6 Popular Fashion Trends (That Killed People)
If we know our readers, then we're guessing fashion dominates your every thought. But how far would you go to be wearing the absolute latest and hottest looks? Would you wear something knowing it could, at some point, kill your ass?
Through history men and women have been asked that exact question, and time and time again they shrugged and said, "Eh, I'll risk it." So we wound up with things like...
#6.
The Crinoline
The crinoline is a hoop skirt that women in the 19th century wore under their actual skirts. It was made from horsehair and thread or steel, and the whole purpose of the huge apparatus was to make the skirt look more... skirt-like.
Also, since you were basically wearing a cage around your legs, you could probably use the crinoline to trap small animals and kick them to death.
How It Could Kill You:
The steel crinoline was actually so deadly it's amazing this thing was ever worn at all. Because of its design, it was quite susceptible to gusts of wind. There are tales of women on piers that were swept up and carried out to sea, where they promptly drowned due to having a fucking steel cage tied to their waists. It was also a bad idea to hang around cliffs or tall buildings in this sort of contraption.
The skirts would get entangled in the spokes of carriages, presumably dragging the women screaming down the street. Then there was the less obvious dangers, such as knocking over candles. Don't laugh; the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's second wife went up in flames this way, and she wasn't the only one.
Wait, it gets worse. In 1863 in Santiago, Chile, between 2000 and 3000 people died in a church fire. When a gas lamp lit the veils on the walls, people tried to run outside, but the width of the women's skirts blocked the door, and crinolines with women inside piled up in front of the exit, making an escape impossible even for the people who'd been smart enough not to wear hoop skirts.
What the Fuck Were They Thinking?
The crinoline, in making someone's ass look big, would also make their waist look smaller, and so women didn't have to wear a corset. Why would they take such extravagant measures to avoid that? Well...
#5.
The Corset
The corset, if you're one of the small percentage of our readership not wearing one right now, was meant to suck in a woman's problem-areas with the small side effect of cutting off all circulation between their legs and head.
The result was not so much an hourglass figure, but a body that became an actual hourglass. Queen Maud of Norway was famous for her very small waistline, and many of her gowns are still exhibited so everyone can view their beauty and not-at-all freakishness.
Compressing her organs as only a queen can.
How It Could Kill You:
The act of donning a corset didn't actually become truly dangerous until people started tight lacing them to the point that their insides were squeezed like a toothpaste tube.
Unsurprisingly, when tight lacing was fashionable people didn't breathe very well. With their liver in their throats and their lungs in their bellies, Victorian women invented "the heaving bosoms." Breathing the wrong way in one of these things could break a rib (a serious injury in the days before anesthesia) and cramming all of the organs inwards could cause internal bleeding. Female impersonator, Joseph Hennella, was doubly unfortunate when, in 1912, he first collapsed on stage as the result of the tight lacing from his corset, and then when The New York Times wrote the part about what killed him, they said it was his "increasing girth."
In 1903, a woman died suddenly due to two pieces of corset steel that became lodged in her heart. Yeah, when your outfit fucking stabs you to death, it's probably a sign that you've made a bad fashion decision.
What the Fuck Were They Thinking?
What else do you do when you live in a society that demands women have a shape that's physically impossible? They were stuck between wearing a thing that could snap ribs, or a ridiculous cage dress that could fling them into oncoming traffic at the first gust of wind. At that point, you just flip a coin and wait for someone to invent feminism.
#4.
Footbinding
Footbinding, aka "lotus feet," was a custom for women in China from around the 8th century until the beginning of the 1900s. It began with one concubine (that's archaic for paramour) dancing around in front of the emperor with silk wrapped around her feet, and it ended with women whose feet were so disfigured they could only walk very short distances, never mind do the Hustle.
How It Could Kill You:
In order to transform the foot from regular-shaped to crazy-in-the-head-shaped, women started early, at two to seven-years-old, when their feet were soft and their minds blissfully unaware of what would happen to their feet. First, their feet would soak in a bath that could be anything from herbs and water to urine and vinegar, depending on the family tradition. Then all their toes except the big one were folded down, and the arch of the foot bent back. The process would go on for a couple of years, with ever tighter bandages and recurrently disgusting foot baths, until the feet were about three inches long.
Footbinding cut off circulation in the toes, and the procedure oftentimes lead to gangrene or other life-threatening infections. Gangrenous toes were actually considered to be a good thing, because that meant the toes might fall off. The ideal was a foot that wasn't a foot at all, but simply a continuation of the leg. If the woman happened to die in the middle of all this, that was a real shame, but at least she'd be buried with nice feet.
What the Fuck Were They Thinking?
A woman with normal-sized feet was considered ugly and frankly, unwedable. We all know what that's like, when a woman who doesn't have hideously mutilated feet starts stomping about, walking all normal and shit. Would you want to marry that woman? Of course not.
Women who didn't have bound feet were considered to be provincial, because only farmers needed to be able to walk and get work done. A real lady staggered on her heels or rode piggyback, because she was unable to put any pressure on her toes (if she had any).
The foot itself was usually covered in sores, puss and gave off a repugnant smell, and if you happened upon a Chinese woman naked in the days of footbinding in China, the first thing she'd try to cover would be her feet. Not that you'd want to see those feet anyway; men actually never saw their ladies' feet without beautiful silk shoes on, but if they had, we're thinking that would ruin the mood pretty fast.
A "healthy" lotus foot.
The feet! The horror! Why? Why!? Why is this real? Now they will forever haunt my dreams...
ReplyYup, it's real. Isn't China great?
I tried to read one of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's books Hyperion, but it wasn't really my kind of book. I remember learning about the footbinding stuff back when I was in elementary school. Apparently Chinese men preferred small feet, it was considered more ladylike I guess. It also sounds like something ballet dancers do. They wrap their feet in bandages before they put their ballet slippers on because ballet dancing is so hard on the feet. The lead makeup kind of reminded me of The Wizard of Oz. I heard the actor that played the tin man ended up wearing a lot of that lead makeup for the movie and eventually ended up killing him years later. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but he did have to wear a lot of it for the part. I've read one of Oscar Wilde's books The Picture of Dorian Gray, it was really good. It had a bit of a homosexual vibe in the beginning of the book. Popping collars was still considered pretty popular when I was in middle school and early high school, now it's just considered kind of gay.
ReplyYou're thinking of the Wicked Witch of the West's make-up, it was made with copper oxide and if I remember rightly caught on fire at one point giving her serious burns. I think I read that in a Cracked article, so you could probably fact-check me from here.
I stopped using the corset the moment i read this though...i only wear a corset to straighten my posture and sometimes, i tightlace it that i almost killed myself
ReplyPersonally, I find it very interesting that for centuries (going back to ancient Greece at least) the ideal was to be as pale as possible but then sometime in the 20th century, it all changed and people no longer wanted to lighten their skin but to darken it.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesOf course, turning your skin brown by cooking yourself in the sun turned out to be about as deadly as the lead paint. So far, spray-on seems to be safe, just turns out more orange than brown.
I think it was around the time that Southern California became The Place To Be. I blame Hollywood. :)
Before the 1900s, lower-class people would be working outside, while higher-class people didn't have to, so a pale complexion was an indication of one having more money and status. Nowadays, most jobs are done indoors, and a pale complexion is no longer an indication of wealth...but having the cash to go on vacation to a sunny, beachy place is, and what do people get when they go on vacation to a sunny place? A tan. Also, tan skin is indicative these days of a person being healthy, since pale skin can imply that a person stays inside all of the time (or they could just wear sunscreen...).
Actually in India, where everyone is naturally tan, fair skin is still considered more beautiful. So basically whatever is the farthest from your natural state is the most desirable. Or something.
The moment i read thing about the tight lacing of corsets in this article..I swore that I'll never wear one again ever in my life (and death as well) because it would turn my insides to mush :p
ReplyWearing one normally isn't going to hurt you. It's tightening it to the point of ridiculousness (i. e., painful points) where it can hurt you.
Besides that, most of the "corsets" of today (a la Hot Topic) aren't really true corsets; they're just corset-like garments.
I forget where I read/heard about this, but there's apparently a slave-purchasing guide from ancient Rome where they something to the effect of "Don't buy slaves who have worked in lead mines. They die young of disease."
ReplyAnd no one put two and two together...
I felt very ill looking at the footbinding. Thankfully I didn't hurl, but I felt it coming.
ReplyAugh, I physically cringe at the site of that! x___x;;;;; I mean, egad! That's just craziness! Glad it went out of style!!
Am I the only one that thinks the "lotus foot" kinda looks like someone giving a thumbs-up with their foot?
ReplyI have never before been so ashamed to be a male until I read this article.
ReplyI dunno; a lot of these (like the head dress thing) were things women did to themselves to try and show off. (At least in the end, that is.)
The ironic thing? You mention in footbinding that the sight of the foot would have been a turn off for men at the time...and that's where things get even worse. Chinese men of the time had somehow convince themselves that A) a bound foot was sexy and B) footbinding led to the woman in question having a tighter vagina.
Reply...yeah. The Chinese communist party might have created a plague of locusts and declared war on intelligence, but at least their bizarre 'reforms' managed to catch footbinding in its net. Same goes for eunuchs.
You can't force people out into the fields to toil endlessly for the state if their feet don't work.
How is foot binding not #1? Girls who had their feet bound could hardly walk without pain and the binding broke pretty much every bone in your foot. Not to mention it looks f*****g gross.
ReplyIt's not number one because the lists aren't in any specific order.
Those collars look incredibly strappy, though.
Replycorsets were also worn by peasant women, but they didn't tightlace to extreme. same way modern women might diet and exercise a bit to shake a few pounds, but without trying to get to size 0.
Replythere's always been a difference between a few fashion-nuts who took things to extreme and normal people who only engage in watered-down versions of that fashion.
thinking extreme fashions were normal back then and that we have only liberated ourselves from such idiocy in the past century is like a future historian picking up a vogue and concluding 21th century women were all on the brink of fashion-inspired starvation.
But aren't we? Aren't we, really?
Venator: Not down here in the South, we aren't. It's actually the opposite problem..
Frankly people have always wanted to look like they didn't have to do work. When most jobs were physical and outdoors that required being pale as hell, strapped up and barely able to walk. Now most jobs are inside and sedentary it requires being permanently tanned and fit as hell. Because who wants to look like they contribute to society?
ReplyNOT women
The next time my boyfriend bitches about wearing a suit, I'm showing him this article.
ReplyBut...you didn't have to do any of these.
"Stop bitching about the suit - at least it's not a health risk."
Seriously needed some kind of warning and external link to those foot binding pictures
ReplyI actually did a report on bound feet when I was fifth grade. Me and some friends did a play. (in the end, the lead characters father killed everybody but the baby)
ReplyThat's... messed up for a play performed by fifth graders.
Why is a fifth grade play ALLOWED to involve both footbinding AND a massacre?
I'll say this about corsets: it's only the Victorians who really f-ed them up. I used to work at a Ren Faire (yes, yes, I'm a geek...), and I had to wear a period corset. We laced ours properly (snug but not lung-constricting), and it was incredibly comfortable. I could run and jump without my chest jouncing painfully, and the boning provided a built in backrest while sitting on benches. Modern corsets (of the practical kind often purchased by frantic mothers before weddings) sadly tend to follow the Victorian trend of waist cinching rather than the the original design of unparalleled support.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesIt's a shame that something that can be so comfortable has been redesigned to the point where the word is used to describe torture. Fashion!
In early 2010 I had to have lumbar spinal fusion surgery, and was wearing a medical back brace for almost a year. It was a huge, monstrous, lace-up plastic thing. On bad days, the muscles in that area are still weak. I purchased a period corset at our local Renn Faire because it provided damn near the exact degree of support as that plastic giant, and did it much less obtrusively. I seriously recommend a trip to a Renn Faire for people struggling with back trouble.
hehe... the boning provided a built in backrest. sounds sexy.
Period to the Renaissance would the be bodice on the outside, corset under.... so I'm assuming that, at least for the original commenter, she was wearing a bodice. This was per-masochism.
even when laced in i have had no problem breathing. despite the boning corsets are still slightly elastic (talking about 'real corsets', not those flimsy lingerie-corsets).
they do provide a lot of support, the same way a belt provides support to a weightlifter.
When I first read the boning part I thought you were saying you get a lot of dick when you wear a corset.
I have an advert for Cheryl Cole's Shoe Collection right underneath the Footbinding section. Good to see the torture hasn't completely gone away, just changed its nature.
ReplyI have to say corsets themselves weren't dangerous, it was people wearing them in a stupid way. They were put on very young girls and actually effected bone growth. Or laced down too fast too tightly, like Kiera Knightly in Pirates of Carribean. She even admitted in an interview that she had the costumer lace her up as tight as they possibly could and then wore it for twelve hours - which would be like putting on high heels for the first time and then running a marathon in them. The proper way to waist train is slowly over time - a half inch a month at best.
ReplyQueen Maud of Norway was actually a sports nut - she biked, skii'd and skated constantly with an 18" waist.
The woman who was stabbed by her stays had to have been in an accident; a twelve carriage pileup or something. Even if the bones of a corset break, the fabric is going to hold them in place unless there's some other circumstance shoving them back into the body.
Regarding waist training...do you want your organs smushed together and out of place quickly, or over a period of time? Because even if you do it "properly", you're still reshaping your ribs and squishing your internal organs. How do you think you eventually get your waist so small, even when not wearing the corset? There is no "safe" way to wear a tight-lace corset.