This is Bo-Y, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public Radio.
I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions from kids just like you, and then it's our job to offer you some answers.
You can submit your own questions by having an adult help you record yourself.
We'll give you more details at the end of the episode.
Have you ever been threading one leg through a pair of pants in the morning and wondered, why do we wear these?
Or how did pockets get invented?
And why are the pockets designed for girls clothing sometimes smaller than the pockets designed for boys clothing?
Or what's up with underwear?
If you have wondered those things, well this is just the episode for you.
And if you haven't, stay with us.
I think you'll find this pretty interesting.
Just wait till you hear how shirts were invented and what they were used for.
Hello, my name's Bukti.
I live in Australia, Queensland, Majimba, and my question is why do we have to wear clothes?
Many people think we started wearing clothing for practical reasons of warmth and protection, basically.
My name's Amber Bitscharts, and I'm a dress historian.
So I spend my time thinking about clothes in the past and what clothes can teach us about history.
Amber Bitscharts is going to guide us through a little bit of the history of the clothes we wear and why we wear them as she answers the questions you've sent us, like backties and Olivia's.
We don't have fur, like a lot of other animals do.
So when modern humans began moving away from very warm places like continental Africa, and to cold parts of the world, we need to protect ourselves somehow.
We need to wear something to keep us warm if it's very snowy outside or if it's very cold.
So this is one answer that we wear clothes for protection.
But while that might explain why we have to wear something to cover our skin from the elements, there are a lot of other answers that help explain the what, the kinds of clothes we wear or don't wear.
And that's the stuff that really interests Amber.
Remember she said she's a dress historian?
That doesn't mean she studies dresses.
She's using dress as a verb to dress, to dress yourself, get dressed, dress up, dress down.
She studies how the clothes we wear are connected to where we live and what kind of culture we grow up in and what time period we're growing up and living in.
I've always loved old clothes.
I love shopping for secondhand clothes.
I love rummaging and treasure hunting, three vintage stores, three markets.
All of these places looking for old clothes.
Amber's job in a clothing store when she was younger got her started researching some of the old clothes she found interesting and she liked that so much.
She decided to go back to school to study history and fashion.
And now she does TV shows and podcasts and writes books and teaches.
So let's look at that question about why humans wear clothes from another angle now.
The other answer is to do with ideas around culture and society and really to do with ideas around modesty as well.
In this case modesty means what's considered proper or appropriate, broadly accepted as not being too wild or out there.
A lot of how we dress comes down to what is considered appropriate in our culture.
The idea is that these cultural codes build up across time, you know, across millennia and centuries and centuries, ideas that certain parts of our body should be covered up.
And so we tend to see, and I'm sure you can all imagine the areas that I'm talking about, we tend to see particular areas being covered in various different cultures, many different cultures, from very, very far back in history.
So we have these sort of social ideas to do with what parts of the body shouldn't be on display, but we also have that combined with this need, especially in colder parts of the world of protection from the elements.
That can change over time, right?
In some cultures and in some time periods, you might not expose your shoulders or your sort of upper neck area and in some cultures you do, right?
And that changes over time and depending on where you live and even what family you're in, what is appropriate or not appropriate for you.
Yes, exactly. So ideas around what people should and shouldn't expose, what parts of their body, these ideas can change hugely.
They can change between cultures, they can change across time periods, various different points in history, different parts of the body have been believed to be very salacious and areas that should be covered.
So, a salacious kind of means scandalous or too racy.
Or alternatively, areas that have not been seen as salacious at all and that can be left uncovered.
And today, all kinds of ideas can feed into this, ideas around religion, ideas around modesty being related to religion or not.
Just ideas around what people are comfortable with.
This all feeds into what parts of our body we cover and what parts of our body we don't.
It's interesting too to think about also how old we are, changes things.
A baby running around with no clothes on might be fine, but when you're five or six or ten or twenty, then you're going to look differently about running around naked.
Definitely. Yeah, definitely.
And it's interesting actually, we do have in the past, there was some markers of age that we could tell through clothing that we don't have anymore.
For example, this idea of breaching.
Really up until the sort of early 20th century, little boys would always be dressed in dresses up until the age of around about seven and this age could vary.
But if you have a look at paintings from the past, from the 18th century, from the 17th century, if you look at royal families, all of the very young children will be dressed in dresses, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're all girls.
And you're talking specifically there about cultures in Europe?
Yes, this is definitely cultures in Europe.
And what would happen is that at the age of around seven, the boy would be breached.
We call it breached. He'd be put into breaches for the first time, taken out of dresses and put into breaches.
And breaches are like pants.
Exactly. So what we would today call short pants, I suppose.
Well I certainly wouldn't call them that because I'm English and so I don't say trousers.
But yes, exactly. They're pants, they're pants.
And this was quite an important moment in a young boy's life.
And it was a moment where he was a step closer to being a man, a moment that might mark a period in his life where he would spend more time maybe with his father, with the male members of his family, and it's just a sort of writer passage that we just don't have anymore.
And shows how these ideas just shift and are always in flux.
Hello, ladies. Hope I live in Virginia.
I'm five years old and my question is, when did people invent shirt?
Thank you. Well shirts is a great item to talk about because we think today of shirts as an item of outer clothing, something you wear that you will show off to everybody else.
You know, everyone can see.
But originally when shirts were developed, it was actually underwear.
So this was not items that were meant to be seen on display.
And for men especially, shirt was a really important item because it would usually be made of linen, something that's very easy to clean.
And so it's an item that's really heavily associated with hygiene.
It's the first thing that you put on next to your skin and it's an item that can soak up your bodily fluids.
You know, if you get sweaty, anything like this, the linen will so cool of this up and you can very easily change and wash your linen shirts.
The shirts at this time also were quite long.
Would come down to almost the knees and in fact, could, the bottoms of them could be drawn up between the legs.
So they sort of function as underpants as well.
As if you can imagine that.
And so certainly it's important that this item is being changed very, very regularly.
So it's an item that's really closely associated with keeping the body clean.
And this is a period as well in the past when people didn't wash as much as we do today.
You mean wash their bodies, let alone wash their other clothing?
Yes, exactly, exactly.
People did not shower every day in the way that we are maybe used to doing now.
So the body is not being kept as clean.
So the shirt has a really important function.
Now one of the earliest examples, it's not, I'm not sure if it's exactly a shirt, but it's certainly a linen garment that's very much like a long shirt or a long dress was found in Egypt.
And it's actually been radiocarbon dated to the late fourth millennium BCE.
So it's one of the oldest garments of clothing that has ever been found.
Like there is, you know, there is woven, there is sort of a whole garment essentially.
Well, I'm glad you're kind of talking about underwear because we have some questions about underwear.
Hello, my name is Sassina and I live in Milan, Italy and I am six year old.
My question is, why do we have to wear underpants?
And you kind of explained that a little bit that it's a part of hygiene cleanliness.
Yeah, exactly. I think that's really very much it.
You know, parts of our bodies, especially as we grow up, as we become older, certain parts of our body will generate more secretions than others.
Essentially, you know, we sweat from our armpits, things like this.
There is secretions going on, which means that we might want to keep that area clean and certainly regularly change the clothing that's being worn around there.
That's one thing, but you know, you mentioned that shirts initially when they were first invented were not supposed to be seen.
They were undershirts and underwear underpants are also designed to go under your pants or under your skirt or under whatever you're wearing.
So Graham wants to know why are underpants pretty if they're covered by pants?
I am five years old and I live in Batonik.
Meland, my question is, why do I underpants pretty after covered by pants?
Well, this is a good question and I think a lot of people like to wear really pretty underwear because it just makes them feel nice.
If you know you're wearing something nice, it doesn't necessarily matter that other people can't see it.
It just makes you feel confident, it makes you feel happy.
Maybe if you've got a pair of pants in your favourite colour, it will put you in a good mood when you put them on.
So I think that is a reason why people make underpants that look pretty rather than just underpants that look ugly.
Now, everyone wants to get up every day and put on something that looks really dreary and miserable as the first thing you put against your closest to your body.
You want to put on something that's going to immediately make you feel good.
In just a minute, why clothing designed for girls sometimes has pockets that are smaller than the pockets enclosed designed for boys, if they have pockets at all, and why we bother with fashion to begin with.
This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids.
I'm Jane Lentom. Today we're tackling questions about clothing and culture with dress historian Amber Bouchart.
Two different Mollies sent us these questions.
I am 6 years old. I come from Buffalo, New York and my question is why do boys dress differently than girls here?
I'm 9 years old. I live in Beverly, Massachusetts and my question is why are boys let's roam around in the summer without a shirt on, but girls aren't?
So this really comes down to culture again and how different cultures decide to communicate ideas around gender through clothing.
And also comes back to those ideas about modesty and what we can and can't reveal as well.
I think it's unfair that boys are allowed to run around in the summer without a shirt on.
And girls aren't. It's really not fair.
It's a cultural idea that different cultures throughout history have expressed gender through clothing in very different ways.
In European culture, European history, the main way we express gender through clothing is with trousers versus skirts.
Historically, this skirts versus trousers divide as something that we see in awful lot.
And we even see it on things like bathroom signs still, rightly or wrongly.
This is still something that we see in awful lot.
Many people in the fashion industry are trying to change, trying to bring about lots more gender neutral clothing.
So clothing that can be worn by both boys and girls and that is comfortable and people can move in and run around in and just have fun in work and play in all of these same items, essentially.
Well then, Megan might be happy to hear that.
And I am from Massachusetts in 2005.
And my question is, why are girls pockets smaller than boy pockets?
Megan is wondering why girls pockets aren't clothes are smaller than boy pockets.
This is a really good question.
And actually the history of pockets is surprisingly interesting.
Women's pockets haven't always been this small.
If we look back into history, a period in say the 18th century where women were wearing very wide skirts, what you would often find is that pockets would be a separate item.
You would have these two pockets on a string or something that you would tie around your waist basically.
There's almost like carrying two handbags around your waist and this wouldn't be worn on the outside of your clothing.
It would be worn underneath your over skirt and then you would have slits or gaps in your over skirt so that you could put your hand in to put things in your pockets.
So women used to be able to carry around all kinds of stuff in their pockets.
This has changed in much more recent years and I think there are a couple of reasons for that.
Firstly, the way we all shop for clothes now, fast fashion, the whole sort of idea behind fast fashion is that there are fewer details so clothing is cheaper.
So one of the reasons that sometimes women's clothing doesn't have pockets at all is that it's simply more expensive to make clothes with pockets.
There's an extra detail so it takes more fabric and it takes more work for the people who are making your clothes who are stitching them together.
Amber says another reason is that some women's clothes are made to be tighter than men's clothes often are.
So if you put anything in a pocket, it creates a lumpy appearance in something that's pretty tight.
Now this isn't really fair because of course girls want to carry stuff in their pockets too.
Amber says designers are getting that message and are starting to make bigger pockets.
Now that we've learned a little bit about how clothing has a lot to do with history and culture, not just about staying warm and dry or having certain parts of our bodies covered up, Anya has a question about the big picture.
I am eight years old and from Brooklyn, New York.
My question is why do we have fashion?
I mean we know now why we wear underpants, we know a little bit about pockets, we know how shirts were invented but why do we have fashion?
Well that is a great question and what it really comes down to is this difference between clothing and fashion, this word fashion.
Now this word doesn't just mean items that you put on your body, doesn't just mean garments.
This idea that some things are in fashion and some things are out of fashion.
That's what we're talking about really when we say fashion.
Now why do we have this? I think that goes down really to questions about humanity in the very nature of humanity itself.
Well the t-shirts we wear say something about our humanity, that's pretty deep.
Totally, totally. I stand by that comment, I really do.
Because there are a couple of different arguments as to why we have this system of fashion.
Now one of them is that it is this means of communication and it is a way of saying I am like these people and I am not like these people.
For example a band t-shirt, if I wear a t-shirt with my favourite band on it, I'm signalling to everyone else who likes that band, we have something in common.
I am like you, whereas if you don't like this band I'm definitely not like you.
So it's a way of not only showing your identity but showing your allegiances to certain groups of people.
Now another argument as to why we have fashion, especially historically, not so much now, is all to do with status and display.
The more current your fashions are or the more expensive your clothes are, the more money you have and therefore it's likely in the past the more power you have.
So it is all very closely related into these ideas around power, who is ruling, who and really who gets to make decisions that affect all of us.
So in the past the people that were the leaders of fashion who would influence what other people were, were leaders in society, members of royal households, for example, members of court circles, the monarchy people like that would influence what other people were.
So it's very closely related to ideas around power.
Fashion now is maybe a little less about power but it still can signify wealth or other things.
But what our clothing choices say about us today is different from what the clothing choices of people in the future will be and what they will say about them.
These ideas change across time, they change across different cultures, they're not set in stone.
These aren't quote unquote natural but these are socialised ideas, these are ideas that we get from culture basically and these ideas are mutable, they shift, they change.
And is that still true today that the way we dress is telling other people how we see ourselves, what culture we think we belong to, it's telling people something about us just by what we're wearing.
Certainly clothing today can communicate a lot of different ideas, can even communicate ideas such as I am not interested in the way that I dress.
You often hear this from people who aren't interested in fashion, they say well you know it doesn't matter to me, I'm not communicating anything but everybody makes a decision every morning when they get up as to what they're going to put on their body.
And with some people the communication is very, very clear and very definite especially with some kinds of t-shirts.
It's a really simple garment but it can communicate all kinds of things.
You're maybe wearing a slogan t-shirt, you're maybe wearing a t-shirt with a political slogan, you're maybe wearing a band t-shirt that's telling people what your favourite band is.
This is a very literal way of communicating something about you and your identity.
What a treat to get a little insight into how clothing ties into so much more than just a way to cover our bodies.
Now before we go, I can remember a couple of times when I was a kid being teased because of something I was wearing that I really liked or something I wasn't wearing that all the other kids my age thought was really cool and I just didn't like.
So I asked Amber if she has any advice for those of us who dress a little differently sometimes.
Absolutely, my advice is stick with it.
It is those style mavericks that are going to be the designers, the stylists, etc, etc of the future.
I remember wearing some outfits when I was a kid or when I was, you know, a teenager and being laughed at for it, being ridiculed and it's not a very nice experience but I sort of always stuck with it because it was something that for me was very important to me and to how I express myself and I just think it's hugely important to cultivate your own sense of style.
It's important on a personal level.
It's also important on an environmental level.
I don't think we should all be blindly following fashion trends and buying stuff all the time.
Think about secondhand clothing, think about these more individual ways of dressing and really cultivate that.
It is such a fantastic skill and you have so many career opportunities ahead of you as well.
So really stick with it.
Don't listen to the haters.
That's Amber Bouchart, address historian, podcaster, broadcaster, instructor and author.
Thank you so much Amber.
That's it for this episode.
If you have a question about anything, have an adult record it.
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But why is produced by Melody Bodette and me, Jane Lentholm at Vermont Public Radio and distributed by PRX.
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We'll be back in two weeks with an all new episode.
Until then, stay curious.
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