Deadly Fashion Trends of the Past

Fashion is a complicated world. Youthful women, beautiful clothes, and the whiff of culture and privilege is a heady mix. It’s no surprise that the trends and fads in fashion have had us chasing our tails for eons. But before there was heroin chic and body positivity movements, fashion was shaping our health in a completely different way. Turns out it’s not just the culture of fashion that’s toxic.

Today we’re exploring the deadly fashion trends of centuries past. Industrial waste, poison hats, and columns of fire are on the docket today and it might make you think twice about what threads you decide to rock at your next big social function.

That’s what you're in for today on Impolite Society.

00:00 The World of Fashion: A Toxic Legacy

03:25 Historical Fashion: From TikTok Trends to Deadly Dyes

06:23 Aniline Dyes

19:17 Fiery Hoop Skirts

26:13 Felt Hats and Mercury Poisoning

37:00 The Legacy of Scheele's Green

46:06 Reflecting on the Dangers of Fashion and Industrial Chemicals

48:25 Share the Podcast and Stay Informed

 

Sources:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/toms-river-excerpt-on-aniline-dye/

https://wwwn.cdc.gov/TSP/MMG/MMGDetails.aspx?mmgid=448&toxid=79#:~:text=Aniline%20is%20irritating%20to%20the,acute%20or%20delayed%20hemolytic%20anemia 

https://mollybrown.org/death-by-crinoline/

https://thecowkeeperswish.com/2018/08/06/the-crinoline-fires/

https://www.famsf.org/stories/poisons-part-i-the-mercurial-world-of-felt

https://corrosion-doctors.org/Elements-Toxic/Mercury-mad-hatter.htm

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/02/scheeles-green-the-color-of-fake-foliage-and-death/

https://www.jezebel.com/the-arsenic-dress-how-poisonous-green-pigments-terrori-1738374597

Transcript

  📍   Fashion is a complicated world, youthful women, beautiful clothes,  and the whiff of culture and privilege is a heady mix. It's no surprise that the trends in fads in fashion have had us chasing our tails for eons,  before there was heroin chic and body positivity movements, fashion was shaping our health in a completely different way.  Turns out it's not just the culture of fashion that's toxic.  Today we're exploring the deadly fashion trends of centuries past industrial waste. Poison hats and columns of fire are all on the docket today, and it might make you think twice about what threads you decide to rock at your next big social function. That's what you're in for today on Impolite Society. I



.     📍  Welcome to Impolite Society. I am Laura,  

 and now I'm Rachel,   

question Rachel. Did you see Zendaya's dress at the Dune two premiere? 

  I, I have seen several of her outfits while she's out there promoting Dune, and I try, I try not to seek them out, just because knowing Zia exists as a person makes me feel worse about myself. 

  you have not seen

her C3 Po wet Dream outfit. 

Well, 

 

But the way you described it.

  

 yeah, it, it is something to behold and it truly illustrates the fact that fashion is just fucking weird.

 I see you've added a photo of Zendaya's outfit and holy shit,  she looks good.

  Of course She does. 

 looks good. It's not, we don't even feel like I'm the same species. I feel like there should be another classification for people that are that good looking, uh, just like tall so thin.

Her outfit for those you haven't seen it, it does look kind of like C3 po if he had a lot of strategically placed cutouts

Mm-Hmm. 

  like, , a super  thin, tall, lanky, beautiful body. , and just little tiny straps covering where C3 PO's nipples would be.

   And it's entirely made of metal and plastic as it would appear. It does not look comfortable, and 

  How did she go to the bathroom?

 oh God, Lord only knows

 She's been, she's so dehydrated. There's no urine in there. I mean, she probably hasn't drinking water for three days to look good in that. 

  and it just goes to show that fashion is fucking weird. But luckily it's not going to kill you nowadays.  I mean, Who knows what kind of cancer causing shit is in our clothes, but it won't immediately kill you, at least not anymore. That was not always the case. And  Rachel and I know a thing or two about historical fashion. It isn't just drop dead gorgeous.   

I believe we both follow one specific historical clothing dress, TikTok, but I follow a bunch to be fair. Do you know there's some people out there who wear historical dress every day? They just, their day-to-day life. Oh my God. And I love watching them on TikTok and learning about them getting dressed and how they made their little costumes and their little outfits and what air it is.

And it's just so fascinating. I've learned so much about. What these people wore, the layers and layers of Petcos and the kind of the  breaches or whatever they call it, the bloomers that have the open crotch, 

 

Britches. Yeah. 

 

totally explained every fucking period romance piece where they're like pushing their lover up against the wall and then just like lifting their skirt and then mounting them.

I was like, what is happening? But that's just because it was all just open, right? Because you had to go to the bathroom, unlike Zendaya, so you needed that access. And you know, I'm, that's okay. So I'm thinking all those things and like big dresses and all thing. Another thing on TikTok that that women used to have these big, wonderful pockets that they tied around their waist, that were under their skirts, that they 

 

Oh, I have seen those

 

all their stuff in.

Ah, bring 'em back. I guess they're like purses. They're the fanny packs, right? Oh, sorry. Belt bags. Uh, the 

 

hip packs. That's another way to say it. Hip

 

Oh,

 

that's another one

  

I wear it like cross body because I think that's what the youths do. 

  

That's I, well, I just don't wanna wear anything around my waist, but.

  

truth.  But when, of course, when I think of historical dress, I also think of tight, tight corsets, which you know, might make you die, right? If you can't breathe.

 

Oh, that's a whole nother episode. But it's not all just corsets and beautiful intricate scene work. 'cause I love looking at that shit on the tiktoks.  It could be deadly and I mean a lot deadly. Not just corset make you can't breathe. We know

 

Corset, no. Breathe. You.  

  

We all know that old timey people did a lot of crazy shit.

We know to be incredibly dangerous now, but clothing and fashion wasn't one of the things that I would've thought to be likely to kick your bucket.

  

Luckily, we've all grown as a species and we're not nearly so vain where we do things to our bodies to alter our appearances that may or may not be harmful to us in the future. Our vanity has subsided, and we always do. The thing that's healthy and rational 

are, are you judging me for my modelo, my light beer?

  

I am not. 'cause I'm like on my fourth cocktail,

 

I don't do this to look cute. 

  

I do it because I have to.

  

I do this because I have two under two. 

  

All right. First up on the crazy shit that could kill you back in the days or at least make you pretty uncomfortable, that's annaline dies. So pre 18 hundreds clothes were drab. Nothing was really popping, bringing out the colors of your eyes, scarlet ho O'Hara and her green curtain dress, you know, gone with the men. It was at least 60 years away in this time, and most of the clothes are some shade of white, blue rust, black few snazzy colors in there, the real bright ones. But god damn, they were pricey. Purple was the color of royalty for a reason only they could afford it. Truly. It wasn't until the discovery of synthetic dyes did the vibrant colors of nature of flowers in bloom of, I don't know what else is colorful. I mostly just think flowers, 

  That's what I imagine. Everything that was pre industrialization was just ground up berries making the 

your. 

You're not wrong. Uh,  a version of that is exactly how they did it. , but these vibrant dyes put those colors into the hands of regular folks.  And now I am not a chemist, so I cannot describe to you exactly how this happened, but I can tell you that in 1856, William Henry Perkin made up some shit that was about to change fashion and the whole frigging global economy.

He was a chemist and he spent his Easter vacation that year playing around with coal tar as one does undo.

  

Ah yes. The many traditions of the spring festival, of the solar Equinox. Right. You have of course, Easter Mass. Egg hunts and cult tar Col tar cult tar. I don't know. It kind of sounds like a villain from an animated robot series. I am cult tar.

  

dark.

 

I come to end your world. Okay, but what? What is cult tar outside of a robot villain? 

It's honestly sounds like some stuff I found in my son's diaper when he was first born.

 okay. I'm not a chemist. Stop asking me hard questions. What is coal tar? Uh, I think it was an industrial waste product that came from. Burning coal? Uh, I'm not a hundred percent sure. I'm sure there's some chemical involved in there somewhere that I don't know about.

I don't wanna give bad info. So let's just say this was an industrial byproduct of burning coal.

 

We need to get a chemist on, on retainer here to 

 weigh in on these, of things at retainer around here.  So  Perkins, he was playing around with industrial waste trying to make something useful. And that would be good business, right?

Buy up shit. No one wants and sell it. And he was originally trying to make medicine from malaria out of it.

  You know, one man's industrial waste is another man's wonder drug. Right?

  

But while trying to do that, he stumbled on something, the goo that he created and attest to while burning toxic waste. Turns out it was pretty, it was bright purple in

 

Ooh, 

  

and he knew he had something worthwhile. Immediately. Within six months, he had gotten a patent,  started production in a top floor lab with his brother, and that lab quickly moved from upstairs to the back garden, and then on into a factory of their very own.

  

man, I love that he dropped that medicine bullshit, like it was hot, cold, tar, or whatever the fuck he was working with. He was like, you know what? Fuck the betterment of humanity. Fuck quality of life. I'm trying to improve my quality of life by getting dirty, filthy, stinking rich.

  

America   

Oh,  beautiful.

  

lucky for the Perkins Boys. Light Purple was having a moment in London and Paris. , the riches were wearing it. AKA, the Royals

  

Yes. And I, as I understand, purple has always been, like you said, the kind of the color associated with royalty, like the deep purple. And that kind of made me think, right, because when you think of a color that has the name Royal in it, what do you think?

  

Royal Blue.

 

Royal Blue. So I was like, okay, what's going on here?

So I did look this up, right? This is my  Rachel's aside. side fun fact. And it's that the tur Royal Blue actually came from a contest where they were trying to design a color or make a color or dress or something for Queen Charlotte in the late 17 hundreds. So bef like almost a century before these perk And Boy showed up, right?

That that's when Royal Blue had its little moment. But that's, anyways, that's a little fun fact, little history tidbit of why we say Royal Blue, even though purples were like much more associated. And I think the traditional royal blue was a lot closer to purple.

 

more Indigo

  

Yes. Not, what's the word, Azure? I don't know.

What's the word 

for, yeah. Not that blue, but yeah. More towards indigo.

  

Oh, 

  

I love a rainbow.

 

Well, actually it's kind of similar. Uh, because this purple was having a moment because some royal, I don't remember which. I read this in the research but didn't put it down in my notes. She loved to wear purple because she thought it really brought out the blue in her eyes, and it probably did, but because she was wearing it, it became very fashionable for everyone else

 She brought it

wear it She after Queen Charlotte was like, I'm all about the blues. 

This unnamed aristocrat was like, no, bitch. It's purple season

  on 18, blah, blah, blah, we were purple. But they were having a, a good time with it. Those Perkins boys, because their dye was even more vivid than the expensive versions that were made from, like you said, crushed up bugs and shit. Like the, the purple that they were using were made of this cru crushed up lichens, lichen.

I don't even know what that is. It's like a fungus of some kind, right? I don't know.

as a fungus among us.  

Who cares, who cares about natural? This version didn't involve foraging in a forest, so it was a lot cheaper. And any fashionable woman of the upper middle class or maybe even the middle class could

now dress like the royals.

And if that is not a good business model, I don't know what is.

 

We all just wanna feel rich, right? That's what we want. The crux of humanities. We wanna feel like we're rich and we're elite. And if not, that's, if that's not the case, we wanna at least trick other people into thinking we are, and we will fucking ruin ourselves and our long term success to create that illusion,

  

Oh, and our, and our health because, uh, these  chemists, more of them got into the mix. they discovered they could make even more colors from Annaline. There was a Swiss company that started pumping out their own versions in even more colors. Pat and Schat, whatever Perkins, and capitalism takes off like a shot worldwide. Not only were they making clothing dyes, they were making paints, sweeteners, inks, soap, and  the first plastics. All from this coal tar. Coal tar derived die,

  

And they were doing that for the colors. Right, right. Obviously when it say paints and plastics, I first, when I read it, I was like, sweeteners, soaps. I thought it was like for the aroma or like the flavor or I don't know the, the health properties, since that's what he was looking for originally. Anyway.

 Nope, just for the colors. 'cause it looks pretty

purple soap.  

Is that where we got those decorative soap bars that people used to put in their guest bathrooms that you couldn't actually use

 Honestly, probably.  But as you can probably suss out by the title of this episode, uh, Annaline is Toxic and it.

No matter if you, if you ingest it, inhale it or touch it, it is just not good. It damages the hemoglobin in your blood, causes liver and kidney damage, messes up your airways, all the different kinds of things.

And of course, it causes cancers. But the good news, it, it was very dosage dependent. So wearing clothing dy with lene dyes didn't cause an acute kind of sickness, only some really nasty sores because it, it's a, it would rub up on your skin and , damage your skin cells.   There wasn't enough for the Lene to off gas and get into your lungs or get too much into your bloodstream through your skin. It was really just surface level. And these sores were really prominent in socks and stockings.

So when it's rubbing directly onto your skin. So as you mentioned in the historical dress, dresses were worn over these heavy layers of corsets and

crotchets under things.  So there wasn't a lot of direct skin to skin contact, but you put those snazzy colors on your feet and you were likely to get those mov measles.

That was a term that was coined in 1859 that gave you a pretty nasty case of the on your feet seas.

  

man. And here I am. I can't even wear anything with a waistband after a meal. 

  

You are not willing to sacrifice. 

 

they were suffering for the art or their art. Their art for their aesthetics. They were suffering for their aesthetics.

They needed those bright purple socks.

 

Yeah, I can't imagine being like, oh man, this thing is really fucking up my feet. Oh, well

  

Well, they probably didn't even know what was causing it. They were just like, man, I must not be praying hard enough.

  

I think that they did know, uh, and they were just willing to suffer. So over time, the chemist that got better with the synthetic dye process, it got less and less toxic when you're wearing them. At least I wouldn't go around licking this stuff.

 

That's too bad for the foot fetishist. Ah, sorry guys.

  

and even today your jeans are probably dyed with a version of Lene Dye. You know, when you get some jeans and or really kind of any clothes that are like cheap,

 

And they have the chemical smell, right?

 

oh yeah, those are your synthetic dyes, and

  

It's not even just clothes, right? It's uh, it's household products. Because 

one time my dog peed on a laundry basket, or not a laundry basket, a wicker basket, and I put the whisk wicker basket into our bathtub to kinda like rinse it out and it stained our bathtub purple. So it's probably not, yeah, they made it look like wood wicker.

Right. But it's probably just plastic or something that's covered with coats and coats to coats of this 

  

And the urine probably disintegrated a

 

the water of it's sitting in the water.

  Uh, I think it's probably a combo.

Yeah. So now I get to  urine 

on a bathtub and it won't go away. So if anybody has any cleaning tips on how to get rid of that from a clawfoot tub, lemon, lemme know. 

Email us at ru@empiresocietypodcast.com.  Subject cleaning tips for Rachel.

  

and so these dyes are generally safe to wear on your body.

 

Unless they are Lowrise jeans, . 'cause those are never safe for any human to wear because they're awful.

  

Truth buff and topping all over.

  

Yep.

  

But we cannot say the same thing for the manufacturers because the people who are working with them, they have a lot of bladder cancer. So

  How is it getting in their bladder?  

it's just, it gets into their system. And for some reason, bladder cancer is the thing that pops up the most, um, because it's doing cell damage.

Right. And for whatever reason, the bladder is particularly vulnerable to this. But like you said, it really does make you think about all the different stuff, , that we have in our everyday items that you're like, shit, what is this?

  Yeah, it's, oh, well, that's, you know, we talked about what are we doing today that people in the future are gonna look back and be like, oh, they were so dumb. It's gonna be the plastics and the chemicals and 

 everything 

  percent.  

in our day 

 to day 

for our chemicals, or forever plastics, or whatever it is.

I saw somewhere, a human digest, a credit card worth of plastic every year, which that doesn't seem like that much in hindsight, but,

  

No, it does. I just did like a face that does not

 

oh, I thought you just froze.

  

I gotta stop doing this shit. But  glass is so breakable. Okay,  but  putting all that aside, do you know what is worse than bumpy feet or sores on your feet?  Generally being a human torch.

  

Yeah. I think that that would be worse than many things.

  

Yeah. So let's stick with our whole Gone With the Wind theme. And

 

I do declare

 And hopefully no one was going to put this podcast on blast for even mentioning, uh, Scarlet and her dress because I've, there's some social media influencers who've really gotten shit for just wearing a southern dress.

But

 Oh, okay. Wearing a southern dress. Yeah, I could see that. Yeah,

just a I was, I 

I was confused. What do you mean? I have to look more into this. Anyways, continue on

  

Scarlet would not be able to get that hovering grace and splendor without her

,

 Like,

Kline hoop skirt. 

And in case you don't follow historical dress societies on social media, Rachel, what is a hoop skirt?

 

Oh my God. I had a friend, we were so obsessed with Little House on the Prairie in elementary school, and she had a hoop skirt, and I just thought it was the coolest fucking thing ever. So let me tell you, even before I followed TikTok, I knew what a hip poop skirt was. And it is a skirt that you wear under your dress, right?

It's made of a light gauzy material. So it doesn't weigh a lot, it doesn't add a lot of, uh, bulk to your outfit. Um, unlike the 15 pound dresses that you would have to wear, and it's got hoops in it, right? Like.  I wanna say probably like wooden hoops, but think of them like hula hoops that are growing in size from around your waist all the way to the floor, and they just make you look like a cupcake.

Right. And make you look like the bottom of a 

 cake 

 Totally. 

And so you would wear them under your skirt. And I'm gonna start completely talking outta my ass here. Um, but I believe that they were very popular in the south, right? Which is hot and muggy. , also why we would get potentially canceled.

This is me connecting the dots to what you were saying earlier, because it's associated with  plantation life. 

It's just a dress  though. Anyway, go 

okay. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Laura Engel's Wilder also wore them, but I'm sure she was also racist as hell. So, . Basically it would let all of those southern Beckys get the appearance of wearing a full skirt with a ton of petticoats underneath it without the layers and thereby the heat being trapped.

  I think you are right. You're not talking out of your ass. I think you're a hundred percent right,

because it was a, a little roomy and there was a little draft down  there, 

right.  

You really just, just do a V stance and just air  everything out. 

I just flap your skirts and let that, I mean, they didn't have a lot of feminine care products, right? I don't blame 'em. You need to get a little, uh, ventilation down there. Uh, let it, let it breathe a little  bit. 

Oh God, the smells.  Those poor little dogs that laid under the skirt.

  

Oh my  God.  

All right. But there was a small problem with these skirts.  They were wide, like Rachel said, cupcake wide, like  difficult to control, like walking around

an ice cake,   basically. 

because you're pushed out and it's not heavy, so you don't necessarily know where  it is at all times.  

Precisely. And since central heating hadn't been invented yet, people spent a lot of time around fireplaces.  And that gauzy light material that made up the Kleins,  It was just like kindling. And I shouldn't laugh because these people turned into fucking human torches.   Yes.  

Oh no. Oh, those poor Southern Beckys.

  And sources estimated that around 3000 flay, Southern Becky's death took place between 1850 and 1860. That,  yeah. That's probably exaggerated. Journalists are just like they are now. Right.  They're unreliable, sensationalists,

  I, I, would say that most journalists are probably doing  the best 

uh, whatever. Gotta get them clicks, just like back then. They gotta get the

page turns. Now They gotta get the clicks.  I mean, it just,

They probably would. They do better with if they were taking pictures of what was happening   underneath  

Yeah, I bet they would  Ups skirt shots. That's real popular.  But anyway,  um, it was common enough that there were several famous stories about it. Oscar Wilde's two sisters, died this way at the  same time.  

Talk about a case of the vapor.  They got  vaporized. 

Oh,  we're mean. I shouldn't be laughing about this. This is gonna get us canceled more than  No,  probably not.  

No. 'cause  it's white people being burned to death.  Rich  white folks  

eat  the rich.  

Well, not only were the rich people wearing these skirts, though. Not just people dancing at balls, women who are actually doing household labor. The the household help that were hauling. Coal

tending fires. Yeah, they were wearing these freaking things. You get that cold dust on you and you get next to a fucking fireplace, boom.

   Gosh. This is a real legitimate case of where that trying to appear rich, trying to dress like the rich folks that really come and bites it  in the ass. 

Truly, and luckily though, hoop skirts, they were fast fashion,

or at least, yeah, as fast as things could get when news traveled  pretty slow. 

when the fastest thing around was the Iron horse  and you had to send your mail through the Pony  Express.  

And by the 1880s, 30 years after they kind of hit the market, the bustle replaced the hoop skirt as the undergarment of choice. And in my opinion, by far the superior trend, I mean, snatch waist in that big old booty. That's  time 

old. 

Well, that's kind of right of what the hoop skirts were doing. It was all hips and there's just  all the way around. 

Yeah. Instead of just on the back. That's

 Yeah.  Yeah, the Gibson girl era. But yeah, truly it's rained for so long of humanity, and yet you and I, we had the great fortune of coming up in the time where heroin chic was what everybody wanted to be.

So raise your glasses to us young women of the nineties and early  two thousands. 

We ain't the fortunate suns 

  it through mostly Unda. No, mostly damaged. I, yeah. 

Yeah. 

fucking low rise jeans,

  Okay, so socks aren't safe. Dresses aren't safe. What a fucking time to be alive. What about hats? Those seem pretty  innocuous, right? 

I  would guess. No, 

 You would be correct? 

just based on the content of this  episode.  

Well, okay. To be fair, it depends because if you're wearing them, you're fine. 

But if you're making them  at least making felt hats in the 18 hundreds, you are not fined, you are being poisoned because felt is a complicated thing. Did you know that felt was fur, or at least it used to be?

I  didn't know 

that.  

Yeah. I feel like nothing's fur these days, but I had no idea that it used to be fur. Is it like processed mushed up  fur?  

Bingo,

rabbits, hairs and beavers specifically. And to 

Oh, not the beavers 

Yeah. Beavers.  There's a lot involved

to make that fur  to felt, and it used to involve urine. That was back to your, uh, laundry, uh, call out. So that's why I was saying I think it's probably

your dog urine that helped because

uric acid. Yeah. it's, , uh, it's an acid. It does dissolve things.  It has chemical  properties, so that uric acid made it easier to pressure the fur into that dense material. 

   

Manufacturers have been using urine for decades to make  felt, 

 No, now that's the job I want. I want the person who's pissing in the felt bucket so that like, I wanna get paid for that. Like, how do you acquire the urine? Where does the  urine come from? 

I'm gonna have to assume, uh, that it was animal urine, but I'm, let me tell you a little  bit about that, that urine here in a second.   Okay. I, I assume they got it from whatever animals were around, but maybe some other sources. I'll get to that in a second. But 

somehow they got turned on to using mercury instead of urine.

To do this processing.  There's a story  that goes, one felt maker, . He made the best fucking felt. The best fucking felt.

And it was because he was using his own urine. So the fact that they called that he was using his own urine makes me think that normally  they were using 

Something else you're in. Yeah. He was very industrious. Right. He was like, why am I spending my time collecting urine? I, how do you even do that? Taking a cup  under a horse? 

I think, yeah, I don't think cows and horses really give a shit where they pee.  So you just stick a bucket 

underneath 

you? Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you can do that with dogs too, but they just don't produce  enough at a time, I'd 

Exactly. You got big bladdered animals, animals of labor.

Anyways. Yeah, this guy was just  whipping it out, 

peeing all over the place. He's like, wow.  

Make, let's make some felt.

  And he had the best fucking felt and he was being treated for syphilis. And the treatment of syphilis back then was Mercury. So that,

as the story goes, is how they landed on Mercury being really good for felt. And I mean, I don't know about you, that sounds like a lot of bullshit, but I, you don't know with these things that are, you know, 200 years old, truth can be stranger than fiction.

It could be made up or it could be real.   Nobody fucking 

yeah. Let's treat a deadly disease with a deadly toxin. You know, that's really cutting off your nose to  spite your face. 

But it did something. That's the thing though,

right? it. did help at some point because they didn't have any, anything better. Um, so yeah, the people did use it, but yeah. Did it also kill you? Yeah. But so does syphilis, so it's kind of like, you know, 

choose to die slow or  Yeah. Pick 

Die. Die fast. Or have your nose fall  off. You know,   rather, I'd rather die a mercury poison than live  without a nose. 

Truly.  Did I say something about us? Anyway,  in the 18 hundreds, mercury was the go-to chemical for felt making, and it wasn't these felt makers who got the real brunt of the mercury. This is the part that I think is really interesting. It was the milliners who worked the felts into hats. There was some kind of slow reaction that took place over time inside the felt, so when they were making it, it didn't release these mercury vapors. It was over time when the hat makers were working with them, shaping, bending, heating, doing all this different stuff that really put out those free mercury particles and the hat makers were getting  sick.  

so they would, this has really risen the point that I do not understand how hats are made. , because I never thought about any of this, where I guess they would buy the felt and then they would shape the felt into the hats. And it wasn't until they were in that second stage, like reheating 'em, that's when you really got a healthy dose of the,  the marker of  IPUs 

the vapors. Yeah. And what they were suffering from was ery   This is a central neurological disorder that comes from mercury poisoning. So unlike other poisons, another one that we're gonna get into later on, this wasn't  super obvious and needed acute medical treatment,  aism is much more subtle.

So these symptoms included a lot of behavioral   changes. 

  Mm 

things are listed. Irritability, depression, timidness.

  huh. It sounds like I might be  mercury poisoning my whole life.

  I,

so you see  how 

 that?  

we see how subtle this is, right? That timidness I thought was

 really weird. I was Yeah.  Like what is that? 

 is symptom. 

is the medical diagnosis of timidness? What is the medical medical  definition? 

they, they didn't give a medical definition, but the things that were listed it, they listed it as like shyness, low self-confidence, anxiety or unusual psychological vulnerability.   , 

Are we sure they weren't just describing somebody who would go on to make podcasts,

  so what I viewed this like was basically a total personality shift where you kind of turn into some weepy,  wallflower,  

which is kind of fair because whenever I do have any kind of malady, I turn into a weepy wallflower, whether that's just a cold or you know, it's something more severe. The first symptom is I become a little whiny bitch.

  Well, and so you see how this was diagnosed. It was not diagnosed  as an acute medical issue. It was diagnosed as a mental illness.

So these symptoms, though, they progressed. They went to delirium, wild mood swings, wild behavior changes, memory loss, pain, tremors in the hands, and so hence the term mad as a hatter.  

No way. 

they are totally  fucking 

nuts.

Another thing I never put together, Matt, is Hatter the Mad Hatter

that he's got mercury poisoning.  What a delightful 

doesn't. 

  I. 

He actually, I read a little bit about this too. The Mad Hatter character does not display any of the symptoms of Mad Hatter's disease or, um,  atheism. It is. He just basically, um,  who wrote that 

 Rodda? 

No. Is that his name? 

No. 

  Louis Carroll. 

 Louis 

Carroll, 

 But so he, he wrote him as just like, this jolly, well, he was  mercurial. Ha  Is that  where that comes from too, to 

Oh my God. We're kind of busting it all open right  here,  

truly.

mercurial. 

a, a, very mood swingy like character, but he doesn't, he doesn't have like the shakes or anything, but like, I mean, Matt is, Matt is a hatter, mad Hatter. Like that's just, it is kind of just a, a fun way to say it. But eventually doctors did realize what was going on. Hat makers stopped using these chemicals around the late 18 hundreds, but damage can't be reversed once

you've had these high level prolonged exposures, , nothing they can do about it.

But industry started phasing out using mercury and felt processing  everywhere except the  US That is, uh,   we did not stop using it until 1941, so 

this is, 

 years after they figured out 

Yes. Yes.  In 1934, public health officials in the US estimated that 80% of hat makers had these tremors, no legislation occurred to ban it. And even the hat making unions. Yep. There were  hat 

Hats 

back then. 

  very important.  

They didn't say fucking shit about it. So apparently they weren't doing their fucking job. Uh, and what finally turned the US off of these highly toxic chemicals, it was the war in 41. They conceded to using hydrogen peroxide because the government needed mercury for the war  war 

efforts. 

Ah. They're like, oh, we got this poison that our people have been using just for day-to-day work. We're gonna give that to our enemies. We're just start making the mix of hats and then 20 to 30 years, 

watch out axis. You're gonna have shaky hands and wild mood  swings.  

I think they probably use the mercury for something a little bit more damage  damaging, 

Yes. Uh, like what's in the atom bomb? Miss Mercury   in there? I don't 

Probably it's got fucking everything  in it.

I have no idea. But my main question is why did people go into the hat making  profession?   I mean, they had, they had to have seen, right? This is like several generations of hat makers in their prime. They're just like, you know what?

Live, fast,  die young,

Ha. make hats.   

  I'll be the 

again. We shouldn't fucking  laugh,  

leave a sexy corpse with a cool hat behind. This is my death  hat.  

fedora. Uh, but  this was one of those moments that man making this podcast sometimes makes my eyes open a little bit too wide. And this one really bummed me  out. Like, 

episode just is like, wow, something sucks.

  and specifically, uh, American capitalism.  It's pretty fucking rough. Um, but one last bummer. For you. And this one is my favorite, and maybe because I like the name. For some reason, shields Green, it's spelled funky.  it's S-C-H-E-E-L-E. I don't know why, but I just think that's a cool way to do it. Or maybe it's the color, because if you look it up, it is such a bright, vivid, crazy green,  and every time I see it, it just makes me think like acid, poison, toxic,   like it is 

Oh yeah, it's literally like the  yuck. 

 Yes,  it's 

 sticker? The guy's like, 

 Yuck. 



yeah. It's literally   that color. 

And as I was doing this research, I was thinking, is this why cartoons, color, toxic waste, and all the other poisons green? Is it because of Shields Green? I don't know. But that was just something that occurred to me because I can see why people were taken with it. It was created in 1775 by Swedish chemist, Carl  Wil Heim Shield, hence the name Shields

Green.

Um, copper was being mined a lot around this time, and like we learned with Perkins though, his story takes place about 75 years later. There is big money to be made on industrial byproducts.  So again, not a chemist. He did some wizardry. With, uh, the copper arsonite that came from production. And he got a gorgeous green colored pigment. It was cheap to make very pretty, as I said. And

Victorians went, went nuts for it. They painted house exteriors. They painted interiors with, with paint. 'cause this is the pigment. You can put it in whatever the fuck you

want. They put it. Wallpaper clothes, fake flowers, toys, baby carriages. The

whole fucking scene. 

 the babies. Is that what um,  like there was my first house, uh, had a green tile in it. 

Uh, like green tile on the out.  Oh, that's something different.  

I don't think so. At least if it is, it's sealed in there real well, because  we definitely know the dangers of that. , so if, uh, it would've been a, i, I would imagine though. Lord knows you can't fucking assume anything, but I would assume that it would've been taken out the way asbestos was if we knew that  that had been in there. 

Well, I mean, my house got fucking lead paint in it  everywhere. 

well lead is different 

Yeah. 

asbestos and,

and as we'll see,  shields Green. ,  This article I read had a really interesting take on why it was so popular in this time period about, you know, the industrial landscape  would popped  up. It's really drab and fucking smoke  and yeah, 

  and, 

bumming people out and they wanted some of this nature back in their lives.

Uh, it was a good read. I recommend that you, uh, take a look at it. I'll link

it down there in the show notes. It's, uh, from the Paris Review,  but if you're paying attention to root words, copper arsonite might raise a  red flag because. 

Yeah,   arsonite.  

It contains arsenic like a, a lot of it,  and even people in the 18 hundreds knew that arsenic was poison. It was the drug of choice for women killing their husbands back in the day. It was very hard to smell or taste. Symptoms were very similar to cholera, other diseases that ran rampant at this time of the world. People knew it was toxic, but they thought unless they ate it, it would be  fine.  

Got it. They just didn't, as long as I don't lick my dress, I'm good.   Or my 

That's what they thought. No such luck. Uh, because people started getting really, really sick and it was hard for doctors to pinpoint because not everyone reacts the same way to a slow poisoning. Some people in a shields greenhouse would be perfectly fine and other people would be vomiting profusely basically on their deathbed. Not only was it dosage and exposure dependent, it also depended on the person. Some people could tolerate a lot. Of this arsenic in their system without any symptoms. But then others very quickly would get sick and have to call the doctor. People would come in and then the doctor would be like, Hmm, two of my patients have the same green wallpaper.

And wallpaper in particular was very deadly, more so than the paint. 'cause it flaked more, it

had, you know, more rustling to put it up. Once it was

up, it could, you could scratch it, you

know, and it would just come free, uh, a lot quicker.  There's even a theory that Napoleon died actually from arsenic poisoning because he had wallpaper in his, uh, you know, little

weed banish you room, uh, his bedroom that 

included shield's,  shield's green. 

  Oh, 

And when they autopsied him, he had a bunch of arsenic in his, in his body. Like modern day autopsy  

Oh, 

  how you say that? 

Thompson.  That's how I say it. I don't know if it's right, but that's how Rachel in Played Society says it  Thompson. 

Symptoms of arsenic poisoning, , can include severe abdominal cramps, vomiting, diarrhea,  heart arrhythmia, pain and weakness, and pins and needles in your extremities and all around, , organ failure. So death and, and then of course, the  old 

standby cancer 

Yeah, if you lived long enough to develop it, right, if you made it through all the other   symptoms,  

precisely. If you were one of those people who did not succumb to those immediate symptoms from the acute poisoning, you probably have it in your body and it's likely going to  cause 

cancer.   

 lovely. A color worth dying  for.  

Uh, and that particularly sad story is the death of Matilda  Schwer. She was a flower maker in London. Fake flowers were all the rage at this time. See above that, um, kind of theory about Victorians needing some, uh, nature in their lives. Many women and girls worked in factories painting flower stems.  Green.  

 Oh no.  

Matilda was only 19, and in 1861, in her final days, she vomited green fluid.  The whites of her eyes turned green, and she told the doctors that everything she saw was  green.  

What 

 final.  I know and her final hours were full of intermittent seizures.

And when she finally died, , reports said her face was fixed in an expression of pain rather

than, you know, you pass away and like your face slackens,

like, hers was like frozen. And again, take reporters, , with a, a grain of salt, especially back then.

But her autopsy later showed that arsenic was in her stomach, liver and lungs, in very high levels.   All signs of long-term, high doses of arsenic. 

  So this is like looking in a mirror. 'cause I so would've died for this shit too. 'cause I Googled it and I'm like, these  dresses are gorgeous. Like, this is a color   I would love to wear. So I would've obviously, I mean, realistically, I probably would've been in, in the factory painting flowers as opposed to wearing the really fancy, pretty dresses.

But, you know, I would've fallen right  into this trap.  

Take a look at the wallpapers. They're also  very, very beautiful.   So after reports of Matilda's death reached the newspapers, and that happened with the help of some of the, , activist upper class women. These are women who ran in the same circles as these green dress wearing socialites who were wearing these fake flower crowns that were so popular.

So we, we can't eat all the rich because there were some people who were doing the good work. They got this out, they had a campaign against it. After this reached, you know, everyone's news desk, basically the fad had faded fast. But from its invention, from 1775 to 1861, it was very, very, very popular. So some European countries banned it in the 1830s and forties.

So we were up on it. But it wasn't until Matilda's death that did it really fall outta fashion and just get  dropped.  

She really was the martyr for  the cause.  

And it just goes to show one person can make a difference. All you have to do is die horribly.

  And have your story told in a very public  way.  

  Yeah, 

So much so that you're mentioned on a podcast, hundreds of year, hundred plus  years later.  

Yeah. And it also makes me think of like all the European countries that have banned a lot of stuff  that we have not banned here in America. Yeah, 

again coming back up. Why does the European version of this food have like five ingredients? And the American version has  27? 

yeah. They're

not looking out for you folks. They are not looking out for you It really made me, all this research made me pretty paranoid about the things that we consume and all the different

but  yet we hate on that woman who's making the fruit loops for her kids  from scratch.  You ever seen her 

  yes, I have 

seen that bitch.   It's her weird ass smile and what she wears and like the way she never smiles and the way she's posed herself against the cameras, like, oh, it's the fucking weirdest shit  in the world   and I will not apologize for hating her 'cause I'll 

hate  her for forever. 

rotting our bodies out with these chemicals and we're rotting our brains out with the social  media.  

Pick your poison

 Say, Say, lavie. You know, , live fast, die young. Leave a corpse with a cool hat.  I just cheered myself.  Doesn't sound right when the one glass is on the ground.   There you go. 

There you go. It's, but really more likely we're just going to, uh, keep doing what we're doing and die horribly of cancer in a nursing home in a slow, painful, very  expensive 

death.  

I'm root for dementia. 'cause I wanna really relive my childhood. 

  

Well,  on that note, leaving y'all on a, on a high up note, enjoy your fun fashion. Don't think about toxicity, don't think about the Chinese slaves. Just go to Temu and sheen. Do your thing. Work it, girl. Buy those fashions.

  Buy those fashions. Laura, where'd you get the clothes you're wearing right  now?  

China, just like everything fucking else. I'm not pointing fingers. I'm pointing 'em right  back at me.  

Guess where I got all the clothes I'm literally wearing right now?  I didn't play in this. No, I got 'em from the Goodwill  because,   uh,  waste or something. AKA  I'm poor. 

  I'm cheap. 

Yeah. Actually I   So now that you're feeling warm and fuzzy,

 Be sure to tell a friend about this podcast so they can also feel great about themselves in their fashion. Troy says, just kidding. We're not shaming you. We're here with you. Live fast, die young. Leave a corpse with a cool hat, and  

 but reality is please share the podcast with somebody that you care about because we are a completely grassroots podcast. We, um, are live off recommendations and that's how we grow. So, if you like today's episode, please tell somebody in your life about it.

And if you don't have anybody to tell about it, then leave us a five star review or rating on your platform of choice. 'cause that helps other people find the  show  

And don't forget, send your cleaning tips, uh, on Rachel's bathtub to root@impolitesocietypodcast.com. Let us know you're listening. Let us know that you  care 

 📍 precisely. We care about you so, so much that we will share our cleaning tips with you. If you want cleaning tips, email us at root@employeesocietypodcast.com. And I will say, I don't know  vinegar.

  bleach. That's what Laura says. Put

Yeah.   Just drowned in bleach. I don't care about  the chemicals that my animals get on their little feces. Sorry. Um, 

  they're fine.   Moral of the story, but the real moral of the story is to stay rude and never, ever  stop marching to the beat of your own drum. Do your thing, girl. Work  it.  

You better  work, bitch. 

Leave a cool hat,  corpse.  















   Crinolines

Crinolines? 

Damnit  made, which made up the crinolines

Crinolines. 

fucking hell, I can't fucking say it.  Crinolines. 

Yeah.