435. Fashion, History, and Romance with Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello there! Thank you for welcoming me into your eardrums. I’m Sarah Wendell; this is Smart Podcast, episode number 435, and my guest today is Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell. Kimberly is a fashion historian. She is the person behind the @WornOnThisDay Twitter account, and she’s the author of a new book, The Way We Wed. In her book she looks at the history of wedding clothing and fashion, and the history of the people surrounding the marrying couple and what they wore too. We also talk about why some clothing and the fascination with wedding clothing endures, and what changes the Quarantimes will create for what we wear.

I will have links as to where you can find Kimberly, and during the Hanukkah giveaways I have a signed copy of her book to give away too, so watch for that on the site at smartbitchestrashybooks.com.

I have a compliment in this episode, and it makes me so happy to start an episode with a compliment.

To Tara C.: A spice blend has been created that makes everything taste seventy-two and a half percent better by adding culinary sparkle to every dish. It is now available, and it was named for and inspired by you.

If you would like a compliment of your own, have a look at our Patreon at patreon.com/SmartBitches. Monthly pledges start at one dollar. Every pledge makes such a difference. And hello again to the Patreon community for being terrific.

This episode was brought to you by Don’t Look, a chilling new thriller from Alexandra Ivy. Dr. Lynne Gale follows in her father’s footsteps to become a veterinarian in Pike, Wisconsin. For years, she’s had little contact with Kir Jansen, son of the town’s late sheriff. Suddenly he’s back. He’s insisting that Lynne is in danger, and she can’t believe anyone would target her, but someone is hunting the women of Pike, savoring every last moment. If you love hard-edged suspense with sinister killers who are outwitted by fierce heroines and strong heroes, you will love Don’t Look by Alexandra Ivy, available now wherever books are sold, and for more information take a look at kensingtonbooks.com.

This episode is also brought to you in part by Headspace. Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations in a terrific, easy-to-use app. It is one of the only meditation apps advancing the field of mindfulness and meditation through clinically validated research, so whatever the situation, Headspace really can help you feel better! If you’re feeling overwhelmed, Headspace has a three-minute SOS meditation just for you. If you need some help falling asleep, they have wind-down sessions – Amanda loves these. And for parents, they have morning meditations you can do with your kids. Headspace’s approach to mindfulness can reduce stress, improve sleep, boost focus, and increase your overall sense of wellbeing. I am now on level two of the course on managing anxiety through meditation, and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this app. I have learned new ways to examine and manage my weird but lovely brain and its way of thinking, and I am calmer and more relaxed and feel a little bit more resilient, which I really needed. I also love that there was a special course on dividing your day between working at home and being at home. That was wonderful. Headspace is backed by twenty-five published studies on its benefits; there are six hundred thousand five-star reviews and over sixty million downloads! Headspace makes it easy for you to build a life-changing meditation practice with mindfulness that works for you on your schedule, anytime, anywhere. You deserve to feel happier, and Headspace is meditation made simple. Go to headspace.com/SARAH – that’s headspace.com/SARAH, S-A-R-A-H – for a free one-month trial with access to Headspace’s full library of meditations for every situation. This is the best deal offered right now. Head to, head to headspace.com/SARAH today!

Now, this episode is a little heavy on pictures because we talk a lot about the images and the history in The Way We Wed, but do not worry! I am going to link to all these pictures, and I’m going to put a link in the show notes hopefully that will work so that if you’re listening on your app you can tap that little link and look at some of the pictures we’re talking about. This is such a fun episode; I hope you enjoy it.

I would also like to tell you that it is brought to you by HelloFresh! And hello, I have a coupon for you, so stay tuned! You can give yourself or someone you love the gift of easy and stress-free dinner prep with HelloFresh! HelloFresh offers convenient, no-contact delivery to your doorstep, which means fewer trips to the store! which means a lot to me in the Quarantimes. The recipes are easy to follow with simple steps and pictures, and they don’t take more than about thirty minutes. The meals are delicious, there is a ton of variety, and over ninety percent of the ingredients are sourced directly from growers. HelloFresh offers more than twenty chef-crafted options every week to choose from. You can try new meals and make a weekday evening feel kind of special. And HelloFresh is paying attention to sustainable practices too, which I love. They are the first global carbon-neutral meal kit company, and the packaging HelloFresh uses to ship your food is almost entirely made from recyclable and/or already recycled content. We totally saved the box it came in ‘cause I am ninety-nine percent sure we can reuse it. I have tried three of HelloFresh’s most popular meals. The Firecracker Meatballs were our favorite, and the leftovers were awesome! I also appreciated the reminder that mashed potatoes are terrific, you should eat them more often, and we learned a new method to roast vegetables. And, as I’ve mentioned, the greatest part is that my son took charge of making dinner because the pre-portioned ingredients and step-by-step instructions helped him level up his cooking skills. Go to hellofresh.com/TRASHYBOOKS80 and use TRASHYBOOKS80 to get eighty dollars off, including free shipping! That’s hellofresh.ocm/TRASHYBOOKS80 and use code TRASHYBOOKS80 to get eighty dollars off, including free shipping!

Stay tuned at the end of this episode for an absolutely dreadful joke, but for now, let’s do this episode! On with the podcast.

[music]

Dr. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell: I’m Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, and I’m a fashion historian, curator, and journalist. I write books and articles about fashion, and I tweet about fashion, and I look at pictures and paintings of beautiful old clothes, and sometimes I even get to touch them.

Sarah: Whoooa!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs]

Sarah: So how did you become a fashion historian? This seems like a really cool, although sometimes probably dusty job.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: It is very cool! Fashion history has always been a hobby of mine since I was really young and I was making 18th-century gowns for my Barbies, but I wasn’t really sure what to do with it. I thought maybe I wanted to be a designer or work for a fashion magazine, and it wasn’t really until my senior year of college that I took a history class in material culture and realized that you could get a job as a fashion historian. So I immediately tore up my five-year plan and applied to a grad program in dress history; then I went on to do my Ph.D., and then I worked in museums for several years before going freelance, mainly because I had kids and I couldn’t do museum hours anymore.

Sarah: So how many programs in fashion history are there?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: When I did it, there weren’t many; there were maybe two or three, and they were all in Europe. But now there are quite a few more, and they all have different emphases, so you might do one that’s more focused on museum studies or one with more focus on art history or anthropology or textile science. So there’s a lot of, lot of options. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of jobs –

Sarah: Right.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – so at this point we have more people coming out of school ready to do the job than we have openings for curators.

Sarah: How many museums have collections that include clothing? Like, I know that every time I go to the Met, I always go down into the basement, into the costume part, because it’s, it’s always so cool! Like, it’s one of the sections I have to visit. How many, how many museums actually curate a collection of clothing?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Well, there, there are very few museums like the Met, but most museums have something wearable or textiles, even if it’s a museum like the Huntington, where I worked for a long time, where they have wonderful carpets and tapestries and, and furnitures, but no, no actual costumes that you can wear. A lot of local history museums collect costume, and they all do it for different reasons. Some are interested in the decorative and artistic qualities; some are interested in who wore it or where it was worn; so there are lots of different kinds of costume collections.

Sarah: And I imagine if you do an exhibit of costumes it’s very popular, because it’s, it’s interesting to look at what people wore however many years ago, right?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Oh, they’re always blockbusters, and it’s because we can all relate to it. Even if you don’t have paintings or snuff boxes or sculptures in your house, you have a closet full of clothes, and you can look at it and, and judge it from a place of experience and expertise.

Sarah: Look, person three hundred years ago! You wore clothes, and I wear clothes! I understand this! It totally makes sense!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Well, even if you don’t know the history, you can at least say, I would love to wear that, or, I would never wear that. You could, you could picture it on yourself.

Sarah: Yeah. I know when I go to textile museums or if I’m going to a quilting museum, I will look at things and think, someone stitched this by hand at a time when there was not electric light, so outside or in the sun or by candlelight, and they did that with their hands.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Exactly, and they –

Sarah: See, and it’s like, it’s stunning, right?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: It, it’s incredible. They had so much more time back then, and they also spun the threads themselves, and they wove the textiles themselves.

Sarah: So I know researching fashion, especially couture and wedding fashion, has to be really fun, but also really frustrating. I mean, on one hand, it’s all gorgeous dresses and beautiful clothing and different cultural signifiers that are present in a big ceremony. I did a podcast recently with Hilary Levey Friedman, who wrote a book called Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America, and she’s the daughter of a former Miss America who studies pageants, and, and, and of course, you know, weddings are a form of pageantry. It, it is a pageant –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Mm –

Sarah: – it has a costume –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – it has an expectation, but at the same time, all of these clothes are really fragile, and not all of them survive.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Well, you’d be surprised by how much has survived. Like I said, these were made of handwoven textiles from handspun threads; 18th-century clothes are going to be around a lot longer than most of what we wear today because they’re like Teflon, and most museums are overflowing with wedding gowns, which tend to be kept for their monetary and sentimental value.

Sarah: Wow.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: But for me, though – yeah, yeah, there, there are plenty of wedding gowns out there. It was a really hard thing to write about it – [laughs] – because there’s just so much of, where, where do you stop? But often it’s, it’s, for me, the really humble and damaged pieces rather than the runway and the red carpet gowns that tell the most compelling stories. So in my last book, Worn on This Day, I used a lot of clothes that had bloodstains and bullet holes, and they’re my favorite pieces.

My research has taken me – [coughs] – oh, sorry – my research has taken me all over the world. My favorite destination was probably Sweden, because, just like my Swedish grandmother, they saved everything. They had the dress; they had the bill for the dress, the diary describing the dress, the portrait of the princess wearing the dress, the shoes she wore with the dress, the underwear, everything.

Sarah: So literally, the undergarments of history.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: Wow. Oh, that’s cool. So you, you said museums are overflowing with wedding dresses because people keep them.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: You, you’ve probably got yours, right? [Laughs]

Sarah: Actually, no! I don’t. We moved five years ago, and instead of throwing birdseed we lit sparklers at the end of my wedding –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs]

Sarah: – and I didn’t think about this, but all the sparklers burned little pinholes in my gown, so it wasn’t going to be able to be worn again, plus – and this was something I wanted to ask you about tangentially as we talk about your book – when I was married it was 2000, so I shopped for my wedding dress in 1999, and the number of places where I could try on gowns as a plus-sized woman were very, very –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Right.

Sarah: – small, so I couldn’t try on dresses. I, I was, I was at one boutique and they were like, you can hold it up to yourself, but, you know, we don’t have anything for you to try on, and then I went to one of those giant bridal warehouses, and they had, like, everything up to size 36-42; it was glorious. So I ended up getting a, a very simple gown that I absolutely loved, but I did not keep it, because it was not very expensive; it was not, like, super –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Oh.

Sarah: high-end material; and by the time I was done with it, it had pinhole burns all over the skirt, so – [laughs] – it wasn’t much point!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs]

Sarah: So I don’t actually have my wedding dress, much as I love it. But I know that, like, I think my mother has hers; my, my husband’s grandfather threw away my mother-in-law’s –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Ohhh! [Laughs]

Sarah: – thinking that it was like a, some, like, I thought it was some schmatta; I threw it away! And, and my, my mother-in-law was like, you did what?! So we don’t have any dresses in my family! I’m fascinated by these people who hold on to theirs!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Well, as a curator, I’ve always been really fascinated by why things survive and find their way into collections, and if you think about things in your closet that have been there for several years – you know, maybe not your wedding dress, although, you know, mine is certainly sitting in my closet – but they’re things that you kept for sentimental reasons. They’re not –

Sarah: Absolutely.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – the things you wore every day that got worn out and thrown away and, and, you know, went out of style. They’re, they’re things, things survive for sentimental reasons; they survive by accident a lot of times; they survive because they’re beautiful and expensive; or maybe because you never wear, wore them? Because they went out of style really quickly, and they’re just in good condition, so you keep them –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – because they’re too good to throw away, even though you’re never going to wear them again.

Sarah: So that becomes sort of like a, a, an artifact of that day, or an artifact of that time.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: But it doesn’t really tell you about that time if you never wore it or if you –

Sarah: No!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – only wore it once.

Sarah: No. Wow. So in your book, you have, in, in The Way We Wed, you have both the things that were only worn once, and then you also have dresses that were more worn and loaned out over and over, which is so cool. What will readers find in your book?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yeah, well, one, one of the really cool things I found out while I was writing this is that many of things we think of as being very traditional, like wearing white for weddings, are actually extremely recent developments –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – while other things that seem very modern and contemporary, like having a whole wedding week of events or having a different dress for the reception, those go way back.

Sarah: Now, in the introduction you talked about the, the whiteness of weddings, both sartorially and socially. What are some of the other things you discovered about the history of weddings and wedding fashion, wedding clothing?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Well, what I didn’t want to write was yet another book about white people in white dresses. We already have a lot of those, and I’ve tried hard to get away from that, but I found it wasn’t easy because, to a certain extent, that’s what’s been saved and recorded and photographed?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: I suspect there are a lot of wedding dresses sitting in attics and museums and vintage stores that have not been identified as such because they’re not white. But I also really wanted to go beyond the wedding gown to the groom –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – and the guests, the attendants, the mother of the bride, the engagement and going away dresses that are all part of that story of wedding fashion. My favorite chapter is the one on wartime weddings –

Sarah: Yes!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – which has a lot in common with pandemic weddings, actually. [Laughs] When people are going through difficult circumstances, it really brings out their creativity and resilience –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – and reminds us that it’s the marriage and not having the perfect wedding day that matters, and that’s where you see the wedding dresses that are made out of parachutes or that are worn by twelve different brides because they wanted a white dress and they couldn’t buy one. I also really enjoyed the chapter on remarriage, which has a whole fashion history of its own that we rarely hear about. Today, nobody blinks an eye if you want to wear a white meringue for your third wedding, but for a while there, for most of the 20th century, there was a whole set of rules for what you could wear for your second or third wedding.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. I was fascinated that Jackie Kennedy hated her wedding dress that she wore to mar-, mar-, to marry Jack Kennedy, and then when she got married to Aristotle Onassis she finally had the dress that she wanted, which was so completely different!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yes! It’s fascinating to wonder what she would’ve chosen for herself for her first wedding. It was all orchestrated by her father-in-law. It was kind of a royal wedding for American political royalty, and –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – she didn’t have a lot of say in it.

Sarah: And, and I always thought her dress was very pretty: it was off the sleeves, it had a – off the, off the shoulder – it had short sleeves; it had all these pleats; and she really did not like it!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Well, when you look at why she didn’t like it, you can see her point. I mean, it, it is a beautiful dress, but it wasn’t the right dress for her body; it didn’t really go with her personal style. I –

Sarah: No.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – I don’t think she was opposed to the dress itself so much as the dress on her.

Sarah: Yeah, and I, I also think that it’s interesting that she figured out pretty quickly that as part of a political dynasty marriage like that, she’s going to be looked at and photographed so much. She had a very specific style after that.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yes, she did, and, and she certainly showed that off as first lady.

Sarah: And when you wrote about – oh God, I’m so sorry; which Jonas was it, Joe?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs]

Sarah: It was a Jonas, and –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Nick! Nick and Priyanka.

Sarah: Nick. Thank, thank you. I know Priyanka; I was like, Priyanka’s not a problem. Which Jonas, brain? Come on now. You can’t just lump them all together. I’m so good at this interview thing. The, the photographs and the clothing for their wedding over several days was, I, like, you wrote about it a little bit, and there was one photo, and then I had to go deep dive for all the others, ‘cause I hadn’t seen the full set. Holy cow! That was gorgeous!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Oh yeah. They, they are jaw-dropping, and I couldn’t get all of them, because some of them were sold to certain magazines and the rights aren’t available, but I tried –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – to include – [clears throat] – excuse me – I tried to include some really spectacular pieces.

Sarah: Looking at the book, I have probably read this thing twice, ‘cause it’s just so enjoyable and relaxing. It’s this lovely blend of history and context and then some pictures! How –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Oh, thank you, Sarah!

Sarah: The pictures are so fun! It’s, it’s a real, you know, it’s a really lovely book. Like, I, I’ve been married for twenty years; I don’t really think about wedding fashion all that much. In fact, the, I was in a wedding last year, you know, bef-, when we would do things in person and breathe with other people –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs]

Sarah: – and I, when I got married, I had some of my friends and my sisters-in-law-to-be and my sister in my wedding, and they were all different shapes and hair colors, and I was like –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Hmm.

Sarah: – just buy a dress and make it blue; all blues go together. I am not dressing other women; I cannot do that. I can barely dress myself! So all of my bridesmaids had their own dresses, and it was lovely. For my sister-in-law’s wedding last year, she said, just, here’s the designer and here’s the color; you can pick whatever style you want, which I thought was very generous. Wedding fashion has changed a lot just in, just in twenty years! Like, it’s, it’s amazing how many changes have happened. And I love the way, in the book, that history and the, and the way that weddings have changed is, is captured in so many of the photos. How did you decide which photos to include? I have a list of favorites, but I want to know what your favorites are.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Oh gosh. Well, if it were up to me there would be five hundred photos in all my books. So to narrow it down I look for things that are absolutely critical to the story I’m telling, and preferably things that haven’t been widely published? If you can picture it in your head or easily google it, it’s, it’s less essential, however beautiful and wonderful it might be. I always try to include as many famous faces as possible, because someone you recognize, like Nick Jonas, is always going to be more interested than a random couple who got married in the same year or in the same place. And it’s often celebrities who popularize wedding trends.

Sarah: Oh yeah!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Not just fashion trends, but things like beach marriages or destination weddings or even gay marriage. They become more widely accepted because we see celebrities and royalty doing them.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. So what were some of your favorite photos that were in this book?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Well, my favorite piece in the entire book is Queen Soraya’s Dior wedding gown. I don’t, I, I didn’t know this about myself when I started writing the book, but I’m really into wedding gowns that involve fur or feathers? And I say this as a vegetarian, but I love a winter wedding.

[Laughter]

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: And there’s something really romantic and incredibly luxurious about that Snow Queen look. So Empress Soraya’s wedding gown is trimmed with marabou. There are two pictures of it in the book, one on a mannequin in Christian Dior’s atelier with a dozen seamstresses sort of all around the edges of the train working on it. But there was a whole wave of fur-trimmed, hooded wedding gowns that were inspired by the film version of Doctor Zhivago that was released in 1965. Judi Dench wore one when she got married in 1971; you should definitely google her wedding dress, because it’s just fantastic.

Sarah: One picture I love is the one of your wedding gown!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Oh yes! I was so happy I could squeeze that in there, and I also wanted a picture of a man in a kilt, so I, I used my own man in a kilt there. [Laughs]

Sarah: Ah! Judi Dench totally had the big, furry hood!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Isn’t it great? And there’s, there are several –

Sarah: It’s gorgeous!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – similar wedding gowns around the same time.

Sarah: Oh, that’s beautiful! I wanted to ask you about some of my favorite pictures from this book, starting with the 1766 court dress? Where –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Ooh, yes.

Sarah: – the bride looks like a sofa?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs]

Sarah: Like, are those panniers? Whatever the thing is on the side there where you could, like, park, like, a whole buffet dinner under your skirt?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yes! And that, that wasn’t a wedding thing; that was a court thing. So if you were –

Sarah: It was a court thing ‘cause you would –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – if you were the queen –

Sarah: – wear that dress again.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yes, right. Well, the, I, I doubt she wore that dress again, but for court, the more fabrics – [laughs] – you could wear, the more trimmings, the more expense, the better, so for, during the 18th century those extremely wide hoop petticoats were worn at court, even after they went out of fashion.

Sarah: Seriously, you could park, like, a, a space heater, a couple of sandwiches – like, you could pack so much underneath there.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs] Yeah, she takes up the whole aisle, doesn’t she? And I –

Sarah: I think –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – I think it’s really wonderful that wom-, women were, had that physical presence then.

Sarah: Oh, right? It, it’s like, you cannot miss this person. I mean, the, the –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – the groom’s clothing, it’s to the left of it, even though it’s this beautiful sort of icy, shiny fabric with a lot of embroidery, she’s four times as big as he is.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, and it was all about showing off how much fabric you could afford, because –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – before the industrial revolution, when you were weaving fabrics by hand, the cost of the fabric was so much more than the cost of actually making the dress.

Sarah: Right, of course. I also love the –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: It was more than we would spend today.

Sarah: Oh, right? Yeah.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Buying a dress back then was like buying a car today. It was an enormous expense, and people had a lot fewer dresses then than we have now.

Sarah: I also love the Princess Josephine dress, mostly because she looks so petite next to the male model wearing the other clothing?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Doesn’t that look like it’s out of a fairy tale? I, I just love this.

Sarah: Right? It’s, it’s so opulent: there’s so much lace and gathers and I don’t know all the right terms, but whoo!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: And again, wearing silver for a wedding I think is a trend we should revive.

Sarah: Oh yeah. Speaking of the ice blue Frances Dodge dress –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Ohhh, yes!

Sarah: – it’s so beautiful! Where did you find out about this one?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: You know, I included that in Worn on This Day, and I’m not sure where I found out about it! But I, I know the curator at Meadow Brook Hall and, and she really was very happy to let me use that picture, and researching that wedding, not only did the bride wear blue, but all the bridesmaids wore graduated shades of blue, and it was an evening wedding. The groom was a sort of ne’er-do-well jazz musician/writer about jazz, and the reception was outdoors under the stars with a jazz band playing, and I think the different shades of blue in the starlight must have been absolutely jaw-dropping. I wish we had color pictures from back then.

Sarah: The dress itself is so elegant, too. It – how would you describe it? ‘Cause I do not have fashion language at my disposal.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Well, it’s a bias-cut silk satin grown, so extremely clingy, and it has this train that pools around the, the feet, and it just goes on and on and on, and it, it’s a very kind of Hollywood-influenced, sort of screen goddess dress, but it is in this amazing icy blue color.

Sarah: I agree; I think blue would be a gorgeous color to bring back.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Mm, mm-hmm.

Sarah: I also love the stories about the gowns in the book that were borrowed and shared or made for other people, like Mary Riccitelli’s gown from the dressmaking shop that –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Gasps] Yes.

Sarah: I love that! When did you, how did you learn about this? What, what is the story of the Tirocchi dressmaking shop?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Well, there’s a whole exhibition catalog about it. It was a project done by the Rhode Island School of Design Museum where they found this basically untouched dressmaking shop in Providence that had all of the records and all of the fabrics still intact, so they, they did the right thing and they completely cataloged it. They showed it off; they, they turned it into this interdisciplinary study project; and there’s a great catalog of it.

And one of the traditions of this dressmaking shop was that all of the seamstresses who worked there, who were mainly young women who were either Italian immigrants or children of Italian immigrants, were given a wedding dress when they got married. So the owners, the sisters who owned the shop would pay for the materials, and then the, all the seamstresses worked together to make a wedding dress for whichever seamstress was getting married, and they did this over and over again, and these are jaw-dropping dresses that these women could not afford on, on their own, but that they were making for their clients, and then they got to be the client for the day and wear these stunning gowns. That, Mary Riccitelli’s dress is very much like the Frances Dodge dress, where it’s very clinging, bias-cut, slim line, kind of Hollywood style gown, and it was worn by a, you know, working-class woman.

Sarah: You also have a whole chapter on the going-away clothing –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Mm, mm-hmm!

Sarah: – which I love, because there’s a practical element to that. Like, you’re going somewhere! You have to be prepared for photography if you’re famous or a celebrity or, or somewhat prominent, but you also have to travel in it. And the gown for Holmes, is it Kerr? Holy cow.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Oh, the Glasgow gown; oh gosh, yes. And –

Sarah: It is –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – that was one of the gowns that I was determined to include in this book. I, I knew that existed, and I wanted to put it in a book. [Laughs]

Sarah: It’s ridiculous! It is deep purple-blue; it has fur; it has a – okay, first of all, it looks really warm, which I appreciate.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs]

Sarah: It is opulent! It has this incredible fastening where the buttonholes sort of overlap each other, and holy cow!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Oh, the, the Art Nouveau sort of cording – it’s, it’s spectacular. It almost glows, the color is so rich; it almost is sort of iridescent.

Sarah: And it’s in a museum.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yes, it is. It’s, it’s in a museum in Glasgow, Scotland.

Sarah: Wow! How, do you know how they came to acquire it? Was it donated? Because, I mean, I can’t believe that this isn’t, like, reproduced frequently. First of all, it looks really warm and comfortable, and it’s gorgeous!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs] I, I believe it was worn locally, so it probably found its way into the collection through, through the family.

Sarah: Did you have a favor-, a favorite going-away dress from this chapter? Is that it?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: That’s one of my favorite dresses of all time, so – [laughs] – yes, probably. But the going-away dress was an essential part of any bride’s wardrobe for, for hundreds of years, and it’s something that’s not as popular today? We’ve sort of forgotten about it, or maybe we wear a different dress for the reception that you can dance in, but this was, like, something that was worn for leaving on your honeymoon, and of course for most of history you, you know, you left on your honeymoon, meaning you left the reception and got on a train or got on a boat, so it was a traveling dress, and it’s, it’s something that we don’t really see anymore, we don’t really appreciate anymore, but women kept them, and they wore them again, and there’s an issue of Mademoiselle from the ‘50s where it’s the bridal issue, but they actually put a going-away dress on the cover –

Sarah: Oh!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – because it was that important, and because it was something that even if you weren’t getting married you could look at and say, oh yeah, I’d like to wear that. That Holmes-Kerr wedding gown, that’s the one where she wore her grandmother’s wedding dress, I believe?

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: So she, the dress she wore for the ceremony was probably old-fashioned, it wasn’t something she picked out for herself, so the going-away dress could be something absolutely up to the minute that you could wear again and that you could wear for, you know, evening, for travel, for not having a wedding. The wedding dress was becoming much more specific to the wedding –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – and then the going-away dress was where you could kind of show off your personal style. It didn’t have to be as traditional or, you know, suitable for church or whatever. It, it, it gave you a lot more freedom.

Sarah: Right, and it was your, it was symbolically the dress you were going to wear as a married woman entering the world.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: That’s right.

Sarah: So it has a different role to play in the pageantry of a wedding.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: And even today, the royal family – for example, Kate and William, you know, we all know what they wore for their wedding, but the, the royal family released a picture of their going-away clothes. Princess Diana’s going-away dress was widely photographed. It’s a tradition that has survived in kind of more formal and royal contexts?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: And even though, you know, Kate and William, they didn’t go straight from their wedding to their honeymoon, they still had going-away clothes, and there was still a picture released.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. It’s a, it’s a very old custom!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yes! Yes, and it, it’s, it’s one you see pop up in, in odd places, but not so much in, in average weddings. Although I think it’s coming back. I think part of having a wedding wardrobe and having a wedding week, people are paying more attention to what they wear at, at all points of the wedding –

Sarah: Right.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – whether it’s the reception or the rehearsal dinner or actually going away, getting in the car.

Sarah: Yes. I’ve seen a number of wedding gowns that transform into an evening gown for the reception –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sarah: – so you can move around easily, possibly use the bathroom by yourself without assistance.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs]

Sarah: The dress transforms or, or becomes something else, or just, just a completely different outfit altogether.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Right, or the train comes off, or there’s that wonderful picture in the book of the train being cut off of Lauren Santo Domingo.

Sarah: Yeah. Now, I wanted to ask – I didn’t sent this ahead of time, but I forgot to mention – in the book you talk about mothers of the bride and bridesmaids who kind of upstage the bride a little bit?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs]

Sarah: That was a very dishy chapter!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yeah, that’s not a new thing; that’s been going on for centuries. [Laughs]

Sarah: Even Queen Victoria showed up her own daughter by wearing this gorgeous, giant, purple gown, and then in the portrait it’s like all of the, all of the art and the light is focused on her! For –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yes.

Sarah: – whose, wait, what happened to the bride, do you know where the bride is? Whatever, she’s fine. We, we have to talk about this purple dress in this picture. Like, wow! All these moms showing up their daughters!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Well, Queen Victoria was paying for the portrait and the whole wedding, so –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – I think she could do that.

Sarah: It would be her centerpiece.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs] For a long time, though, bridesmaids were meant to be decoy brides, so they were supposed to look like the bride, and that’s why royal weddings, you see, you know, Pippa Middleton wearing a white dress to a wedding! That could have been a wedding dress, but that transi-, that tradition of bridesmaids in white goes back to the idea that the bridesmaid was a decoy bride, so if somebody wanted to kidnap the bride or if an evil spirit was going to curse the bride, they wouldn’t know which one she was.

Sarah: Right, so it’s a lady in waiting and a decoy at the same time. Wow.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yeah, so it’s okay that the bridesmaid maybe upstages the bride or, or looks a lot like the bride, because she’s supposed to! That’s a tradition we’ve kind of lost in 21st-century America.

Sarah: I love the, the extremely pink bridesmaids for the White House wedding?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Gasps] Yes! [Laughs] There’s some great gossipy stories about that wedding as well.

Sarah: Including the designer just chopping off the veil because the maid of honor was complaining too much that she didn’t look different?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Right. The, the maid of honor was Lynda Bird Johnson, and the bride was Luci Johnson, and, and Lynda Bird was not happy that she had to wear the exact same dress as all the other bridesmaids. She thought she should stand out as the, the maid of honor.

Sarah: Oof! Bridal drama does sort of –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs]

Sarah: – transcend history, doesn’t it?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yes, it does. I had one bridesmaid, and it was my, my most low-maintenance friend, and I was really excited about look-, and looking forward to spending a whole day shopping for her dress, and we found one in half an hour and –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – she just had it hemmed and that was it, and we went to lunch. [Laughs]

Sarah: That sounds actually quite nice!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: In, in, in retrospect it was, but at the time I was like, wait a minute! I, I’ve got a whole list of stores we were going to go to today!

Sarah: [Laughs]

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell:  But it, but it was the perfect dress, so what are you going to do?

Sarah: That’s really lovely. You, you sent me an article from El Pais about your @WornOnThisDay Twitter feed, which is very popular. When I mentioned to my review team that I was going to be interviewing you, they were like, oh, the woman from @WornOnThisDay? I love that; it’s so great! It’s like a timeline cleanse!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Oh great! Oh, I’m glad it’s getting, getting seen by, by people. I, I really do it for my own amusement, and I’m always thrilled when other people find it and enjoy it.

Sarah: So you’re cataloging one outfit worn on that day in history every day.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yes! And trying not to repeat myself after three years – [laughs] – which is getting tough. But I, for a while I wasn’t doing wedding dresses at all and now I am, so that’s helped.

Sarah: Right, a little bit. Now, I noticed in the, in the El Pais article, it said that you spend a couple of days writing and scheduling all the posts for the month, and you use museum databases and online accounts and archives. How do you organize your social media that way? What do you do? Do you, do you spend one whole day and then preload it into a piece of software? Like, what is the organizational behind-the-scenes details of this undertaking? ‘Cause that’s a, that’s a lot.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Wow, I, I wish it was as organized as you’re making it sound. I –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – I use Hootsuite so I can preprogram everything.

Sarah: I love Hootsuite. I use it too.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yeah. And I just update it, you know, whenever I’m kind of running low on stuff. I keep a running list of ideas, dates, photos. I’m always finding stuff. Like, just this morning I was sort of browsing Twitter and thought, oh! There, there’s something that has a date on it that would make a great WornOnThisDay, and when you only have two hundred and eighty characters to work with there’s, there shouldn’t be a lot of research involved, but often I go down these wormholes, and it takes me a lot longer than it should. [Laughs]

Sarah: I also noticed that in the, in the El Pais article you talk about how there are some posts, like wedding dresses, that are always popular. Why do you think –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – we’re, we are all so collectively fascinated with beautiful, opulent clothes?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: But there are a lot of Twitter accounts that post a pretty party dress every day, and they’re great, and I follow them, and I love them, but I think fashion exists in a, a, a myriad of beautiful and interesting ways that aren’t just the expensive, high society dresses.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Obviously, we’re all going to respond to that artistry, to the sentimental value of a wedding dress, to the celebrity perhaps that wore it. That has a lot of appeal and, and always will, but I have really enjoyed being able to do this Twitter account in a way that I’m forced to go outside my comfort zone?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: I can’t just do high fashion because there might not be something for that day, or there might have been something really compelling on that day that is not by a designer or not worn by a famous person? So it, it forces me to mix it up. I’m not limited by time period; I’m not limited by country; I’m not limited by social class. It really just has to have a date on it. Which is harder than you think! I mean, curators are usually happy if they can date something within about five years, so finding something with –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – one day attached to it is tricky, and there’s usually a really good story behind it.

Sarah: Wow. Now, you mentioned in our email exchange quarantine fashion, and I am really curious about that, because (a) I’m presuming you don’t mean the five pairs of jogging pants that I just ordered –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs]

Sarah: – because I realize that in terms of quarantine fashion there’s a, only a certain number of days in a row that I can get away with wearing my favorite jogging pants, but what quarantine fashion have you learned about?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Sarah, who’s going to know if you wear the same pants five days in a row, honestly?

Sarah: My teenagers.

[Laughter]

Sarah: And they don’t care.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: They’re ho-, they’re home judging you, aren’t they?

Sarah: Yes.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Well, I, I am not a specialist in quarantine fashion; however, historians are often called upon to predict the future or explain the unexpected, and since March I’ve had so many people from around the world wanting to interview me about what the pandemic means for fashion. Fashion magazines and fashion designers obviously couldn’t predict that we’d all be staying home in sweatpants in 2020.

Sarah: Right.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: So from a historian’s perspective, the only thing I can compare the COVID pandemic to is a war, specifically the French Revolution or World War II, both of which disrupted fashion while also kind of speeding it up in many ways. A lot of fashion designers went out of business, obviously. The ones who survived had to adapt very quickly to the new normal. Supply chains and distribution networks were interrupted. There was a correction when the wars ended and people went back to dressing up and they went back to consuming fashion the way they had beforehand, but there were also things that were already kind of percolating in fashion before the war that became more entrenched. For example, women were already wearing pants in a limited way before World War II, but when they went to work in factories and on farms they got used to wearing pants and overalls and jodhpurs every day –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – and men got used to seeing them wearing them, so that was able to continue after the war. We’re seeing the same thing happen now: athleisure obviously was already a big business before COVID, but now people are getting used to dressing in a certain way for working from home, and it may be hard to go back to a more formal office environment.

At the same time, the fashion industry was already facing very hard questions about sustainability and ethical manufacturing and the economics and the psychological toll of doing several seasonal collections, so that may never go back to business as usual. If fast fashion goes away, I won’t be sad about it, but I think a lot of other good designers will also go away.

Sarah: And the idea that, you know, you don’t have to dress up to go to an office, you don’t have to dress up at all, do you think that fashion will become more comfortable and casual? Or do you think that there will be sort of a rebound of, we’ve all been wearing sweats; let’s go full on!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: I, I think both! I mean, I think there will be that rebound, but I think that also, you know, things like men wearing suits and ties to work that have been going out for a long time –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – may finally be gone. Workplaces are going to have to really re-evaluate what, what they need to wear.

Sarah: This summer, my husband had a work conference that he had to speak on, and I have a picture of him – it’s one of my pictures of this year – wearing a suit jacket and a tie and a shirt, and shorts and slippers underneath.

[Laughter]

Sarah: It was like ninety degrees, and, you know, he’s up in my office and the door’s shut and it’s very, you know, it’s, this is where I record, so it’s a small room and it’s quiet, but it gets really warm, and he’s like, well, now I have to have this shirt cleaned! I don’t even know whether the dry cleaners is open anymore!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs] I did a lot of Zoom lectures over the past few months, and I, I always feel a bit weird if I dress up. I mean, I, I don’t want to dress down, but at the same time you could go too far and, and just look overdressed! It’s, it’s a very difficult balance.

Sarah: I just had a whole conversation with some of my writers about the makeup products that they keep in their desks –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Hmmm.

Sarah: – so if they have a, have a Zoom, ‘cause, you know, the, the, the camera on a computer is not meant to look your, look very good, and, and you, you get really washed out and pale, and one of my co-, one of my coworkers was like, I got real tired of being asked if I was okay, so here’s what I wear right before Zoom calls to give myself a little bit of color, and I was like, this is really important information!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Right, or you keep that silk shirt kind of on a hanger by your desk in case you have to get on Zoom. Yeah –

Sarah: I have an emergency shawl. Yeah.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs] Yeah, the scarf can, can do wonders. The, the makeup is really important, though. I mean, I, I’ve had to do stuff on camera in the past, you know, way before COVID –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – and you’ve got to step it up. I mean, you’ve got to have the, the highlighter and the false eyelashes and the, the lipstick, and it’s, it’s not to look like a movie star; it’s just to look like your normal self and kind of recreate that face-to-face experience.

Sarah: Yeah, I hired a makeup artist last year to show me how to do makeup, ‘cause I wear glasses, and I would do eye makeup, and then I’d put my glasses on, and then the eye makeup I just did would be completely gone! And I was clearly –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs]

Sarah: – didn’t know how to do my own eye makeup, so I hired a makeup artist to show me how to put on makeup, which was great, considering that I had, you know, two events and my sister-in-law’s wedding, and I didn’t, if I wanted to have my wedding done, my makeup done with the other bridesmaids, I would have had to have had my makeup done about three hours before the wedding? And –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Oof.

Sarah: – I was like, I can’t wear makeup that long. I, I, I just, I can’t. I will not look good by the time the wedding shows up. So I learned how to do my own makeup, which was great and has saved me so much time and has been a wonderful skill, but when I was on a television program, I think in 2018, this was the makeup artist that I hired to do my makeup, because I took one look at the, the opportunity and I was like, I cannot do makeup for 4D television. I don’t –

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sarah: – I don’t have that, the, the, the 4K television resolution. I do not have makeup skills for high-res TV. Like, that is just not happening here. And I think that it’s interesting to see all of us sort of thinking, okay, my meeting is me in a tiny little box. I need to get dressed just to my sternum, basically.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I just need that one jacket, and any, any T-shirt will do.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Well, and you know about the, the Improve My Appearance button on Zoom, right?

Sarah: Oh, yes, I do! Yes, I do!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yeah, that’s very important.

Sarah: Makes my skin look way better than it does in real life.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs] I’ve, I’ve got my little portable ring light.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Things I never had to think about before COVID.

Sarah: And I remember in the spring there were news articles about how more tops were being sold than bottoms?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. [Laughs]

Sarah: Like, more jackets were being sold than pants? Like, we’re all wearing the same pair of sweatpants, but we have a good, like, a set of jackets for, for appearances.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: If, if we’re wearing pants at all, let’s be honest.

Sarah: Mm-hmm! Yes. Now, I also understand that you have some historical romance fashion favorites and some historical romance fashion pet peeves. Would you please tell me all about this?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: [Laughs] Yes! Well, I’m a romance reader, and I see a lot of the same things kind of going wrong in historical romance that often drive me crazy when I’m watching a period drama. Never watch a period drama with a fashion historian.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: It’s usually the underwear, though, and underwear is so important in romance that it really bugs me when it’s wrong. And I know readers don’t want to think about the fact that people didn’t bathe or wash their clothes very often in ye olden times, but that’s so crucial to understanding the fashion and all the layers that people wore. A, a corset would never touch a woman’s skin. Whether you were a man or a woman, there was always a layer of linen between the stinky and sweaty parts of your body and your outer garments, because those were made of silk or wool and you couldn’t wash them easily. There were some pretty primitive and gross techniques of, you know, spot cleaning them if things got really bad, but back then your clothes were kind of like your nice wool winter coat today: you might have it professionally cleaned a couple of times a year, but you wouldn’t throw it in the washing machine –

Sarah: No.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – and you didn’t need to, because it never touches your skin. So this is why I cringe when I read about heroines, you know, wearing silk underwear or heroes sleeping in silk sheets, because anything that touched your body had to be washable, so linen and cotton, not silk. There are some isolated examples of silk underwear and bedding before the 20th century in museums, but they’re usually found in a royal or even a medical context.

Also, people didn’t have a lot of clothes? They had a lot of linen, but they weren’t wearing new dresses and tailcoats every day, even if they were rich?

Sarah: Right.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: So I’ve seen Marie Antoinette’s wardrobe bills, and they’re full of charges for repairing or retrimming things so she could wear them again. She repeated stuff all the time. There wasn’t any Target or H&M or polyester or rayon or fun fur. You wore real silk and real wool, and most of the population bought their clothes secondhand, if not third or fourth hand. I mean, imagine if we only had Neiman Marcus: you would either wear very expensive new clothes or you would wear very high quality third- and fourth-hand clothes.

So another thing that gets me is when authors use the wrong words for clothes? So, unlike in a movie –

[Laughter]

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – in a novel, the vocabulary is really important, and that changes depending on the time and place. So a hoop petticoat and a hoop skirt and a crinoline all look similar and perform the same function, but the words are said in very different times and places. Same with a waistcoat and a vest or a corset and stays. I once read a novel that mentioned a man’s velvet queue, and I’m still trying to figure out what that is. [Laughs] I think the author meant a bagwig, so a wig with a queue that was tied up in a black bag, but those bags were always silk and not velvet, because silk would have been very heavy.

But more than just getting the terminology right and knowing how all the parts fit together, fashion history is important in romance because it allows authors to use clothes to open up narrative possibilities.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: In a lot of historical periods, women didn’t wear underpants! So you could be fully clothed and still have penetration. If you’re wearing a corset and a bustle, your naked body looks very different from your clothed one.

Sarah: Right.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: So one author I really love is Joanna Shupe, who does the impossible and makes Gilded Age men’s underwear sexy. So –

[Laughter]

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – as a historian, that was actually kind of an ah-ha moment for me, because of course it had to be sexy, or, you know, the human species –

Sarah: Right.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – would have died out in the 1890s. But what’s sexy or not sexy to us today often doesn’t align with the historical romance, and romance novels can bridge that gap.

Sarah: Oh, for sure. So how, what are some of your favorite things about fashion in, in, in romance novels? In addition to sexy undies.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Well, I, I think that if you’re a romance fan you’re automatically a historical fashion fan. They, there’s a lot of overlap there, and part of the romance is the opulence and the luxury and the beautiful dresses and you, the, the men in the, the beautifully tailored suits. Bea Koch, who is the co-owner of The Ripped Bodice, has a degree in fashion history, and –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – of course she does! Because you can’t help absorbing that wonderful atmosphere and, and opulence if you’re a romance reader.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Another author I really love is Joanna, sorry, Jennifer McQuiston, who’s not writing anymore, but who really, I think, understands the importance of writing from the history rather than kind of taking a modern story and just putting historical trappings on it. Her book Summer Is for Lovers is one of my favorites, and it, it’s set in Brighton, which is a very unusual Regency setting, and, and the, the whole story is about a heroine who just wants to learn how to swim, to –

Sarah: Yep.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – you know, be, be in a swim race, and what she wears for that, and the fact that she can’t do that because of the time she lives in. I think it’s a great example of how we can take inspiration from history, rather than just giving a historical kind of setting to a, a modern heroine and hero or a modern conflict.

Sarah: Now, I also know that you have a new book that you’re working on, ‘cause I saw the deal announcement, which was earlier this year, but congratulations.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Thank you!

Sarah: What can you tell me about your next book?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Well, the tentative title is A Dozen Dresses That Made the World Modern or That Changed the Modern World, something, something like that; it is tentative. But the concept is a history of the dress in the 20th century, looking at key styles that appeared at specific moments that had a, a lasting influence, like the Little Black Dress or the miniskirt.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: I think we often think of the 20th century as the period when women finally got to wear pants, and pants have become this benchmark or symbol of women’s liberation, but most women actually chose to keep wearing dresses, even when pants were an option, and pants were actually banned in most offices and restaurants until the 1970s, so they really weren’t an option for many women. But you could still be modern and daring and feminist while wearing a dress –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – and as somebody who doesn’t actually own any pants, this is very on-brand for me.

Sarah: [Laughs] So what are some of the pieces, the dresses that you’re profiling in this, in this book? Can you, like, give, give me a sneak peek?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Oh, the Little Black Dress I mentioned.

Sarah: For certain.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Maria-, Mariano Fortuny’s Delphos dress is the first piece in the book. French tennis star Suzanne Lenglen’s Patou tennis dress that she wore at Wimbledon: she was the first woman to bear her arms and legs at Wimbledon, and this was a big scandal, but obviously very influential in retrospect. The Charles James taxi dress was the precursor of the Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress; it was a dress that was so easy to put on that you could do it in the back of a taxi, which I would love to try. That had a, a lasting influence on the way we dress today. There’s the Schiaparelli lobster dress, which was a collaboration between Schiaparelli and the surrealist artist Salvador Dali and launched a whole history of dresses inspired by art, like Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian dress, for example.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. And also the idea of, of, of putting large illustrations on something.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Yes, yes, that graphic element of –

Sarah: Like there’s a character on the dress.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Right; it’s using the dress as the artistic canvas.

Sarah: Yeah. So what books are you reading that you want to tell people about?

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Let’s see. Well, I was signing some books at The Ripped Bodice a couple weeks ago, and I picked up Christina Lauren’s new book, Holidaze, In a Holidaze, which was adorable and hilarious, and everyone should read it. Bea Koch’s book Mad and Bad is about the real-life heroines of the Regency and proves that truth is stranger than fiction.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: I just got an ARC of a book called Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History, and it’s –

Sarah: Oh!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: – written by a Stanford law professor. It looks at sumptuary laws and other attempts to regulate dress over history? So I’m really looking forward to diving into that, because I’m fascinated by dress codes. They, they never work, and they usually do a lot of unintended damage.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: And dress codes are always unfair to women. They –

Sarah: Always! So frustrating.

Well, thank you so much for doing this interview. I really appreciate your time!

Dr. Chrisman-Campbell: Oh, it’s been so much fun, Sarah! Thank you so much!

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. I will have links to where you can find Kimberly and her books.

And going on this week, every day, we have a different giveaway for Hanukkah, because, well, I celebrate Hanukkah, so I like to go shopping for the whole website, so you can win cool stuff like Kate Spade purses, Bluetooth headsets, and some books, including a signed copy of The Way We Wed. Trust me, this book is really gorgeous, and reading it is such a relaxing experience. It’s just like, oh, pretty dresses! History! Interesting! Moms showing up their families to make themselves the center of attention. You know, little family drama, as you do. So have a look at smartbitchestrashybooks.com in the coming days to see if you can win a signed copy of this fine, fine book!

And thank you again to Kimberly for hanging out with me and answering questions and to her publicist for sending me a PDF copy of the book so I could read it early. It’s really nice!

This episode is brought to you by Ritual, a daily mighty, multivitamin, now available in Essential for Kids! Ritual knows how difficult it can be to get your kids the nutrients they need – whoa yes! That’s why they made Essential for Kids to help fill the gaps in the diets of ages four through twelve without making a single compromise to quality or taste. Not only do they have a natural citrus-berry flavor, but they’re convenient by design: each gummy features a three-in-one design that combines a daily multi, a vegan omega-3 DHA, and a good source of fiber per serving. I like Ritual because of the convenience of the delivery schedule; I don’t have to remember which day it is, which I had trouble with before – now, just forget it – and the new bottle arrives the minute the old one is done. I also like the literal transparency; like, the capsules are see-through? But I also like knowing the source of every nutrient that’s in the vitamins that I take. When it comes to what goes into our kids’ bodies, they’ve got being picky down to a science – at least, mine do – so that is why Ritual is offering my listeners ten percent off during your first three months. Visit ritual.com/SARAH to start Ritual or add Essential for Kids today! That’s ritual.com/SARAH.

I have so many links to share this episode. I will link to all of the books and articles we talked about, plus some of the pictures – ooh, pictures! – and I will link to all the books we talked about, never fear. They all go in the podcast entry, and I bet you know where to find it, but I’m going to tell you anyway: smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.

One final thing to tell you: this episode was also brought to you in part by OneHope Wine. OneHope is a Napa Valley winery built on hope and rooted in purpose, and their wine is delicious, ‘cause I’ve been drinking. Not right now; like, it’s ten in the morning. I’m not drinking right now. I could, but I’m not. However, every bottle of their award-winning wine supports a meaningful cause! Their commitment to high quality wine is as important as their commitment to the causes, and through the sale of every bottle, OneHope has donated over five million dollars to causes around the world! Their world-class vintner collection begins at twenty-five dollars, so everyone can afford to have the best of Napa Valley delivered to their homes. You can stock up for the holidays with up to thirty-five percent off wine from OneHope. You can get ten percent off a four-pack, twenty percent off a six-pack, or thirty-five percent off a twelve-pack during their biggest sale of the year, and let’s be honest, we could all use a little extra wine this holiday season, because 2020? If you need a gift idea, they have gorgeous glitter bottles that are covered with glitter, just for the holidays. Have a look: visit onehopewine.com/SARAH, or use code SARAH, S-A-R-A-H, for ten dollars off your first order. This is for new customers only, so if you haven’t taken a look, visit onehopewine.com/SARAH and use code SARAH for ten dollars off your first order today. That’s O-N-E-H-O-P-E-W-I-N-E dot come slash Sarah.

As always, I end each episode with a bad joke, and this is a really bad joke because that’s the kind that I like best, and if you would like to send me one, [email protected] is where you should send that joke. But here we go. This is a bad one. I love it.

What does it sound like when a nut sneezes?

Give up? What does it sound like when a nut sneezes?

Cashew!

[Laughs] I love this in particular ‘cause I’ve been leaving nuts outside for the flock of crows that lives in my neighborhood, so – they like cashews the best. [Laughs] I don’t know what it sounds like when a crow sneezes, but when a nut sneezes: cashew! So bad; I love it so much!

Coming up on the podcast, by the way, I’m going to be connecting with each of the team at Smart Bitches, and we’re going to talk about books that got us through, so we’re going to have episodes with all of the reviewers from different parts of the world for the next couple weeks, and I hope you enjoy it.

But in the meantime, wherever you are, we wish you the most excellent reading. We will see you back here next week.

Smart Podcast, Trashy Books is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find outstanding podcasts to listen to at frolic.media/podcasts.

[jaunty music]