Clown Suits

Our Ancestors Weren’t Stupid – Wearing the Clothes

It's a video about 19th century clothes by a living historian, who wears authentic historically accurate period clothing in day to day situations such as running a household, cooking, doing laundry, gardening, caring for livestock, etc.

And she talks about people complaining about period clothing having inherent design flaws when sometimes it's not properly fitted or they aren't wearing it properly.

This is a problem for how people relate to clothes generally. My mother trained with a tailor in her youth and I know more about clothes than most people I meet seem to know.

It's extremely common for women to not know how to get properly fitted for a bra and to not know how to properly put it on.

When I met him, my ex-husband knew nothing about clothes, but learned a few things while married to me. While getting divorced and still living together in part because I was extremely ill, he wanted to buy a leather jacket and had picked one out that made him look like he was starring in a thug music video though he was the wrong ethnicity.

It was a size too large and I knew immediately by looking where the shoulder seam fell.

Let me stop here and note that most likely, the styles you see in Black music videos that sometimes look ill fitting or weird to White Americans almost certainly grow out of widespread poverty in the Black community.

You get hand-me-downs because you can't afford new clothes and wear them even though they are too big and you do that enough and eventually no one has the same concept of "fit" that White Americans have.

Furthermore, the New York Garment District was born of plantation owners buying cheap clothes made en masse with poor fit for slaves because they didn't want slaves wasting their time and energy on making themselves clothes. They owned the time and labor of these people and actively denied them opportunities to establish their own culture and their own identity, so refusing to allow Black people properly fitting clothes and clothes literacy goes back hundreds of years.

That's not on them. I will note that one young Black male designer known for his decorative use of buttons explained that came from his grandmother replacing lost buttons on clothes to make them last longer, even though she had no means to match them. So one day while walking to school, he looked down and no two buttons on his shirt looked alike.

I don't know what his grandmother did that made him look at that and see ART, but he took that and ran with it and creative use of eye-catching buttons was a feature of his signature style.

My husband grew up poor for a military kid and probably also wore hand-me-downs and lacked clothes literacy. He also had nonstandard measurements and I once bought him a too large silk jacket off a sale rack and got it tailored to fit properly, so he struggled to find clothes that fit him off the rack properly.

It makes me crazy how modern people are so frequently interested in how clothes look at the expense of how they function and frequently seem ignorant of the function of clothing items or details on their clothes.

It's not like I always get it right. I remember being a kid and baffled by a sweater set I was given and initially wearing the button down outer sweater over the sleeveless inner sweater and figuring it out and feeling stupid. 

I can't think of other examples in my life of wishing I had known sooner how some piece of clothing was supposed to work, but I'm certain there have been other occasions where I was like "Gee, it would have been useful to know that sooner.

So I'm not trying to accuse people or be holier than thou. I'm frustrated with the fashion industry which seems to do really zany things at times and wondering how to:

1. Make clothes that I think make sense.

2. Educate the consumer about how to use and wear the clothes I make.

I've read enough to know that stores put the razzle dazzle items in the window to get people to come in and LOOK at the line, but those pieces tend to not sell. What sells is the practical parts of the same line.

I've talked and thought for many years about how fashion and decor and housing stuff is all seriously harmed by the tendency for media to want the camera to love it while losing sight of the lived experience and quality of life we should care about.

It's a variation on sex sells. The stuff that's eye-catching makes it into magazines and books and onto websites and billboards because it has visual appeal and that lands us on a treadmill of trying to top the last thing in terms of visual appeal in a way that throws the baby out while seeming to keep the dirty bathwater.

I don't expect to ever be able to compete or get traction. This site is two years old and not a single person has emailed me to talk about funding my business idea though this site began with the intent of pitching the business to fashion VC.

It has a surprising amount of traffic compared to most of my sites, but I don't see any evidence it has any hope of becoming a business.

I have no idea WHY it has any traffic. I have absolutely no engagement whatsoever.

So in MY mind, if this goes anywhere, it's me buying a knitting machine and making clothes for ME and then posting it online and maybe selling a few pieces and maybe having no sales at all.

I don't WANT to play the game that is the current status quo for the fashion world where we dress women like whores and those images make it to the billboards and make fashion houses money, then say "Women can't get promoted because MEN are all sexist pigs!"

This clip criticizes girl's Halloween costumes for becoming steadily more overtly sexed up and out of touch with reality for how real police women dress. I don't have daughters and my kids are long grown, so I noped out of Halloween a long time ago, but I'm appalled at the idea that any girl in her teens is allowed to wear the stuff this woman is showing.

White Americans probably look down their noses at the way Black Americans dress in many cases given the long history and cultural context of intentionally cutting them out of having a clothing culture of their own, but see nothing wrong with dressing their teenaged daughter like a hooker paid extra to dress up for some guy's BDSM "police woman domme" fantasy or whatever?

And then don't realize business men look down their noses and see White women who dress fashionably as trollops good for dating or marrying as a polite way to buy sex the way we look down our noses at Blacks.

FYI: Black women are probably generally having a better sex life than you if you are a White American woman because Black women have ALWAYS worked and generally have more say in the family finances than your typical married well White American woman.

Black women have sex to meet THEIR sexual needs, not "to have children and take care of HIS needs because God knows I'm not a dirty HO."

It's nigh IMPOSSIBLE to find women's shirts in the US that actually cover the cleavage, which is nominally a requirement of business casual dress codes that I saw ROUTINELY violated, in part because good luck FINDING a top for work that meets that standard.

America's fashion industry was literally born to keep slaves enslaved and identity-less and it's currently role in society boils down to dressing women as whores and making it nigh IMPOSSIBLE to get respect as a working woman because we all get dressed like working girls, a polite euphemism for hooker.

And in two years, not a single woman has decided to begin supporting my Patreon for a dollar a month in hopes of helping me get to a point where I might offer to dress them as NOT whores.

No one WANTS to dress as anything but a man's BDSM fantasy of a police woman domme.