26Long Beard
A Massachusetts farmer named Joseph Palmer was attacked for having a long beard in 1830. He was imprisoned for 15 months for defending himself. He died in 1873, by which time beards became fashionable. His tombstone reads, “Persecuted for wearing the beard.”
27. The first successful anal fistula surgery was performed on Louis XIV in 1686. Anal fistulas then became highly fashionable among his royal court, with people lining up to undergo the procedure whether they needed it or not, or placing bandages on their bums to pretend that they did.
28. The coat suit evolved from padding known as the doublet that protected the skin of knights from chafing by armor or chainmail. Around the 14th Century, it became fashionable for nobles to wear the doublet as an outer garment as if perhaps they had just come from the battlefield.
29. Jazz helped women in the 1920s to wear looser, less restrictive clothing than the prior corsets and longer hemlines because women wanted to dance to jazz and less restrictive clothing allowed this.
30. After Christian Dior introduced the “New Look” fashion collection in 1947, there were several protest groups against the designs, including the “League of Broke Husbands”, made up of 30,000 men who were against the costs associated with the amount of fabric needed for such designs.
Latest FactRepublic Video:
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
31Macaroni
A "macaroni", as mentioned in Yankee Doodle, refers to a 1700s trend wherein some men would dress up in ridiculously over-the-top clothing and speak in a gender-ambiguous manner. The name came from young men who had toured Italy referring to fashionable things as “very macaroni.”
32. Wearing forbidden Western fashion, like denim, jewelry, and hair dye, is used by North Korean millennials to show their defiance of the regime, but a women’s union and youth groups monitor the streets to shame and beat rule-breakers, cutting off ponytails and destroying tight trousers.
33. Agnès Sorel, the mistress of King Charles VII of France, started the fashion trend of “front openings through which one sees the teats, nipples, and breasts of women.”
34. Bell-bottomed pants originated as part of the uniform for the U.S. Navy. The reason they were “belled” all the way up was to allow the wearer to easily remove them in case they ended up in the sea, to use them as a flotation device.
35. The Beastie Boys coined the term “mullet” to refer to a hairstyle in 1994 in their song “Mullet Head”. No earlier use of the term “mullet” that refers to a hairstyle has been found.
