Valerie Steele

socialite they're not granted the same omnivorous world to peruse

I'm glad that you brought that up because we've had Valerie Steele on the podcast a few times, and I think she is, you know, really into this idea that we make history.

And so by assigning these kind of characters to these women to a certain extent i'm retrofitting retrofitting them into them um because that totally makes sense of the world but also

i'm really interested in the idea that yeah these that these women were basic bitches in some ways and

That I think it would be hard to argue that that was the thing that was restricting women's roles.

And I do think if you didn't wear one, you were making your whole life about not wearing one in a way that was maybe you didn't want to do.

But I also think that, you know, and I do think Valerie Steele also talks about this in her book, though I haven't read it in a while, but that, you know, they remove the corset, but then the feminine ideal becomes extremely thin.

So there's this idea that the corset is internalized rather than like something that you can just put on and take off at will and like sort of your body is molded to the standard of the day.

And you know, I think probably people will be familiar with the language of say like feminization, right? Like I might make a claim broadly.

Like wh- when we did, Patrick, the episode on fashion with, with Valerie Steele from the Fashion Institute of Technology, she talked a lot about how, uh, e- even though clothes are like vastly culturally important, because they are associated with women they are feminized and treated as frivolous and unimportant.

But that usage of feminization, the way that that travels, it goes way beyond simply affecting women.

There's a kind of ability of this argument which gives us like infantilization and dehumanization in addition to feminization.

And honestly, why do we wear bras anyway? Are they tools of oppression or expressions of sensuality? Are they designed for comfort or mechanisms of new age torture? These are all things that Dr.

Valerie Steele, renowned fashion historian and one of the leading experts on corsets, and I talk about in this episode.

If you've ever worn a bra, you know.

We might not be able to always see them, and we might not always like them, but it turns out they're doing a lot.