Ilise S. Carter
Out in the again, this women in the public space is a very modern concept for non royalty and is not a figurehead for their husbands. So America is adapting that. And lipstick becomes politicized in, you know, all of these editorials. And at one point, I think. I think there's an interesting case in there of Pearl Pugsley of Arkansas was sent home from high school for wearing lipstick and powder. And she's like, but I want to wear lipstick and powder. And they're like, no, go home and wash your face. And she took her case all the way to the Arkansas Supreme Court. Now she lost. But women were suddenly feeling themselves right, you know, as an economic block, as a voting block. It was women largely who achieved not just suffrage, but at the same moment Prohibition. And they're like, well, now what do we do? You know, like, following the Civil War, you know, the two main causes that had sort of occupied them were suffrage and prohibition. And now they have them, and they're. The question is, what's next? And it wasn't racial equality. So women find themselves in a position where they have. They have never found themselves with spending power before. And the idea that they could go to college and have careers, you know, that's not everybody. It's a somewhat small percentage, but it's enough that it sort of rattles the establishment.
- [40:19]
Cassie
Yeah, for sure. And the wearing of cosmetics at this point had become so normalized, as you note, in no small part thanks to flapper culture and also Hollywood. But you also note that by the 1930s, that not wearing lipstick was a statement. And this is really interesting because we've already done an episode on Elizabeth Hawes, but at fit, we have a collection of her unpublished manuscripts that she wrote later in life. They're all type written. They're really fabulous. But for anybody who hasn't listened to the Elizabeth Hawes episode, she was an American fashion designer, kind of one of the very first American fashion designers to become somewhat of a household name in the 1920s and the 1930s. She was also a writer, so she wrote copiously for ladies magazines and newspapers, et cetera. She wrote nine books. But this story that she tells in some of these unpublished manuscripts is really, really interesting.
- [41:13]
Ilise S. Carter
She was.
- [41:14]
Cassie
She was very progressive. Her fashion designs were usually worn by kind of like artists and intellectuals. She was considered maybe a touch avant garde. And so was she personally. You know, she did really outrageous things like wearing blue jeans in public in the 1930s. But there is this one incident that touches on lipstick specifically because she talks about how she was out in public. She was walking shopping in midtown on, you know, fifth Avenue or whatever with a friend. And she had on a very wide kind of like dirndl skirt that she had designed. And that was kind of the exact opposite of that, like, very thin svelte, 1930s silhouette that was fashionable at the time. So right there, she's kind of like already outside the box. She's walking down the street, she wasn't wearing a hat. And she says that people thought she was so bizarrely dressed that they were like literally moving out of her way while she was walking down the sidewalk. And ultimately her and her friend go into Bergdorf Goodman, and one of the owners of Bergdorf Goodman sees her in the store, knows who she is, right? She's a well known fashion designer. And apparently he flew into a huge fit of rage and just got red in the face and started yelling and telling everyone that she's crazy. She's not even wearing lipstick. So I think that just underscores, like, how common it had become at that point. And almost necessary.
- [42:43]
Ilise S. Carter
Oh, yeah. I mean, not the wp, not the works Project administration itself, but like somebody who was working with them. I found all of these things about, you know, there's advice you give to John Seegers when they. They go out in the world. And some of it is fine advice, like, you know, make sure your nails are clean and, you know, look people in the eye and show up on time. And that's all very normal, but they, they really, they're like, you should be wearing lipstick, but not garish lipstick. And oh my God, if it's on your teeth. I think one of the things that I really wanted to emphasize with this is I, you know, I go back, I came up as a performer through the burlesque scene, even though I'm not a burlesque performer. Exactly. I'm a sideshow performer performer. And one of my idols in that scene is this woman, you know, biological, female, world famous Bob, who refers to herself as a female. Female impersonator. And I bring this up all the time because 1. I think it's like, she really should get a Nobel Prize for that. And somebody make that happen. Because gender is a construct and gender is an ever moving construct. Like, it does not stay stable. And I think that's one of the things I really wanted to emphasize was like, what it is to be ladylike is a constantly shifting thing. And absolutely within one generation it goes from like, don't put on lipstick in public, you cow. To like, don't leave the house without lipstick. Are you are crazy? Yeah. So. Because it looks so suddenly, it looks so unpolished and it look, you know, it's. It's very interesting because to me, like, I grew up, I fought punk rock and then I get to the hippie culture. You know, I wrote that whole thing on hippie culture. And it's kind of. I found the 60s kind of hilarious because Revlon, which for years had just been at the bleeding edge of cosmetic advertising. And Charles Revson, for all his fault, was very good at advertising because they have no idea how to get their arms around a generation that is rejecting makeup. They have no clue what to do with themselves. And you see them eventually introduce something called on lipstick, which is like lipstick, but not. I think it's gloss, I don't know. But it's. It becomes the norm and then rejecting it becomes the act of rebellion. And that happens really very quickly. And then, you know, you go from the 30s to the 60s, they'll be subculture will reject it again. And then another subculture, we'll pick it up. And it's amazing to me, I think a lot of it goes back to this concept of. And I shout, you know, like, all due respect at World famous FOB that like this idea of female. Female in person.
- [45:21]
Kim
Yeah.
- [45:22]
Ilise S. Carter
Where are we at with the. The idea of what is the Proper amount of female to be, you know, and it's now you're supposed to be, you know, like, tough. I can, you know, bench press a cow strong and do all these other things and my makeup is always perfect and my eyebrows are always on point and like all of these things that you're supposed to be all at once and it'll shift again.
- [45:47]
Cassie
Yeah, for sure.
- [45:48]
Ilise S. Carter
For sure.
- [45:49]
Cassie
Well, I'm really glad that you brought up Revlon and the whole concept of advertising because the whole marketing of lipstick and as you say in the marketing there of the creation of consumer. Consumer fantasy. I love this idea so much and I'm hoping you might talk about some of the messages about lipstick that American women were receiving from advertising. Maybe from the 30s to the 40s to the 50s, kind of that era.
- [46:16]
Ilise S. Carter
That is a golden era. It's advertising. Yeah. I, the image search for this was fascinating to me because I would find stuff and I'm like, are you kidding? You know, like, you know, I'm Gen X and I look at this dubs and we're, we think we're a very hard generation to advertise to because we're like, I don't need your, I don't need your labels, man. But it's fascinating the way we talked about one also because I've been a professional copywriter for a great many years and like, everyone's like, shorter, shorter, shorter. Like, the shorter you can get the messaging, the better. And so to the point where it's just, you're basically grunting.
- [46:57]
Cassie
Thanks, Twitter.
- [46:58]
Ilise S. Carter
Yeah, like 240 characters is a luxury to me. At any rate, they're very copy heavy and they're really selling this within. An ad for tangy lipstick has just decades of fascinating advertising. Tangy was the original mood lipstick. It had something in it that reacted to the ph in your skin. So it was slightly different on everybody. So it was supposed to be perfect on you. And all of these lipsticks would have the entire soap operas within a tiny, tiny little ad about like, men liked her. But women whispered about the girl with the painted lips. You know, you looked over painted. It wasn't natural. Like, none of those lipsticks looked natural. It just wasn't the formula. And it was about social acceptability or it was about catching a man less than like, who are you today? You know, what do you wake up and feel good in? And more about like this idea. And it was also a lot of them took place. Cody Makeup had a line of lipstick called Sub Deb, which is shirt for Sub Debutante, but you haven't made your debut in society. It was for young girls but it was based off this idea that at some point you'd be a debutante. And I didn't the model thing that even in the best of times in America they were selling this idea like romance was possible, social acceptance was possible, luxury was possible with the right lipstick or they're very foreign their lipsticks like Taboo or Tattoo. Two different brands you would always see on very white women but in sort of South Seas get up. Like they were exoticized. You know, no actual like Pacific Islander women were in the ads but just this idea like lipstick could take you this exotic places. Or it was very European and continental and it was always aspirational. You were always traveling to Europe where you had summer picnics or. And you were not in the steno pool. Like we get that you're a working woman. They never talked about that. They talk about durability was probably the closest that they got. But up through the 20s and 30s it was really about just this aspirational fantasy that you could live a life that you saw in the movies or on the pages of Cosmo magazine by purchasing this lipstick and applying it properly.
- [49:31]
Kim
Tress listeners. We've said on the show many times before that both Cass and I are big proponents of the therapy. Therapy can help, but sometimes it's not the whole answer, which is where tochiatry comes in.
- [49:44]
April Callahan
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Kim
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April Callahan
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Ilise S. Carter
Minutes.
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April Callahan
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- [50:53]
Kim
Yeah, Cass, I think you know that I enjoy cooking More than you. And I could not agree more. Sometimes the thing that actually prevents me from making a recipe isn't an ingredient that I'm missing.
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Cassie
I just don't want to go to the store to get it.
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Kim
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April Callahan
Not to mention they have some great 20 minute options too. And my personal favorite hack is the tray bake dinners. Literally throw everything on one tray and boom, you're done. They, they even include the tray.
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Kim
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- [51:49]
April Callahan
Reimagined for real life.
- [51:57]
Ilise S. Carter
In the 40s. We do get into working women during the war.
- [52:00]
Cassie
And I loved the fact that, that you specifically talk about how more than a few brands tried to ally their product with wartime patriotism. This is fascinating.
- [52:11]
Ilise S. Carter
Yeah, well, the, the access powers, all of the access powers specifically ban makeup. The Nazis didn't allow it. The fascists didn't allow it. The Japanese didn't allow it. So it became like us versus them. Like, we have pretty girls and they can wear as much lipstick as they want, even if they're wearing overalls. It was very much about keeping up the gender norm, even though you now have women riveting airplanes together. And so that when you conjure in your mind Rosie the Riveter, she probably has a red lip in your mind. She certainly does. In the rock mellow illustration. And the names of them were fantastic. There was like Montezuma's red is from the Marine core anthem. From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. And it's supposed to match the band and their hat. We have like liberty red, firework red, Jeep red, and letter reds. It was about keeping up spirits. It was about keeping up gender norms. We just come out of the Depression. And while you could have lipstick, it might be not as much as you want, because financially out of reach. And we had to. The supply lines were messed up in World War II and we had to adjust for that. And the government was, you know, you could only bring in so much flannel in and you had to get it from the right place. There was a fad for things that were inspired by Latin America because our trading lines were still open to Latin America.
- [53:30]
Cassie
You See so much of that in the fashion magazines of that era.
- [53:34]
Ilise S. Carter
Yeah, it's even Disney's Three Caballeros comes out then because it's making Latin America our treating ally. And even, you know, they start bringing characters into movies. They bring in Carmen Miranda, Cesar Romero and Ricardo Montalon is actually from New York. But you know, as these exotic land because we're making Latin America is our ally. So it's very much. It becomes keeping your makeup on, keeping. Not letting things slide even though you're now working on an assembly line and the boys are away becomes an act of patriotism. And there's a wonderful ad. The owner of that company was Constance Loft Juan who had inherited the company from her father. What I think was actually quite savvy in the way she ran it. There was a wonderful ad. Like she used to be front and center as this like super waspy debutante. You know, like here's her in pearls and a gown and standing in front of a portrait. It's you know, all their age fabulous in the 30s. And then you get to the 40s and it's a woman in a flight suit standing on the wing of the airplane and the headline is women wore in lipstick. And it's just, it's about, you know, like you are helping win the war. You're bringing our boys home, make sure you got lipstick. And it's just, it's kind of this amazing messaging.
- [54:56]
Cassie
Yeah, it was, it was almost sold like you have to keep up the soldier's morale by wearing makeup. Don't let your looks go.
- [55:03]
Ilise S. Carter
Yeah, they're in a foxhole in like the bulge. And but I'm sure they're worried about it. But yeah, I mean you do what you can in, in stressful times. But it is fascinating like how much a form of propaganda it became. And the names of the lipsticks are great. You know, Tessie Jeep Red is a great name. I, you know, I've never seen a Red. Well, now I guess I've seen a Red Chief. But you know that's not what we thought of, right?
- [55:30]
Cassie
Yeah, for sure.
- [55:32]
Ilise S. Carter
And that happened astoundingly quickly, like within months. The new lipsticks are all have patriotic names.
- [55:40]
Cassie
Okay. So we've mentioned Revlon, we've mentioned Halida Rubenstein, we've mentioned Tangie. I would like to ask about another heavy hitter from this kind of mid century lipstick game and that is Hazel Bishop.
- [55:56]
Ilise S. Carter
Oh, I love Hazel Bishop. Yeah, Hail Alma Mater. She and I both mentioned Barnard. Hazel. Yeah. Hazel is a really interesting case and I Think there's still really something there for women in business these days and women in everything. Hazel graduated from Barnard just as the depression hit. And she had wanted to go to medical school and just there was no money for it. So she went to Teachers College or somewhere at Columbia and she studied, she would. She was a chemistry major. So she ended up working as a chemist, an industrial chemist for a number of companies. She worked for one of the oil, big oil companies. She had did work for a vacuum cleaner company. And she ended up eventually working for the dermatologist who would go on to form Almayer, you know, and that was her living. And she was introduced to someone. She, somebody set her up. I think it was on a date that she was not interested in. And the guy said, oh, you're a chemist for a dermatologist. I have a kiss proof lipstick that I just got from Paris. You should see it. And he gave her a sample and she didn't like it. She thought it looked like dried blood. And she's like, I can improve that. So she literally took it home and said about fixing it like she literally was whipping it up in the kitchen sink of her apartment. And she eventually hit on a formula. She discovered what the right additive was that she had. So she invented Hazel Bishop Kiss proof lipstick. And that was all lipsticks were supposed to be long wearing. You know, everyone bragged that it was all day where it wasn't. Hers actually can pretty close. It's probably pretty drying formula, but kind of not the point. She developed it, she had an early partner. They managed to get it manufactured and get a supply of it. And she convinced Lord and Taylor in New York to sell it in the first day they sold out. And what they didn't have, you know, they had this great formula. They had this product. Clearly women wanted. What they didn't have was capital. So she brought in someone who had made a ton of money selling advertising for the radio show of the Lone Ranger, which was a huge deal at the time. And this guy had made a ton of money and he's like, I will invest in your company in exchange for stock. And this would come back to bite her in the butt later. And you know, within a few years of launching, they had something like 24% of the US lipstick market, which is.
- [58:38]
Cassie
Enormous meteoric rise to success.
- [58:41]
Ilise S. Carter
Yeah, they were the first lipstick company to advertise on tv. And you have to understand that TV is black and white and the resolution is nothing. But they could advertise by like rubbing their hands. They would put on the Hazel Bishop lipstick and another lipstick and then rub their hands and you would see that the other one smeared and it, you know, they got to be on huge shows. She would eventually butt heads with the partner and they would sue and counter sue each other. And eventually she, she saw where it was going. No one, you know, she. She had an all male board except for her. And no one was going to take her part. And this guy had money and he had lined up all the sponsors. He was sponsoring something huge. It was like the $64,000 question or one of the quiz shows that was just tremendous at the time. And she finally cried on goal and took buyout, left the company. And so the company did limp along. There was Hazel Bishop lipsticks and makeup. You know, I think they lasted into the 60s, maybe the 70s, but they just were never a big player again. Like, people sort of stole the intellectual property of the Kiss Proof lipstick. So they didn't have that monopoly anymore. And it just sort of never quite. They never kind of regained that momentum. And eventually her partner was the original investor, was fired. It's one of my favorite, like, fired and replaced with some guy who'd been a bouncer in a bar in Hong Kong right now. It was such a weird story.
- [60:13]
Cassie
This would actually make like a really interesting, like, project for someone's like master's thesis.
- [60:18]
Ilise S. Carter
It really would assure. Archives are up at Radcliffe and I don't know why they're at Radcliffe. In a born art, but whatever. Or sit, for that matter.
- [60:26]
Cassie
Yeah, we have an oral history with her.
- [60:28]
Ilise S. Carter
Yeah. Because she was. She ended up, in some ways, I think she had the last laugh, if not quietly, because she was hired to go all over the country speaking at cosmetics industry trade show. She was an expert in the field. She was a stockbroker. She was basically a financial analyst specializing in the beauty world. And she was the Charles Revson chair of marketing at fit. And so I think in a way she had the last laugh. Like she endorsed it sort of speaks to. I have interviewed like the woman who founded Lip Bar and a couple other women of color who have founded makeup companies. And their biggest thing is finding capital. And so I think it's still very much an issue. Like, it's one thing to have a great idea in the marketplace. It's another thing to have access to the levers of power. Yeah. And I think that's what a lot of the women did. Found makeup companies in the past either had husbands who are wealthy or were able to somehow, you know, Madam C.J. walker, like just built the business out of her house and then invested every nickel she made back into it. And, you know, just up until a certain point, financed it all herself through her, the sweat of her own brow. But I don't think we sort of under realize like those success stories are few and far between. And it's literally just because up into the 70s, it was very hard for unmarried women to get their own line of credit. And so the nuts and bolts becoming the next Pat McGrath can be very complicated. And I think this comes back again when you talk about Kylie Jenner, you know, like where they talk about her being self.
- [62:16]
Cassie
Self made. Yeah.
- [62:18]
Ilise S. Carter
No, no, no, no, no, no.
- [62:20]
Cassie
Well, I. I want to talk about black Beauty, because that was actually my next question for you. You write in the book that in 1965, Flori Roberts launched the first department store cosmetics brand under her own name that was designed specifically for women of color. But this is 1965. Right. You already mentioned Madam C.J. walker. There have been many other black beauty brands that had existed prior to 1965. Would you tell us a little bit about maybe a few of them and also perhaps their business models? Because I think that the business models of many of these companies are very fascinating because they gave very real tangible entrepreneurial opportunities to black America.
- [63:04]
Ilise S. Carter
Yeah, there's one in particular, Lucky Heart Cosmetics, which was out of Chicago. And some of them were super interesting because for me, it was one of those things when I did the research, it. You have one piece of information, you have another piece of information, and suddenly like they collide into each other and you're like, oh, that makes all the sense in the world. But I just never thought about it, you know, which is sort of being white or being extended white privilege. Yeah. It just never occurred to me, you know, before we get to Flory Roberts and. And Pat McGrath and Fashion Fair and all of those brands, and certainly Rihanna things like Lucky Heart Cosmetics was founded by a Jewish couple and who had grown up in a black neighborhood, you know, which was not uncommon in those days. And what they realized is, of course in those days, people did a lot more business through catalog and stuff like that and door to door sales. But the advantage for this community of door to door sales, of having an Avon lady type model was that throughout the country, Woolworths might not stock for you. And even if they did, they probably didn't want you in there browsing. So going into a store as a black person in America was a fraud activity, you know, unless it was black owned. And so putting it on the Avon model, having door to door sales took away that pressure. And it was your, you know, a neighbor, a teacher, someone you went to church with. Suddenly it was someone you had a relationship with. And it could be in your own living room or your own home or their home. And it took away the anxiety about shopping and just the range of colors. Like, we are still doing this. Like, people are extending their color range now. But, you know, Max Factor didn't. I think it was. I think Max Factor went up to something called Amber number two that was sort of tan. It certainly didn't factor in that women were darker than that or, you know, had just all sorts of different skin tones. And forget about multiracial. So these companies, while owned by, I think two of them are owned by Jewish families. Well, not themselves being people of color, understood what it was to be a minority and tried to talk to customers in a way that it is. It is. Some of it is very awkward now looking at it. But as they understood it, people of color wanted to be talked to. They tried to make it sound like a peer. And so they're very interesting companies because it was. They recognized a need and they filled it. It was very inexpensive. It was cheap makeup. It wasn't great. It wasn't, you know, the red door experience for Elizabeth Arden, but filled a niche in the market. Flori Roberts and Fashion Fair, these companies date back to the 20s or 30s. Florian Roberts doesn't come along until 65 or 69. And what I didn't know, I spent my whole life. I learned this writing the book, like. Cause I had known Floyd Roberts because I grew up in Manhattan and we have Bloomingdale's. And you would walk around the floor there, and it was on the floor of Bloomingdale's. I just assumed Flori Roberts was black. She was not. And I also just learned she was Jewish. So she. Again, you know, we understand what it is to be a minority, and we'll often speak to that business. But I spent my whole life assuming that this was a woman of color catering to other women of color. And she wasn't. I, when I saw the picture of her, like, my jaw. Dr. I'm like, she's blonde, big, blonde, bouffant hairdo. But, you know, that also speaks to her ability to walk through the door of the buyer's office and be granted real estate.
- [67:00]
Cassie
Get her makeup on those department store. Yeah, Absolutely. Didn't Madam C.J. walker kind of employ that same.
- [67:08]
Ilise S. Carter
We're.
- [67:08]
Cassie
We're using this term, Avon model. But like door to door sales Reps. Madam C.J. walker had representatives like that as well. Right.
- [67:16]
Ilise S. Carter
He had schools and salons and, and beauty is an interesting thing because America used to have a vast number of, of papers for the black community and they had some really interesting women's columns. There was one writer I read a lot of names, Annette, I just love that name. They talk a lot about how presenting yourselves and presenting yourself beautifully is, it's elevating and it's uplifting and it is of course fraught with the white supremacist notion of what is beautiful. Lighter skin is obviously, you know, is, is positive, sadly is more beautiful and so on and so on. And they talk about, you know, the size of your lips and not over exaggerating. It's so. And these companies do sell lighteners, so they are not without fault. But it is very interesting and it is, it really deserves to be examined about that. They did have a role to play and they were there, there are, there are a bunch of coffee table books on red lipstick and on lipstick and you sort of never see that played into the history. And unfortunately some of this history is gone. Like some of these archives are gone because they were so ephemeral and they were so not a part of sort of mainstream corporate culture history. Like, you know, I talk a lot about how, you know, all due respect to the house of Elizabeth Arden, but like there is a lot of self mythologizing in there that because Henry Ford did the same thing, that's how he became a business mobile in America. But you know, we don't preserve the records of, of those small businesses the way we Revlon clutches onto its archives and Yvonne has theirs and so on and so on.
- [69:04]
Cassie
Listeners, we will end our conversation with Ilise here today, but if you would like to learn more about the history of some of the black beauty brands we were just discussing, please check out Ilise's book where there's lots more information on them, including Lucky Heart Cosmetics, Color Keyed Cosmetics or the brand Fashion Fair which is actually launched by Eunice Johnson after she had trouble sourcing foundation shades for the models in her Ebony Fashion Fair. And Cass, of course, we have already done an episode on the Ebony Fashion Fair so you can go back and check out that episode if you haven't already.
- [69:38]
Host/Producer
That does it for us today. Dress listeners, may you slip your favorite shade of lipstick into your pocket next.
- [69:44]
April Callahan
Time you get dressed.
- [69:49]
Host/Producer
Please don't fret because this is only part one of our two part episode with Eilese. She will join us again on Thursday to chat about lipstick, feminism, blade runner, and early 90s hair bands like Poison and Motley Crue.
- [70:02]
Cassie
Yeah, we we definitely went there and you do not want to miss it.
- [70:08]
Kim
Please head over to RestorePodcast on Instagram or Rest podcast without the underscore on Facebook to check out the visual content.
- [70:18]
Cassie
Associated with each week's episodes.
- [70:20]
April Callahan
Remember, we love hearing from you dress listeners, so if you'd like to write to us, you can do so@hello dresshistory.com Dresshistory.com is also our website where you can sign up for our monthly newsletter, our in person tours and online fashion history courses. And there you can also check out whatever else we have up our finely tailored sleeves.
- [70:38]
Kim
We get so many questions from you all about our recommendations for fashion history books, so if you're interested you can always find a link in our show notes to our bookshop.org bookshelf so that address is bookshop.org shop forward/dressed and there you will find over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles.
- [71:00]
April Callahan
Do you love Dressed but want to skip the ads? We are so excited to now be a part of the Air Airwave Network and their premium ad free history subscription Airwave History plus and this is available on Apple Podcasts and the subscription brings you our podcast as well as 27 other popular history podcasts ad free for 5.99 per month. More information is available at the link in our bio.
- [71:25]
Kim
Thank you as always for tuning in and more Dressed coming your way soon. The History of Fashion is a production of Dressed Media.