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With over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common. Every day we all get dressed. Join Dressed as we explore the social and cultural histories behind the who, what, when of why we wear.
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In this week's Dressed Classic episode, we revisit our 2019 conversation with Timothy Long as he takes us inside the multi-tiered genius of Charles James, the self-taught fashion designer behind some of the most innovative and breathtakingly beautiful designs of the 20th century.
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A query from a listener about a recent vintage purchase has us on the trail of the British/American couturier Charles James in our latest--and most bizarre--episode exploring What's in Your Closet.
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In honor of the 30th anniversary of the iconic fashion flick Clueless, we bring you our 2020 interview with the film's costume designer Mona May.
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Oscar-Award winning costume designer Paul Tazewell is back to take us behind the seams and into the magical and textural world of the new film Wicked for Good.
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The work of Oscar and Tony award-winning costume designer Paul Tazewell spans four decades and is a masterclass in the art of visual storytelling. In this episode from 2024, he takes us behind the seams and into the magical world of the blockbuster sensation Wicked.
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Ancient textiles scholar-practitioner Nicole DeRushie joins us to discuss her recently released book Bog Fashion: Recreating Bronze and Iron Age Clothes. And as the book’s title suggests, Nicole does more than just study four thousand year old fashion, she recreates it using ancient techniques and materials.
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This week our Dressed Classic episode revisits a 2022 episode where we go down the rabbit hole of quirky and little-known fashion terms.
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Groundbreaking visionary Carry Somers joins us this week to speak about her three decades of fashion activism establishing the world's first Fair Trade Certified fashion brand and her ten years as the co-founder of Fashion Revolution. We also speak about her new book The Nature of Fashion: A Botanical Story of Our Material Lives which is one of our favorite reads of 2025.
Recommended reading: Somers, Carry. The Nature of Fashion: A Botanical Story of Our Material Lives. New York: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2025.
Want more Dressed: The History of Fashion?
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Our bookshelf with over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles
Dressed is a part of the AirWave Media network
Get an exclusive 15% discount on your first Saily data plans! Use code dressed at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/dressed
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This week's Dressed Classic episode revisits our 2020 conversation with Dr. Jonathan Michael Square joins us to discuss some of his object based research into Brooks Brother's coats worn by enslaved servants during the 19th century. Some of the research we discuss in this episode is included in his contributions to the 2025 Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and its associated exhibition catalog.
Recommended Reading: Miller, Monica, ed. Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025.
Want more Dressed: The History of Fashion?
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This week we cinch our corsets and plump our panniers with an inside look into the Victoria & Albert Museum's exhibition Marie Antoinette Style. Curator Dr. Sarah Grant joins us to speak about her exhibition which examines The Queen of Fashion's enduring influence on fashion then and now. Rare examples of Marie Antoinette's personal belongings are featured alongside supreme examples of 18th century fashion, accessories and the decorative arts, while more contemporary pieces evidence designer's centuries long obsession with the former French queen.
Recommended reading: Grant, Sarah, ed. Marie Antoinette Style. London: V&A Publishing, 2025.
Want more Dressed: The History of Fashion?
Our website and classes
Our Instagram
Our bookshelf with over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles
Get an exclusive 15% discount on your first Saily data plans! Use code dressed at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/dressed
Dressed is a part of the AirWave Media network
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this series, we are celebrating the prolific life and career of the avant-garde French designer Paul Poiret, who is the subject of a new retropsective exhibition Paul Poiret: Fashion is a Feast at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Known as "The King of Fashion," Poiret was an incomparable force of personality, vision, and industry, who was instrumental in not just revolutionizing women’s fashion at the dawn of the twentieth century, but transforming the very concept of fashion itself, effectively laying the groundwork for the modern fashion industry that we are indebted to today.
Further Reading:
Exhibition catalog Paul Poiret: Fashion is a Feast, preorder in the US here,
Poiret's memoir King of Fashion
2007 exhibition catalog Poiret
Want more Dressed: The History of Fashion?
Our website and classes
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Our bookshelf with over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles
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In this series, we are celebrating the prolific life and career of the avant-garde French designer Paul Poiret, who is the subject of a new retropsective exhibition Paul Poiret: Fashion is a Feast at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Known as "The King of Fashion," Poiret was an incomparable force of personality, vision, and industry, who was instrumental in not just revolutionizing women’s fashion at the dawn of the twentieth century, but transforming the very concept of fashion itself, effectively laying the groundwork for the modern fashion industry that we are indebted to today.
Further Reading:
Exhibition catalog Paul Poiret: Fashion is a Feast, preorder in the US here,
Poiret's memoir King of Fashion
2007 exhibition catalog Poiret
Want more Dressed: The History of Fashion?
Our website and classes
Our Instagram
Our bookshelf with over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1In this minisode, we break down the itinerary of upcoming, ultra-exclusive day tours of New York City during which we will step back in time and into the beating heart of American fashion and costume history during the holiday season. Our day tours are offered as mix-and-match separates with unique itineraries for each day as we visit fashion exhibitions, go behind-the-seams in museum collections and on a rarified visit to The Metropolitan Opera exclusively created for Dressed.
Want more Dressed: The History of Fashion?
Our website and classes
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Our bookshelf with over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this two-part episode, we celebrate the avant-garde French designer Paul Poiret, who is the subject of a new retropsective exhibition Paul Poiret: Fashion is a Feast at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Known as "The King of Fashion," Poiret was an incomparable force of personality, vision, and industry, who was instrumental in not just revolutionizing women’s fashion at the dawn of the twentieth century, but transforming the very concept of fashion itself, effectively laying the groundwork for the modern fashion industry that we are indebted to today.
Further Reading:
Exhibition catalog Paul Poiret: Fashion is a Feast, preorder in the US here
Poiret's memoir King of Fashion
2007 exhibition catalog Poiret
Further Listening:
Fashion, Race, and Expanding the Narrative of Fashion History with Kimberly Jenkins
Fashioning White Femininity: The Ethnic Masquerade of Modern Fashion with Dr. Victoria Pass
Want more Dressed: The History of Fashion?
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Our bookshelf with over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles
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Today, we continue our exploration of the century long love affair between fashion and the showgirl.
Recommended reading and viewing:
Es-pranza Humphrey's article “Fashioning the Black Chorus Girl"
Elspeth Brown's Work! A Queer History of Modeling
Marcel Sauvage's Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker,
Baker's 1931 Casino de Paris performance
Robin Givhan's The Battle of Versaiiles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into the Spotlight and Made History
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With her towering headwear and sparkling body suit, the showgirl is an instantly recognizable, cross cultural pop icon--and one that is front and center currently with the debut of Taylor Swift's latest album The Life of a Showgirl. In this two-part episode from 2020, we explore the showgirl's lesser known relationship to fashion, a love affair that extends back over one hundred years.
Recommended reading:
Andrea Stuart's Showgirls
Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema
Jane Merrill’s The Showgirl Costume: An Illustrated History
Want more Dressed: The History of Fashion?
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Our bookshelf with over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles
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We revisit one of our popular 'etiquette in history' episodes today and examine the complex social codes of party throwing and going in Gilded Age New York.
Want more Dressed: The History of Fashion?
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Our bookshelf with over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles
Dressed is a part of the AirWave Media network
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It's Freud x fashion this week as Dr. Valerie Steele joins us to speak about her exhibition Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis which is currently on view at The Museum at FIT through January 4, 2026. The exhibition--which is the first of its kind--explores "key psychoanalytic concepts about the body, sexuality, and the unconscious," by way of 100 items of dress spanning more than 130 years of fashion history.
Want more Dressed: The History of Fashion?
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Our bookshelf with over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles
Dressed is a part of the AirWave Media network
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In the wonderful and often bizarre world of fashion fads from history, we ask the question: which should live on to wear another day and which should be left to history?
Recommended resources:• Bedazzled Beetles• Hobble Skirt• Painted knees
Want more Dressed: The History of Fashion?
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This week, we investigate the historical fashion trends written about in an 1884 Harper’s Bazar article entitled “The Follies of Fashion.” Covering everything from Ancient Roman curling irons to Cleopatra’s donkey milk baths to “barbarous” steel corsets, we decipher fashion fact from fashion fiction.
Primary Sources
Box for rouge and patches, 1750-55
Jean de la Bruyère’s translation of The Characters of Theophrastus
Memoirs of Madame de la Tour de Pin
Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia
Secondary Sources:
Sarah Bendall’s Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England
Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell’s Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette
Donkey Milk article in Beverages
Micaela Higgs’s “The Entirely False History of Tricking Men with Makeup”
Kelly Olson’s “Fashion and Adornment,” in A Cultural History of Hair in Antiquity
Valerie Steele’s The Corset: A Cultural History
Caroline Weber’s Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution
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please would you help me delve deeper? remind me of the Marie Antoinette memories book mentioned? love your work! best podcast ever.
I was listening to a completely different podcast about decor. To my surprise, within the first minute or so, I was listening to a description of Barbie's business outfit that converts to an evening outfit. I was stunned because just a few days ago I also heard about it on this podcast!
❤️🙏🌹
👍👍
Please be the voice of Iranians. They're taking down the internet and KILLING AND TORTURING INNOCENT PEOPLE. please be our voice
My grandmother worn cats eyes glasses and they were not a sexy or classy look at all.
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Great talk! So unfortunate that the mic quality is mediocre :(
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ouch huge bummer i had to listen to more than 2 minutes of obnoxious TelaNovela advertisements before the actual podcast.
Fantastic guest, so interesting to listen to not only the history, but also how she has recreated period garments.
Love this way of covering the history of fashion, and I found the history of fans really interesting.
Loved this episode so much I bought both books. Thank you for a wonderful podcast. It has opened my eyes to fashion, history, culture and encouraged my creative side. keep up the amazing work.
Just a compliment to the hosts to say how much I enjoy this podcast. It's one of my favourites. I love all things clothes and I've learned so much by listening!
Amazing! What a fantastic man and interview!
Swooning over every episode. Love your work ladies!!!!!
OMG, I thank God for you ladies and this podcast. I am about to show my first full collection in May and I was trying to decide if I wanted to attempt to do my 12 looks by hand or sewing machine. I am establishing a haute couture label and brand but starting out I do not have the luxurious fabrics so I wanted to at least hone the craft of hand sewing. This episode has lifted a great burden off of my heart and mind. Thank you ladies!!!!
Well done lovely to listen to thank you.
I recently stumbled upon your podcast......and I must say that I am completely addicted to it!
I enjoyed your history of the swimsuit. In the course of my own research for an article on the history of the bikini, I found a couple of things which might be of interest to you and your listeners. The bikini at its debut was actually, believe it or not, a g-string. (Louis Reard himself referred to it as, "Three triangles of nothing".) It was only later in the year of its premeire that Reard introduced a four-panel version. Also, Jacques Heim first designed the Atom in 1932. Its premiere in 1946 was actually his third attempt to introduce it to the public. He first tried in 1932/33, and then again in 1939. Unfortunately for him this latter attempt coincided with the outbreak of world war II. Really enjoying your show. Keep up the great work!