Well There's Your Problem | Bonus Episode 38 PREVIEW: Fashion

Yeah, if we go to the next slide, this is one that I wrote, which has much more free form and therefore worse content.

We have sexy high heels.

Yeah, the sexy high heel, the sexy shoe.

So

the point that I'm getting at with this is something we've kind of alluded to earlier, which is that fashion is one of several ways that you can code gender in your society.

And this is very dependent on your society, its ways of organizing and thinking about gender.

It's very mutable sometimes.

It's very alien to our conception and one example of that is high heels right which were originally invented for riding horseback with stirrups by the mongols and sort of came to europe as a form of ostentation that was specifically male and specifically manly because it made you look imposing and it made you look tall all the same reasons that women like it and it makes your cows look good yeah it makes you look good as hell like high heels make you look amazing i mean if you look at that picture of Louis XIV from the last slide, it is specifically arranged to show off his legs.

Like, that is part of the point that's being made here.

It's like, just like, what's his face from Game of Thrones?

Condrogo in like stilettos.

Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's, it's powerful and it's elegant.

And like, if you, if they get tall enough, then they can also do the same thing of conveying that, like, I'm too fancy to have to really walk around.

Uh, it keeps your shoes out of the gutters.

I'm forced to do that.

You can also help you give people the Johnson treatment.

Yeah.

And I mean, yeah.

And my, my point with this is only to say that like the ways in which fashion sort of like is used to convey gender change in, have changed in ways and are changing in ways that we seldom fully understand

and which are often tremendously subtle.

And if you are the menswear guy, you can like use this to own Matt Walsh on Twitter and be like, oh, interesting.

You want to take away trans people's rights.

Are you aware that you're wearing a suit that was originally like designed for a feminine?

It doesn't matter.

I don't care.

That's a stupid way of dealing with him.

I think we should probably instead.

You'll have to bleep that.

This is a bonus.

You don't have to bleep anything.

Exactly.

Yeah, but like,

it's a stupid own to make.

And I hate the fucking menswear guy.

But

there is a point to be made here about like

the ways in in which gender is socially constructed through clothing

and that's that was my slide for this there's another interesting fact about shoes from this era which isn't particularly relevant to the discussion we're having here but it is just interesting which is that a lot of them were what is called single-lasted which means they are made to be worn on either foot so what you would do is you would wear them uh you know one way and then you'd switch them around and it would help the wear pattern even out so they'd they'd last longer.

Oh, god, like you were halfway through that.

I was going to make a joke about it being about the wear pattern.

Oh, no, it's about the wear pattern.

Wow, this is like uh, this is the same reason they turn around railroad equipment when they don't really have to.

There you go,

try to only use your powers of psychic uh prediction for good, Rob.

It's interesting, by the way, the details on this shoe that are still like extant in modern shoemaker.

Like, right, right, right, they're sort of more rudimentary because it's old and it's you know, uh, like it's not as sort of like concealed, but like things like a stacked heel, that like sort of like hand welted, you know, that the seam along the side there,

which was then sort of like supplanted by a Goodyear welt with, you know, vulcanized rubber and stuff, but it's still in use and like sort of high-end shoes.

So yeah, yeah, I mean, a lot of this stuff, like...

as much as fashions change, there are only so many ways to make things.

And a lot of techniques still kind of survive in unexpected ways or are rediscovered and reused in that way.

Not to mention that like, you know, even as we've invented faster and cheaper ways to make things, a lot of those older techniques are, you know, considered artisan craftsmanship.

And wearing them is another way to show off your money because it takes somebody days and days to do that.

So, yeah, I get my sort of like my fancy English leather boots where someone has like stacked the heel and like, you know, sewn the welt and everything by themselves.

And it's like, yeah, because I got that podcast money, you know?

Yes.

All right.

Keep going.

What is the podcaster fashion?

I'm wearing a t-shirt that has the Septuagint system printed on it.

I'm wearing a t-shirt that says Memphis on it.

I am wearing a boy genius t-shirt and some tactical jeans from Varus to like Alice.

I will note that on this t-shirt, Pattison Station is still called ATT, not NRG.

Thank you.

Yes.

Selling station

naming rights is fucking awful.

I wish I had been better dressed for this just so I could flex and people would cancel their Patreons en masse because I could just be like, yeah, I'm wearing like a Prada, like Linea Rossa, like shirt.

I'm wearing one of those, probably.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

I know what that is.

Linea Rossa is Prada's like winter sports line.

It's like they do the snowboarding stuff.

You get

Linea Rossa, like red line l-i-n-e-a-r-o-s-s-a

please spark it to us

no

do not spank my my sort of like news my my new secret secondary objective is to fashion pill liam before the end of this episode uh and like the next time i see uh i see him at like a live show or i see a photo of him he's just like Gucci'd out to the nines like completely like I really like this they don't make this in fat guy sizes but if they did I'd be oh

I will be spending your Patreon dollars on the.

Oh, well, the ray coat goes up to 3x.

That's not bad.

But is it European 3X?

Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, we'll get into this in the Encourage a bit, but like high fashion sizing is like

I am like a 25XL as far as these things go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

European 3X is like a medium twink here.

We'll get to that.

It's just a guy standing on an iceberg.

I'm going to shoot this model.

This is the funniest thing about high fashion is

you can throw people at it and they find exciting new ways to hate themselves.

I don't mind being fat.

I just mind this.

I take that and I just turn it around into exciting new ways.

$650 for a ball of clava?

Rich people.

I'm just going to have.

No, no, no.

I'm just going to name you.

Do you wanna look at the Gucci mix capsule that's supposedly gender-neutral, but really isn't?

All right, I'm gonna better blast my calves.

I better look fucking good.

We're recording this on Super Bowl Sunday, folks.

Can I just say that any fashion can be gender-neutral if you're not a fucking coward?

Anyway, thank you.

Yes, absolutely.

There's a Gucci MLB capsule.

What?

Why?

Oh, this is dreadful.

All right.

New New game is just like, I get Liam's earnest first reaction to like any high fashion thing because I think this is my favorite thing in the world, right?

You get Liam and the AI-generated Balenciaga ad.

Oh, with the

bondage teddy bears?

No, that was a separate thing.

That was like a kind of like

weird controversy that was also kind of confected.

But there was also like AI-generated Balenciaga ads that would like, or it was like it was a potter character.

There was a Harry Potter one, and then someone did famous architects, which was very funny.

Um, cool, huh?

It was like historic

$720 for a t-shirt, huh?

That's

we'll get into like actually, the t-shirt's a good lens to explain different like tiers of fashion.

So we'll do that.

I got a black t-shirt for free at the SEPTA uh rail rodeo you know what i like i i i like some of the the the all over awful gucci print shit i think that that's pretty good thank you liam um

we got some some gowns uh yes once upon a time we were podcasting um sorry sorry sorry

the

the the printing press is introduced to europe uh in huge mistake made a lot of people very unhappy uh yes and and

in addition to like actual things that can help society, like books and shit,

this also becomes a way to print what is called fashion plates.

These are, they originate with France and Britain, where they're just people who are just kind of drawing.

These are all like royal fashions, but there's also just street fashion being drawn

and made into these

plates that can be printed and sent around to places much easier, much more quickly than

just one person going to Paris and coming back and saying, hey, I saw people wearing stuff that kind of looked like this.

We should dress kind of like this too.

And so

what you get is

suddenly people start keeping up with trends more and more quickly over a wider area.

There's a subculture, too, that annoys people, particularly when men do it, like fops, you know, or dandies.

Fops, dandies, yeah.

Macaronies, yeah.

And that is actually what the macaroni in Yankee Doodle is: is stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni.

It's sarcasm.

Like, look at this guy who thinks he's the pinnacle of fashion by putting one feather in his hat, these backwards Americans.

Yankee Doodle was originally.

He won the war.

Yeah, yeah, but yeah, but yeah,

Yankee Doodle is like still wearing an off-white belt in 2024, six cry-laughing emojis, and then loses the War of Independence anyway.

Well, it started out as a sarcastic song

directed at, oh, look at these backwards colonialists.

And then

the colonial Americans took it and they were like, yeah, that's us.

Got a problem with it.

Who won the war?

But guess who's not in the Commonwealth of Nations?

Yeah.

I'll show you a special relationship, and it's just me flinging off-white belts.

Oh,

I always assume that, oh, I'll show you an X is just immediately followed by an unzipping.

No, no.

I would have to take off the off-white.

How much is an off-white?

Off-white?

There's going to be a lot of me doing this in this episode.

Oh, this is off.

Oh,

I kind of dig this industrial belt.

Oh, I kind of like this.

I'm going to drop this in the chat.

The picture of this kind of challenge

you went through seeing one of these for the first time.

That was very pleasing to me.

I'm not going to lie to you, Roz.

I feel like you would look good in this.

Well, I can't see it because I have to throw your forehead.

That's right.

That's yellow.

Oh, yellow is off of white.

That is true.

I guess, in the same way that I'm currently off of a horse.

My off-horse belt.

Well done, everybody.

Thank you.

Yeah, so

now you have like a readily accessible, transmissible way of being like, here's what you should be wearing.

And now, like,

at least.

Yeah, exactly.

The thing about fashion is that you can understand it chiefly as a way of making other people feel bad about themselves so that they buy clothes.

And now you can do this so much more efficiently my god like you're not just keeping up with the like ladies of like the court of you know your royal family it's like fucking everybody's what are the swedish bitches wearing this season and this will repeat itself a couple more times before we're done here so

all right um next slide Alice, I think this one's yours.

That's Liam, baby.

Oh, it's Liam.

Liam, take us through.

Hey, so I've contributed very little to this episode,

but I wanted to talk about...

I disagree.

I prize your contributions.

I wanted to talk about

it.

I don't know that I'm adding anything new, but I have the picture here of Marie Antoinette being beheaded.

And I wanted to talk about like a fashion as an indicator of social strife.

Sumptuary laws are a good piece of that to sort of keep the lower classes in line.

And there are some modern interpretations of sumptuary laws well down to like prohibition, cannabis prohibition, that sort of thing.

Sure.

And I think the, what I really wanted to say is, how do our aesthetics project what we intend to project?

So what are we, what are we saying?

What are we doing by, you know, there's

I can, I can, I can show this in relation to X already hit on

that with the, I, I don't have to work fashion.

Yeah, and I can talk about this in relation to pants specifically, trousers, um,

because uh, the sort of courtly aristocratic fashion uh in the sort of like a french nobility of everywhere's nobility really was uh breeches you know like short pants that come to like just below the knee and you have stockings underneath those um and this is a kind of like marker of aristocracy of nobility of nobility um specifically and your sort of your laborer your worker wears like a longer trouser like something closer to the you know what you or i might wear today uh unless we're still wearing breeches like fancy lads um and specifically uh as a sort of revolutionary movement the san culotte the without breeches are the guys who are like we either are or identify with the laboring classes who because they work uh you know 20 hours a day in a tannery or whatever have to wear uh filthy like ankle length trousers instead of your fancy lad breeches so yeah you can you can absolutely and this is before we even get to military fashion,

look at fashion as a sort of like locus of class struggle.

Absolutely.

And actually, the next slide is kind of expands on that.

We can go ahead and advance.