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I am almost to the end of my first series, and at this point, we’ve at least touched on the majority of the big items in my closet. But a lot of fashion history covers items that aren’t in my closet, and for good reason. If you’ve ever gnashed your teeth about a current fashion, you can relax now because history is just brimming with even more gnash-worthy fashions, and this episode will be an entirely unsystematic and incomplete roundup of the most bizarre and absurd ladies’ fashion statements that I happened to come across while researching this series.

Whether a particular item is absurd depends entirely on what you think clothes are for. To keep warm? To keep clean? To be modest? To be beautiful? To attract a mate? To show off your social status? Warmth and cleanliness make perfect sense, but where and how you live has a big impact on your needs there. Whether it has a big impact on what you actually wear is not so clear. Meanwhile, beauty, attraction, and modesty are all in the eye of the beholder. And what we know for sure about humanity is that the beholder can be very strange indeed. For example, if you go back to Catalhoyuk, one of the earliest large towns ever, you find that these people could make stripes in their woven fabric. Hooray for fashion, though I never wear stripes myself. But what’s really interesting is that while they were looking good in their stripes they were building their homes higgledy-piggledy bang up next to each other with no streets, alleys, or anything. To get into your house you had to climb over the roofs of your neighbors. In the words of Bill Bryson, “It is remarkable to think that people thought of striped fabric before they thought of doors and windows” (Bryson, end of chapter 2). But there you are.

So while I have chosen this list for its absurdity, you can rest assured that the women who wore these fashions no doubt thought their choices were very reasonable. We’ll see who you agree with.

Thin and Sheer Clothes

If you think clothes are for warmth or modesty, then Ancient Egypt gets a prize when it comes to absurd clothes for women. Egyptians made their clothes out of linen, and a quick gander at the paintings of the time reveals that some of these linen dresses were so thin that they were actually transparent. You can get a full 360 degree view of absolutely everything. Are these accurate depictions? Maybe, but I think there’s plenty of room to doubt. After all, they may not have had Photoshop, but artists have known how to idealize an image from day one. All we know for sure is we have pictures of Egyptian women in see-through clothes, and they probably weren’t alone in history on this point. If you remember from the Hijab and Sari episode, that was also Jnanadanandini Devi’s problem when she left Bengal for life with the British Civil Service.

Layers and More Layers (and still more layers)

11^th century Japanese noblewomen sported the junihitoe, which literally means “12 -layers” but could have fewer and sometimes has more (I’ve read both 16 and 20 as a maximum). While beautiful, the weight of that much silk yardage could add up to 20 kilograms or 44 lbs. The outer layers were cut differently, so that you could see all the colors and patterns at the collar and the hem as each. In the illustrated scrolls of the period, men walk around and play games, while the women (and I’m quoting here) “are almost always seen languishing in a little heap on the floor, surrounded by huge mountains of cloth” (Albee, 51). Incidentally, the junihitoe is still worn on formal and ceremonial occasions in Japan today.

Sleeves to the Ground

European women in the 12^th century favored slinky, form-fitting dresses with long sleeves, by which I mean very long sleeves. The sleeve held tight to your arm until the wrist, where the cuff widened out so far that they actually dragged on the ground and had to be tied up. Eleanor of Acquitaine was the mother of Richard the Lionheart from the Robin Hood tales. She definitely wore sleeves of this sort, so perhaps we should imagine Maid Marian in them too (Hennessy, 52, 55).

Horned Hats (and not for Vikings)

By the 14^th and 15^th centuries sleeves were sometimes still trailing, but ladies of fashion had added a headpiece, sometimes with two gigantic horns poking out on either side. Hatmakers shaped the horns out of wire and then draped fabric over them. These horns could be several feet long, and doorways had to be redesigned so that women could get through (Hennessy, 74; Albee, 49).

Platform Shoes (but only for your toes)

15^th century Venetian chopines are the shoes of nightmares. Some of the versions were more like platform shoes, but in the 1550s it was the height of fashion to wear them at 20 inches high (Hennessy, 79). Other chopines were, if possible, even worse. These were less of platforms and more like high heels, sort of, except that the heel (or whatever you want to call it) is not actually under the heel. Under your heel is just inches and inches of thin air, while farther forward towards the ball of your foot is the part that actually reaches down to the floor. It forces your entire body weight forward (Gunn, 187). This made it so impossible to walk that women in these chopines had to traipse around town while leaning on a servant for balance. So I take back all the hard things I said about heels in episode 1.3. I guess the stiletto is reasonable after all.

The Flea Fur

If you lived in the mid-16^th century Europe, you might have sported a flea fur. This is a small dead animal, tail, torso, teeth and all, which you slung over your shoulder. The first source I read said that the flea fur was used to attract fleas, in the sense that you hoped fleas would go to it rather than you (Albee, 64). In case you have a flea problem, I’ll warn you now that this doesn’t work. Fleas like warm blood, not dead fur. However, a later source I read said that the name and theory of flea furs was a 19^th century explanation for a 16^th century fashion. A kind of sneer at the past’s expense: see how much smarter than them we are! It’s much more likely that the flea fur was just a small, dead animal, worn by people who thought it would look good to have a small, dead animal on their shoulder. Fleas were just a fact of life.

Heads on Platters

The ruff was worn in Europe from the 1560s to 1640s as a status symbol. The more expensive fabric and starch you packed into your collar, the richer you were (or wanted to appear). So the most pretentious of all nobility walked around looking like their heads had been chopped off and served on a platter. I can think of a number of problems with that, but the one that bothered some people was the issue of cleavage. You couldn’t see enough of it. Hence the open ruff, that made it look like your head was being served on a funnel. Take a look at Queen Elizabeth I’s portraits, and you’ll see that she sported both the closed and the open ruff for various paintings (Gunn, 122).

Hips Extended

By the 18^th century, the collars were back to reasonable size, but the hips were totally out of control. This wasn’t the first time skirts had widened (see Elizabeth I’s portraits for that too), but they were back. They weren’t the round kind you may have seen in movies like Gone With the Wind. No, they were flat in the front and the back, so that all the additional space came out from side to side. The whole skirt looks like someone draped some fabric over a cinderblock wall. Very boxy. Very wide. On formal occasions the wall was four, five, six feet wide, and women had to turn sideways to get through the door (Hennessy, 140-143).

Crinoline Cage

19^th century hoop skirts are the kind you’ve seen more of in movies. Big and circular. The early versions accomplished this with whalebone, rolled fabric, braided straw, and more and more and more petticoats. As a respectable woman, you might be wearing 15 to 20 pounds of woolen petticoats just to step outside your door. Maybe okay if you’re in Boston in the winter, but not so good if you’re in Atlanta in the summer. So when the collapsible spring steel hoop crinoline was introduced, it looks like a cage to us, but women of the time shouted “Freedom!” Now you could get that same big circle without all those heavy (and hot) petticoats. There were still a few downsides. You couldn’t get into the biggest ones by yourself. You had to have a servant with a long pole lift up your dress over your head. You also had to live in a big house. If there wasn’t enough floor space, you couldn’t move. Brushing by items (like glass vases) and accidentally knocking them to the floor was a real possibility. You also had problems squeezing on trains or into carriages. A sudden gust of wind was likely to blow your skirt up, revealing not a wool petticoat, but your legs themselves. And if you remember from our underwear episode, this was the end of the idea that women shouldn’t wear any underwear, and the crinoline was why. The safety hazards weren’t trivial either. You could get tangled in the wheels of passing carriages, and if you happened to brush past a fireplace, well, clothes are extremely flammable. These drawbacks didn’t stop women, even women of modest means, as it became socially required to wear at least a small crinoline (Albee, 132-133). Is it any wonder that Amelia Jenks Bloomer thought dress reform was a great idea?

Rear End Extended

In the 1870s, women had grown tired of the hoop skirt (finally), but their next step was to put all that extra bulk on the back in a bustle. Sure, you can get through a door now, but can you sit down? (Hennessy, 200) If you do sit down, what exactly are you sitting on? Bustles were made of practically anything at hand, including wadded up newspaper or feather dusters, but in theory, you can lift that bustle up and behind you, rather than underneath you. Of course, that means you have a wad of stuff between you and the chair back, so you are not just lounging around comfortably, you are perching on the edge of the chair. Depending on how it was fixed, there is also the risk that your bustle could get bumped out of place, meaning that you might have to do some discreet rearranging of your enhanced rear end (Albee, 134).

Hats with Dead Birds

The idea of a small dead animal came back in the 19^th century. You could have your dead animal as a stole or wrap, much like the flea fur, but you could also get one on a hat, usually a bird (Albee, 64). In fact, birds (or at least feathers) for ladies’ hats were so ubiquitous in the late 19^th century that many species faced extinction for the sake of fashion (Albee, 155). For example, in 1902 it was estimated that one-and-a-half tons of egret feathers were sold, which when you think about how much a feather weighs is a staggering number of dead birds, estimated at 200,000 just in that one year. And when you consider that many of those birds were nesting, it is also estimated that 3 or 4 times as many eggs were abandoned and thus killed as well. This crisis was the prime reason for the creation of the Audubon Society, which still works to protect birds and animals today. But undoubtedly one of their biggest successes was in convincing women to change the fashions.

Mourning Clothes

Speaking of the 19^th century, there was also the question of mourning clothes. Mourning clothes had been a thing in Europe for centuries, but Queen Victoria set a new standard here: When her husband died, she wore black for the rest of her life, which was forty additional years. Society didn’t require quite that long, but the Victorian rules were onerous enough. The exact rules varied depending on the exact era and how close you were to the person who died, but in a gross oversimplification, for the first 12 months and a day, bereaved women wore black from top to bottom, and not just any black, but black crepe, which is a kind of silk. For the next nine months, you can wear regular black silk, which is shinier and more attractive. And after that you can wear half-mourning for at least six months, which meant violet, gray, or white. No other colors. Now it is true that some women may have genuinely done this out of grief, and I don’t mean to diminish that, but the fact remains that many women could not afford a new wardrobe, particularly if they’d just lost the main breadwinner of the family. Some women kept their mourning clothes on hand at all times, even while traveling, for in an uncertain world with high mortality rates, you never knew when you might suddenly need them. But then the crepe manufacturers got to work on the idea that it was unlucky to have crepe in the house when you didn’t need it, so yes, you did have to buy an entirely new wardrobe every time (Taylor, 93). Mourning dress was a genuine hardship on a great many women who were already in a hard situation. Meanwhile, the men wore . . . wait for it . . . an armband. Yep, just an armband over their regular clothes. The rules were not relaxed until well into the 20^th century, and even then for a sad reason: after World War I, the number of bereaved women was so enormously high (Albee, 141).

Hobbling the Legs

In the early 20^th century, the skirt evolved again. No more hoops! No more bustles! The hobble skirt was invented by designer Paul Poiret. He had been among the first to design dresses to be worn without a corset, so A+ for that. But he gets an F on the hobble skirt. It was long, tight, and had no slit, so that a woman could not do anything but hobble around. “Yes, I freed the bust,” Paul Poiret commented, “but I shackled the legs” (Gunn, 100). In some cases, this shackling was actually literal. You see there was always a danger of forgetting yourself, taking a normal sized step, and possibly splitting the seams on your hobble skirt. Was the solution to wear a different skirt? Of course not. Obviously, the solution was to tie your legs together, so you couldn’t make that mistake. Once again, architects were forced to respond. The Widener Library at Harvard has very short steps. Because women in 1915 couldn’t lift their legs enough to walk up normal sized steps. Tram cars also had to be redesigned because women couldn’t step up to normal heights (Albee, 156).

As the 20^th century progressed, a new idea took hold, which said that clothes should be functional, comfortable, and allow women to move. That cut down on a lot of absurdities, which is not to say that we have nothing to talk about. I mean, women in the 1940s were drawing lines on the back of their legs to make it look like they were wearing nylons, even though nylon was rationed, but a makeup line looks downright sensible compared to the hobble skirt. And in the 1980s, take a look at those shoulder pads, which I have to confess I actually remember wearing. Looking like a linebacker with windswept hair and lipstick was an odd choice, but it was a lot better than a ram’s horn headdress that couldn’t fit through the door. The truth is, the later I go, the more likely it is that I’ll hit on something you actually still own, actually still love, and don’t consider ridiculous at all. So to be safe, I’m done.

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Selected Sources

Albee, Sarah. Why’d They Wear That? National Geographic Kids, 2015.

Bryson, Bill. At Home. Doubleday Canada, 29 Oct. 2013.

Gunn, Tim. Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible. Simon and Schuster, 3 Sept. 2013.

Hennessy, Kathryn, and Anna Fischel. Fashion: The Definitive History of Costume and Style. Edited by Smithsonian Institution, New York, Dk Publishing, 2012.

Taylor, Lou. Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2009.