In this episode, Maureen talks with Richard Thompson Ford, author of “Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History.” They explore how fashion has been used throughout history as a way to reinforce class structures, gender roles, and social norms. Though dress codes are not as overt today, Richard explains how unwritten fashion rules still dictate what we wear.

• The “Straw Hat Riot” of 1922 erupted over men wearing straw hats past September 15th
• High heels originated as a masculine fashion, first worn by Persian horseback riders to lock into stirrups
• Over time high heels became exaggerated and flashy, eventually being adopted by daring women
• By the early 1800s, men’s fashion had shifted to being very sober and understated
• The flapper look in the 1920s was the first successful “rational dress” movement for women
• Bobbed hair was seen as sexually provocative and led to women being fired from jobs
• Tartans emerged as symbols of Scottish identity partly in reaction to British dress codes banning them
• Though we think fashion is casual today, there are still unwritten “uniforms” in many industries and social groups
• Midtown bankers in New York have converged on a new relaxed “uniform” of Patagonia fleeces and oxford shirts
• Fashion has always been used to reinforce class structures and signal that “you’re one of us”

Related Episodes:

Episode 91:Suffragists and Suffragettes: Fashion and the Vote 

Episode 155: Ancestral Handbag History with Curator Jessica Harpley

Links:

• Richard Thompson Ford 
• Sign up for my newsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Page so you get notified of my Facebook Live videos.
• Need help organizing your photos? Check out the Essential Photo Organizing Video Course.
• Need help identifying family photos? Check out the Identifying Family Photographs Online Course.
• Have a photo you need help identifying? Sign up for photo consultation.

About My Guest:

Richard Thompson Ford is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He writes about law, social and cultural issues and race relations and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, CNN and Slate.   He is the author of the New York Times notable books The Race Card and Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality.  He has appeared on The Colbert Report, The Rachel Maddow Show, and The Dylan Rattigan Show.  He is a member of the American Law Institute and serves on the board of the Authors Guild Foundation.  Quite to his surprise, he was one of 25 semi-finalists in Esquire magazine’s Best Dressed Real Man contest in 2009.

About Maureen Taylor:

Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective^Òhelps clients with photo-related genealogical problems. Her pioneering work in historic photo research has earned her the title “the nation’s foremost historical photo detective” by The Wall Street Journal and appearances on The View, The Today Show, Pawn Stars, and others.   Learn more at Maureentaylor.com

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

The post Episode 220: Dress Codes and Fashion Rules Through History with Richard Thompson Ford appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

This week Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective, is joined by Dr. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, an award-winning fashion historian and curator from Los Angeles, as well as the author of multiple books on fashion history.

The two discuss skirts and how one piece of clothing can help us learn about history and how the skirt showed changes in ideals toward women and fashion, as well as how we present ourselves to the world based on what we wear. 

Related Episodes:

Episode 210:  The Dress Diary of Anne Sykes with Dr. Kate Strasdin 

Episode 167: Victorian Photo Studio Secrets

Links:

• Dr. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell 
• Sign up for my newsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Page so you get notified of my Facebook Live videos.
• Need help organizing your photos? Check out the Essential Photo Organizing Video Course.
• Need help identifying family photos? Check out the Identifying Family Photographs Online Course.
• Have a photo you need help identifying? Sign up for photo consultation.

About My Guest:

Dr. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell is an award-winning fashion historian, curator, and journalist based in Los Angeles. She is the author of Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (Yale, 2015), Worn on This Day: The Clothes That Made History (Running Press, 2019), The Way We Wed: A Global History of Wedding Fashion (Running Press, 2020), Red, White, and Blue on the Runway: The 1968 White House Fashion Show and the Politics of American Style (Kent State University Press, 2022), and Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the 20th Century (St. Martin’s Press, 2022). She has written about fashion, art, and culture for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Politico, Slate, and The Wall Street Journal and has appeared on NPR, the Biography Channel, and Reelz, along with several podcasts. She was a 2020-21 NEH Public Scholar and a 2021-22 USC Libraries Fellow. As well as writing books and articles, she does writing, lecturing, curating, and consulting for museums, universities, and the entertainment industry.

About Maureen Taylor:

Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective^Òhelps clients with photo related genealogical problems. Her pioneering work in historic photo research has earned her the title “the nation’s foremost historical photo detective” by The Wall Street Journal and appearances on The View, The Today Show, Pawn Stars, and others.   Learn more at Maureentaylor.com

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

The post Episode 215: The Story Behind Twentieth Century Skirts with Dr. Kimberly Chrisman Campbell appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

This week on the podcast, Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective, is joined by Amelia Soth. Amelia is a Wisconsin-based writer who has been writing the column “Cabinet of Curiosities” for JSTOR, which focuses on historical oddities.

Maureen and Amelia discuss her process in writing and finding these stories and how the nuanced parts of history can often lead to great discoveries.

Related Episodes:

Episode 150: Victorian Mourning Curiosities

Episode 61: Mourning Jewelry: Fact and Fiction 

Links:

• Cabinet of Curiosities on JSTOR
• Sign up for my newsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Page so you get notified of my Facebook Live videos.
• Need help organizing your photos? Check out the Essential Photo Organizing Video Course.
• Need help identifying family photos? Check out the Identifying Family Photographs Online Course.
• Have a photo you need help identifying? Sign up for photo consultation.

About My Guest:

Amelia Soth is a Wisconsin-based writer who is fascinated by (as Dr. Francis Young puts it) “the great tension of being a historian: [the fact that] people in the past were simultaneously both just like us and quite unlike us.” She also writes and edits for Mouse Magazine.

About Maureen Taylor:

Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective^Òhelps clients with photo-related genealogical problems. Her pioneering work in historic photo research has earned her the title “the nation’s foremost historical photo detective” by The Wall Street Journal and appearances on The View, The Today Show, Pawn Stars, and others.   Learn more at Maureentaylor.com

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

The post Episode 214: Mourning Jewelry Curiosities appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

This week Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective, is joined by fashion historian Darnell-Jamal Lisby, who is currently the Assistant Curator of Fashion at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the first to take this role.

They discuss the latest exhibition, “Egyptomania: Fashion’s Conflicted Obsession,” and how the fascination with this time period has led to fashion influence throughout the centuries, as well as how it can impact your family photos. Darnell-Jamal and Maureen also delve into the history of fashion, fashion inspiration, and how something in our society and culture inspires and changes trends. 

Related Episodes:

Episode 186: Fashion History on Twitter   

Episode 155: Ancestral Handbag History 

Links:

• Egyptomania: Fashion’s Conflicted Obsession 
• Sign up for my newsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Page so you get notified of my Facebook Live videos.
• Need help organizing your photos? Check out the Essential Photo Organizing Video Course.
• Need help identifying family photos? Check out the Identifying Family Photographs Online Course.
• Have a photo you need help identifying? Sign up for photo consultation.

About My Guest:

Assistant Curator of Fashion, Darnell-Jamal Lisby joined the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2021. He develops fashion study projects across the museum’s various curatorial departments. Before coming to Cleveland, Lisby was an education coordinator at Cooper Hewitt and the Smithsonian Design Museum, where he organized the museum’s first virtual—and best-attended—symposium, “Fashion, Culture, Futures: African American Ingenuity, Activism, and Storytelling.” Lisby previously worked at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  He also taught in the Fashion Institute of Technology master’s program in fashion design.

About Maureen Taylor:

Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective^Òhelps clients with photo related genealogical problems. Her pioneering work in historic photo research has earned her the title “the nation’s foremost historical photo detective” by The Wall Street Journal and appearances on The View, The Today Show, Pawn Stars, and others.   Learn more at Maureentaylor.com

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

The post Episode 213: Egyptomania and Your Family Photos appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

This week Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective, is joined by Michael Murphy, Librarian, and Archivist, as well as Charlotte Engel, who is the clothing historian from the New Canaan Historical Society. The two have been making the rounds on TikTok lately for using behind-the-scenes footage to educate their followers more about exhibits and historical clothing. The two also dive into how they care for historical clothing in an effort to preserve it and help educate future generations about the past through clothing.

Related Episodes:

Episode 127 Beautiful but Deadly: Toxic Fashion and Criminal Dress

Episode 91: Suffragists and Suffragettes: Fashion and the Vote

Links:

• New Canaan Historical Society
• Sign up for my newsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Page so you get notified of my Facebook Live videos.
• Need help organizing your photos? Check out the Essential Photo Organizing Video Course.
• Need help identifying family photos? Check out the Identifying Family Photographs Online Course.
• Have a photo you need help identifying? Sign up for photo consultation.

About My Guests:

Charlotte Engel and Michael Murphy work for the New Canaan Museum & Historical Society in New Canaan, Connecticut. Mike is the Museum’s archivist, and Charlotte is the Museum’s clothing historian. They work together as part of an ongoing project to digitize the Museum’s historic clothing collection.

About Maureen Taylor:

Maureen is a frequent keynote speaker on photo identification, photograph preservation, and family history at historical and genealogical societies, museums, conferences, libraries, and other organizations across the U.S., London and Canada.  She’s the author of several books and hundreds of articles and her television appearances include The View and The Today Show (where she researched and presented a complete family tree for host Meredith Vieira).  She’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, The Boston Globe, Martha Stewart Living, Germany’s top newspaper Der Spiegel, American Spirit, and The New York Times. Maureen was recently a spokesperson and photograph expert for MyHeritage.com, an internationally known family history website and also writes guidebooks, scholarly articles and online columns for such media as Smithsonian.com. Learn more at Maureentaylor.com

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

The post Episode 181: Clothing Care at the New Canaan Historical Society appeared first on Maureen Taylor.