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Dressed: The History of Fashion
WHat I wORE to Work, an interview with Jo Weldon, part II (Dressed Classic)
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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. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders that perfect hang on the patio. Sundress those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done. Hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope.
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It's time for a little in person spring treat.
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It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic.
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Please enjoy one of our favorite episodes from the Dressed archive of over 500 plus shows.
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The history of Fashion is a production of dressed media. With over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common. Every day we all get dressed.
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Welcome to Dressed the History of Fashion, a podcast that explores the who, what, when of why we wear. We are fashion historians and your hosts
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Cassidy Zachary and April Callahan. Yes listeners, welcome back to part two of our Episode with Jo Weldon where we speak about her work on the quote, intersections of fashion, culture and sex work. Earlier this week joined us for an overview of the history of sex work dating all the way back to antiquity and how sometimes the very public nature of sex workers professions allowed many of these women to become style icons of their day, even influencing mainstream fashion itself. And this is something that we have talked about many times on the show before, how fashion will often co opt underground or subcultural styles.
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C
Today Jo joins us for her own fashion history as she discusses her own career as a sex worker and what she wore to work, which is the subject of her one woman show of nearly the same name. What I Wore to Work was staged last year in New York City and will actually be touring next year, which is exciting. So more details on that at the end of today's episode. Today Jo also details her work in sex workers rights. And April, I did not know this, but she's even spoken on this topic at the un which is just incredible.
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A
Yes, she sure has. And listeners, I will again issue the caveat that this episode covers subject matter which may be sensitive for some of you, including fetish lifestyles, prostitution, the politics of prostitution, sex workers rights and anti trafficking activism. And Cass said in part one, we know that these episodes might not be everybody's cup of tea. And that is a. Okay, feel free to skip them. But also, we feel this content is important to women's history and recognizing sex workers contributions to fashion history and also the work that still needs to be done to keep them safe.
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C
So without further ado, Jo, welcome back.
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A
Jo, welcome back.
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B
Hey, thank you for having me.
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A
Yes. And we had to have you come back for part two because we were in no way, shape or form done with our conversation about the intersections of fashion culture and sex work. And the title of your one woman show is what I Wore to Work. And on our last episode, we are really setting up the landscape for the conversation we're about to have today, which is about you and your experiences. So before we delve into that in depth, I want to ask you a cute question because this is a really fun, humorous point that you make throughout the show at several different points. What is the significance of the year 1962 in terms of our subject matter at hand today?
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B
What 1962 means to me.
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A
Yes, exactly.
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B
I was born in the year 1962. And 1962 is the year that the movie Gypsy came out. And the movie Gypsy was based on the life of Gypsy Rose Lee, who was an incredibly famous stripper in the 30s through the 60s. And she was so famous, like Beyonce famous. Super famous. And so when this movie came out about her life story, it was one of the top 10 hits of the year, one of the top 10 highest grossing films of 1962. And the number one single at the time I was born was the Stripper. And everybody knows it. It's. I don't know if you can put that on. I don't think it's in public domain. But everybody knows the tune. The minute it starts, everybody expects a little bump and grind. And that was the soundtrack to my birth basic.
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A
Yeah, it was kismet from day one.
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B
Also, the first breast implants in the envelope form were put in a human in 1962. So that seems auspicious to me too.
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A
Yeah, we didn't delve into this really, in part one, but would you tell our listeners a little bit about your journey as a sex worker because you have worked dressed and undressed for so, so many different facets of the profession.
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B
Yeah, I have worked in almost every sector of the sex industry that there was before social media, and primarily as a strip joint stripper, a dominatrix, and a call girl. But I've Worked. I've worked in a Waffle House parking lot, not to put too fine a point on it, when all of these. What we wore to work was a subject of immense discussion for many reasons. And I started working full time in 1980 and worked full time until probably the 2010s. And I have a few lingering regulars and bless them, they're amazing.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Since I started out a survival worker, I also had to interact with the police and had to watch what I wore with that in mind. And so it's not just what you wear to be noticed, it's what you wear to not be noticed. And a lot of different things intersect. Your personal taste, the taste of your intended clients. If you have a manager, like at a strip joint, they have their taste. And then you have to work around the police.
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A
And you gave a really interesting example of that in the show in terms of moving through hotel spaces.
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B
Yeah. When I was working a lot as an alcohol escort in, oh gosh, the late 90s, early 2000s, I was mostly going to fancy high rises and hotels. This very rarefied section of sex work I had never worked in before. And you have to dress like anything but a whore to go in these spaces. You have to be so careful because everybody has to have plausible deniability that includes the hotel staff who know what you're doing and the client has to have plausible deniability because it's illegal to hire you. So they could both get in trouble if they see you and don't stop you. And I did not have the money to dress like the people in these incredible spaces. But fortunately, right about that time, Athleisure in public had a huge surge in popularity. And I was able to wear these kind of slutty, but also covered you up velour tracksuit of the early aughts. We all had that. Of the early aughts. Yeah. And then they had plausible deniability. Cuz I've got my duffel bag and my ponytail and I'm. I'm a personal trainer.
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A
Which you were.
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B
Yeah, I've got a bag full of whips and chains on some occasions. Like I also did vanilla sessions, but yeah, so that makes sense that you would disappear for two or three hours and then come out personal trainer. Athleisure. Bless it.
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A
Love it. In part one of our conversation, we really established this centuries long legacy of the professional wardrobes of sex workers in any given era, really pushing fashion forward. We see this time and time again in terms of high fashion, seeking out the innate coolness of like subcultures. And the quote unquote, underground and high fashion will just polish them up a bit and present those styles to the masses as fashion, quote, unquote, proper. And sex worker style is no exception whatsoever. In part one, we talked about some of the fashion designers who were openly acknowledging working girl wear as being their source of inspiration. But you mentioned that you worked as a dominatrix, and that is one very established point of inspiration for fashion designers. Would you tell us a little bit more about those years in terms of your job and also what you were wearing to work?
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B
Yeah. I started out as a poser, dressing like a dominatrix because I was a feature dancer, which is a touring headlining stripper. For the first 10 years that I worked as a stripper, I was a house dancer, meaning I would work in one club at a time. And then as I worked as a feature dancer traveling around, I had to have costumes and usually themed numbers and props and everything. So one of my costumes was a dominatrix. So I was dressing up as a pretend dominatrix and eating fire in strip joints. Then I moved to New York and I had sold all my feature dancer costumes to finance the move. But I was living on Christopher street
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in the West Village, and I was
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living on Christopher street in the late 90s and early 2000s. So I was in the midst of fetish heaven and I started buying these clothes. And then there were these incredible magazines that I had never seen the like of in the magazine stores around that area, right? There were incredible magazine stores and there were fetish magazines as well as these magazines that were basically advertising dominatrixes and fetish workers right next to Vogue and people. You would see these magazines like Domination Directory International and Pandora's Box and everything. And I. I was obsessed with the dominatrixes and what they wore, and I couldn't resist it. I saw the documentary Fetishes, which takes place at Pandora's Box. The Pandora's Box. And I became even more entranced and I decided, you know, what can happen? I've got the clothes. I'll just show up and apply for the job. And I had played in my life for years, but I didn't really, not so much professionally, a little bit here and there. Like, everybody in the strip joint knew that you could send the weirdo foot fetish guy or the guy who wanted to tell you about his women's underwear, you could send them to me in VIP and I would enjoy it. Yeah. Oh, he wants to rub my feet for an hour. For A thousand bucks. How can you say no? Then I go into Pandora's box. I get a job. It turns out they don't test you or anything.
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A
The fifth, they just throw you in the room.
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B
Yeah. They go, do you know how to do safe bondage? And I did a little. I said, sure. And they hired me because they liked my photos, basically. And I loved my fetish fantasy so much that it became real. It was like the Velveteen Rabbit. I was literally getting my boots licked in these fabulous dungeons. And I was also, at that point, I became very involved with New York nightlife. And in New York nightlife, dominatrixes were everywhere. We were having the most fun of anybody. In the late 90s and early 2000s, we had the best time. We were hanging out with the most amazing costumers and independent designers, some of whom would go on to dress people like Britney Spears. And there were designers all around us like Marc Jacobs and Calvin Klein and Mugler, especially at Squeezebox, at Don Hills. And it was the most gender bendy space, the queerest space. But anything went. There were no strict guidelines. There was no dominant women, only dress like this or, well, you must be a woman because you're dressed like one, or anything like that. It was just incredible. And it was one of the most powerful and influential scenes I've ever experienced.
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A
Speaking of 80s, I like to ask you about an instance of fashion following in your footsteps, which dates back to your career in the 1980s. It's really hard to fathom now, but you talk about in the stage show how it was extremely hard to find G strings in the 1980s.
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B
In the late 70s and early 80s, a lot of people have the impression that thongs were everywhere because Rudy Gernreich had popularized this thong bathing suit. That is not true. Very few lingerie lines had them. And you would usually buy them at a sex store or Fredericks of Hollywood. And those were generally too flimsy for us. Now, it's understood that a G string is underwear, but at that time, it was considered playwear or stagewear. It really wasn't considered underwear. And in spite of whatever was happening in high fashion, if you went to the regular department store, you would. Unless it was Valentine's season, you'd have a hard time finding them.
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Yeah, once again, an instance of it trickling up the ladder of fashion, not down.
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B
Yeah, G strings were associated with nothing but sex, work and sexy time in the 70s and 80s, no matter what Rudy Gernreich did. If you're a fashion nerd and you're like. But Rudy, forget it was G strings were sex work. And I have all these incredible images of Josephine Baker wearing these pasties and G strings harnesses that you could find on a Runway. Now, these are from photos from the 20s and 30s. And then Gypsy Rose Lee popularized the term G string, which has its own very long, very complex history in the 40s when she published her book the G String Murders, about strippers getting strangled with their own G strings, which was also made into a movie called Lady Dim Burlesque. So G strings, not underwear. They were props. And then we had to buy them from costume ladies who were usually people that either had been dressing burlesque people or used to be burlesque stars that traveled from club to club selling things they made. And the first time that I had to buy my own G string, it had to break away on the side. So we weren't allowed to bend over in this particular club. So they had to break away on the side because we went fully nude, but we couldn't bend over. Yeah.
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A
This leads me perfectly directly into my next question, and that is about some of these various and sundry laws about what dancers could or could not legally wear on stage. And I know this is, again, a massive topic, but could you give us, like, a general overview of how this works and who has a say in these matters?
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B
The laws around what strippers can wear in places where stripping is legal are mandated by liquor boards. So they're mandated county by county, which means you can cross the street. And there's a different mandate. But they do tend to be regional. And that means that there are literally legislators sitting around arguing about how much of their butt cheeks a stripper should be allowed to expose. Yeah, literally sitting around arguing about it.
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A
Oh, I'm sure they had to go do some primary source research as well.
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B
Always. They always talk about what happened in the club. And the interesting thing about a lot of these laws is that some of them come originally from New York's. In this region, come originally from New York's Committee of 14, which was an early 20th century committee on vice. And they would go into nightclubs which weren't necessarily strip joints because strip joints as we know them didn't exactly exist. And they would comment on what the dancers on stage were wearing and how scanty it was and how it needed to be controlled. And they would also complain consistently about miscegenation, the interaction of white and black people, and how they should not be dating. Whenever you come across someone who's really opposed to sex, work, you'll find these other threads of things that they're opposed to that make you wonder if they're the best moral example to follow. So these laws are old, and people, like I said, Theodora in Byzantium, had to deal with them when she was still a performer. So there's a famous among strippers article from 1953 that shows how far you can go in various states, because, like I said, even though they're county to county, they tend to be regional. And it shows. For instance, in one state, you can strip down to a G string and pasties, but they have to be covered by a sheer body suit. And then in some places, you can go to G strings and pasties, and in some places, you can only go to a bikini. And when I was touring in the 80s and 90s, these laws were still in place, so that every striptease routine I did, I had to have a different. These laws change every year, but there's some version of them always in place. So when I was touring as a headlining stripper, I had to have different levels of nudity to finish each number. So for some counties, I had to have a G string and pasties. For some, I had to have a full triangle top and bikini bottom. And this means, again, that legislators are very concerned about what strippers are wearing, and they spend a lot of time talking about it, and that is your tax dollars at work.
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A
Also, how this played out in terms of the legality of things has some pretty funny and fierce anecdotes. Some of them take place in the courtroom. Would you.
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Oh, yeah.
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Tell us about the dancer in Florida.
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So a lot of these laws are based around how much of your butt cheek or your vulva or your pubic hair or the bottom of your breast can be showing. Like, for instance, in Tennessee, I think this is still the case. You can't show your underboob, and you can't show the rear cleavage of your butt, which the strippers, they're called the vortex. In 1983, there's a famous case from Tampa, Florida, and this incredible photograph of the event where a stripper was accused of showing her vulva when she bent over. So a cop came in undercover and arrested her for not being undercover enough doing research. But he's undercover. She's not undercover enough. Yeah. Oh, that's their research. That's their job. That's their job, yeah.
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She got a ticket, and she decided to fight for her rights. She did. She went to court wearing said garment. And what happened?
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So she went into court in these panties that she'd been wearing when she was arrested, that she'd been performing in bent over for the judge showed him her whole entire behind and her vulva was not exposed. The panties fit and the judge did acquit Foreign.
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A
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of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to 15 per month required Intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com so this brings up the point of your work as a sex worker activist. When and where did you first become involved and was there a specific event that spurred on your involvement?
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B
When I was in high school, some books I wanted to read were removed from the library and I worked with an independent bookstore to get them reinstated. So that was my first sort of taste of activism, really going in there and changing things. And they called it anti censorship activism. The bookstore did. And I was really interested in that. They talked a lot about First Amendment rights and rights to information. And as a sex workers rights activist, I put that experience to the test. And I wasn't just talking about the First Amendment, I was talking about labor rights, which is something that got really emphasized by Carol Lee when she coined the term sex work in the 1970s. So I hadn't even heard the term sex worker actually until the 90s. And I'd already been working for over a decade. And then my roommate Judith helped me get involved at conferences. So I spoke at those and I spoke as an out sex worker. And this is, you know, there's no social media. And I spoke directly to legislators and police organizations and eventually lobbied at the un, which was an amazing experience with all these international people meeting and talking and everyone was so passionate. But what I was working toward as part of these teams of activists was the adoption of a framework of labor rights and general human rights for sex workers. How can the work be safer? How can it be easier for them to move on when they want to stop doing it? That's really important. And it's hard with the stigma as it is for people to move on to their next work. And a lot of the idea was to decriminalize sex work so there would be less harassment from police, including international police who are sometimes involved in trafficking rings. And if it's decriminalized, it makes it easier if someone is trafficked or abused by a manager to report it without fear of being arrested or deported.
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A
There's a structure around it, right?
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B
Yeah. And also a lot of times they might not report a crime that had occurred while they'd been working because they're concerned about the integrity of their family. You know, when the laws are bad, a lot of workers experience being separated from their children or other families, family members, when they're going to the law for help. So when you're in the industry, you know how these laws can play out, right?
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Right.
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So sex workers want their input to be considered. And we have seen what happens with things like fosta sesta. We know that many laws that are intended to stop sex work or even just trafficking, they often make it more dangerous or they'll just move the work to another location.
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A
And what is fosta sista for our listeners?
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B
It's an anti trafficking measure that holds Internet platforms responsible for things that happen on them. And so the idea is that you can stop trafficking by doing that. But part of what happened is that the Internet was one of the safest places for workers to screen clients. And once a lot of places wouldn't allow them to do that, they had to screen them in more dangerous ways.
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A
These laws make a big difference in the way that these interactions go down. Right.
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B
A lot. And we're in a position because we've seen what the real circumstances are and what happens when laws are passed. Because the laws are changed all the time, because they tend to be easy measures to get passed and legislators are more successful when they considered more successful, I should say, when they get more laws passed. But when people don't listen to the workers who are affected or they listen to bad or biased research that's poorly constructed, they're going to create laws that do more harm than good to both sex workers and civilians.
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A
And we talked about this before that, like you said something about they can't stand the sight of us. They don't really want to fix things. They're not listening to you.
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B
Yeah, they want to get you out of sight. They don't want to hear from you. They want to speak for and over you. Or they just believe that if you're dumb enough to be stuck in sex work, then you probably aren't smart enough to have an opinion. You'd be surprised. They say it in so many ways, like they fought us so hard. I had people who would say we were pretending to be workers or were brainwashed or were working for sex industry management, when often what we're trying to do is have independence from this management right. We want labor rights, then we want options and safety and agency for workers. And as I said, we want to get. Reduce the stigma. I mentioned that reducing the stigma would help people get jobs other than sex work when they're ready to move on. But also the stigma allows people to get away with harming sex workers because they don't. Sex workers they know either can't report it or they think nobody cares what happens to them. I will say some of the people who abort opposed just the idea of even the term sex worker were abusive to me. It was a little bit traumatizing, to be honest. But I'm still here and still in the fight in my ways, as I care more about the rights of workers than I do about what people who are complicit with police states and conservative organized religious organizations think about me. But it was interesting because someone would propose a plan that sounds good on the face of it. You know, they'd say, well, if we make it illegal, it'll be stay for. For whatever reasons. And that's never true. And then they said, oh, we'll make it illegal for men to be clients. I was like, that's already illegal. That's why there is such a thing as a. Yeah, there's such a thing as a decoy prostitute. That's the term which is a police officer who poses as a sex worker in order to find people who are looking to hire sex workers.
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A
But isn't that entrapment? Isn't entrapment illegal?
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B
Oh, you know, any. Anything in the name of cleaning up the streets, which really means just moving marginalized people to a more marginalized location. You know, I would point out the reasons that this didn't work. And sometimes people in these legislative situations, I had to dress like them and learn to talk like them to access these spaces, because in the 80s and 90s, and early 2000s, actually being a sex worker wasn't considered an advantage. They wanted people who had done big research to speak for. And in my case, over people who'd actually worked. And when they said I wasn't a worker, which I always thought was really interesting, and finally one of them said to me in the middle of a meeting, you can't really speak for all these other sex workers. Which I don't want to do. I don't want to. I don't want to speak for other sex workers. I'm just telling them the experiences that I've had. And I've worked with thousands of other sex workers. So it's not like I'm this random lone person, and I've worked in all these environments with various degrees of privilege. And they said, you can't really possibly be speaking for any sex workers because you're just too privileged. And the irony of that was that the level of privilege they saw on me was my ability to pass of them because I dressed up like them and pretended to be them in order to get in again. Clothes.
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A
Yeah. When we were talking about this, it was like, you weren't undercover, you were overcover.
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B
Yeah, totally. Yeah. I had all these secondhand suits and stuff because I don't dress like that. It wasn't natural to me. But conforming to an ideology is not as important to me as the rights of workers. I want them to get safety, I want them to get human rights, I want them to get labor rights, and I want them to get cultural recognition for their contributions to communities, to the arts, and most certainly to fashion.
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A
And that's exactly why we're here today.
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B
And fashion's a gateway drug to everything else.
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A
We would not have 500 plus episodes of this podcast if we were only talking about fashion. I tell people this all the time. The reason why I love being a fashion historian isn't I'm not a fashionista. I do love clothes, and I like getting dressed up, but I wouldn't consider myself a quote unquote fashionista. In fact, I hate that word. But the reason why I love being a fashion historian is because clothes are only the lens to all these other, bigger, broader issues that involve all of us. And it's a point that we can all come together and meet on. Right.
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B
It's so true. And it's true when you think about sex workers, clearly, obviously. And that's why the idea of being dressed like a whore is such a potent concept, because everybody thinks visually that
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A
they know what it means.
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B
Yeah. And that's why I use the phrase dressed like a whore, because it's just a potent phrase and it's usually used as an insult.
- [32:07]
A
As we have learned throughout these two episodes. You have made this point very clearly. And now two episodes, that clothing is a huge point of demarcation in terms of sex workers visibility. So it's no surprise that dress is now frequently also sometimes used as a tool for reclamation of sex work or pride.
- [32:32]
B
Yes.
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A
Would you tell us about some of the projects, and these span the globe in which sex workers have harnessed the power of dress to promote, raise money and awareness for their various causes?
- [32:45]
B
Yeah. One of the most remarkable reclamations in the sex workers rights movement is the shoes. Because shoes are so often associated with sex work. The thigh high boot with the streetwalker dominatrix, the pleasers. They have been so reclaimed by sex workers as a symbol of their work. And there's a banner for decriminalizing sex work, which is what sex workers want. And that's less police interaction. And it shows a platform heel crushing a pair of handcuffs. And part of this reclamation is the result of things that sex workers observe in the media that's written and shown about them. And my friend Laura Gustine was on Twitter regularly showing images of what we call feet on the street, which is where they show just the feet of the sex worker, whether it's a stripper or street walker. And then there's no heart, there's no head. And I think they're indicating anonymity. But the photos are almost always staged. It's not like they actually have to protect anybody's anonymity. But the idea that these feet, this disembodied feet, are so representative is something that they enclaim. They're like, okay, let's talk about those feet. There's a heart and a mind above them and an appetite. We are not without our own appetites and needs. So they use the foot literally as a base, that high heel. And so you see that on posters and flyers and stickers. And that's a big reclamation. And that's one of my favorites. I love it. And then there are other examples of using fashion. One of my favorites happened with an Argentinian organization that called Amar A M A R. And they did murals on the corners of the building because street corners are associated with sex workers. Right. And they show a woman dressed in what would be thought of as sex worker clothing on one side, reaching her hand back around the corner. And when you get to the other side of the corner, her Children are there. And the first time I saw this, tears came to my eyes because they're saying, we're not damaging children, we're protecting them. We are mothers. And the sign said. And the sign said 86% of sex workers are mothers. And it was this really poignant, powerful statement by the sex workers rights organization. And another is Dafu from Brazil. And they were doing guerrilla fashion shows in front of fashion houses.
- [35:12]
A
I love this so much.
- [35:13]
B
Yeah. They're like, we'll show you our fashion. You're using it. We'll show you in outfits that they had designed themselves based on what they wore to work. And they also do their own fashion shows with their own models to raise money for sex worker organizations. And it's clothes they design. And they show more diversity in on their runways than any high fashion designer ever will. And they're beautiful. And the my heart is with the sistas of the Castle, who are from South Africa, and they work under a bridge in the Castle district, and they're known for their fashion. So it's a group of black trans workers who are very stylish. And they talk about they're proud to be sex workers, they're proud of their fashion. And a designer and a photographer got together with them to help them live out their ultimate fashion fantasies. And there's a book about it. And they have done catwalks, and they've been at the Brooklyn Museum and they're showing, we are not just takers, we are makers. We exist in culture. We influence culture. We literally make culture. And you don't need to lead a hoard of culture because we're already there.
- [36:25]
A
That's perfect. Because my last question that I'd like to pose to you is, what does it mean to you to dress like a whore? Because this was an original title, perhaps, that you were going to use for your one woman show. And what is the lasting legacy of sex worker style?
- [36:43]
B
One of the things that is a popular symbol now of sex workers rights is the red umbrella. The red umbrella was introduced in Venice around, I think, 2001 in Venice at the Art Biennale, and a committee for the civil rights of prostitutes all walked out carrying red umbrellas for visibility and protection. They suggest that if the news media is going to talk about sex workers, maybe use a red umbrella and a face under it instead of a pair of feet. So now dressing like a whore means carrying a red umbrella. And I always do. So when I was young, I already knew that I was queer. I was romantically interested in women as well as Men. I was open to romance with every gender, and my life has played out that way most beautifully. But for me, my clothing was a statement that I would not experience shame on behalf of my sexuality or my sexual activity. People would try to shame you for it. And when I think about queer pride or sex worker pride, I don't think about it just as I'm proud of who I am, but as resistance to shame. So if I'm deliberately dressing like a whore, like in the show, I often wear an old stripper dress, and that also plays into my age. I'm in my 60s. I'm not supposed to be dressing like that. So it's a. It's saying, I know you have an opinion about it, and if that's your opinion, I don't care what you think. You can have opinions about it. I'm not saying you shouldn't have them. But if your opinion is that being a sex worker is shameful, being queer is shameful, being a woman means that you need to be controlled, which is what so many of these laws are about. They're about controlling women, they're about controlling women of color, and they're about controlling trans people. If you look at these laws, that is the goal. That is the goal. And I'm saying, I resist your laws, I will continue to fight your laws. I am out here for all of my. I get very emotional because I think of the women I worked with who felt so much shame from the outside, women who didn't make it, women who are probably still experiencing shame, men and women I was around who were ashamed of being queer. To me, sex worker style is one way of showing that I'm out here for the fight. And I believe in dressing modestly or wearing comfortable clothes or whatever you want. But for me, dressing like a whore has a very specific meaning. That as a form of resistance to patriarchy and late stage capitalism and all the shame that people might want to impose on people for their sexuality and the exploration of their sexuality that keeps them from even discovering it.
- [39:35]
A
Yeah, just one more instance of fashion being a tool of not only exploration, but also resistance, as you just said. Jo, thank you so much for being here. And where can people catch your act very soon?
- [39:51]
B
So you can catch me by going on joewelden.com and seeing my current schedule of shows and classes, and I'm also doing little publications, and I also have a list of sex worker organizations you can support. If you find yourself in a pair of pleasers and wonder if you're doing something wrong, like oh you just here's some stripper organizations that could use a little support if you feel you'd like to. And obviously I also list anti trafficking organizations you can support and workers organizations that support sex workers.
- [40:24]
A
So thank you so much Jo for joining us again on Dressed and we look forward to putting your book on our Dressed bookshelf when it comes out in a few months.
- [40:33]
B
Yes, I'll send you one of my booklets.
- [40:35]
C
Thank you Jo, thank you again so much for not only joining us but for your amazing work and dedication. We are such fans of your work and listeners. If you are interested in catching a live performance of Jo's one woman stage show what I Wore to Work, she will be touring in 2025 and of course she joined us back in 2018 to discuss her book A History of Leopard Print which can be found on our dressed bookshelf@bookshop.org Shop dressed.
- [41:04]
A
You can learn more and sign up for classes, workshops and so much more with Jo via the New York School of Burlesque. And you can find details of her upcoming performances as a burlesque performer and all of the above@joe weldon.com that's J O W E L D O n. You can follow Jo on Instagram at Sex Workers Style. I think that completes our sexiest episode of Dressed yet. May you consider the who, what, when and why next time you get undressed.
- [41:33]
C
As always, remember, we love hearing from you, so if you'd like to write to us, you can do so by way of email@hellorusthistory.com DressedHistory.com is where you can find any and all details about our upcoming classes, trips and tours. Or you can also always DM us on Instagram restorepodcast, which is where we post images and reels to accompany our episodes. You would like to find the Instagram content specifically related to this episode. You can search the hashtag dressed506 and dressed507.
- [42:01]
A
Thank you as always for tuning in. More dress coming your way next week. The History of Fashion is a production of Dress Media.
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B
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