History of Underwear: from shirts and stays to bras and briefs

25:39It's like amber. Like it's your Jurassic Park. We can create an entire theme park filled with 18th century people. Yeah. You're going to be mad, I feel like, about what's happening. Welcome to Jane Austen Park. I would go, sign me up. But most of the time with menstrual blood, we don't really see a huge amount of that evidence. Maybe partly because it's been laundered away, maybe partly because this is just linen that does disintegrate over the time. If you've got a bloodstained bit of linen, you're not going to want to hand it down to your grandchildren. So what would you do with that? So we get very little of that kind of evidence in the archive.

26:18And we also don't really see any evidence of bleeding on the inside of shifts and smocks or petticoats or anything. So it's possible that people did do free bleeding in the past, but we don't necessarily have very much secure, solid evidence of that. Fascinating. Whoa. So the humble gusset, the crotch, dates to the same time as radio and film cameras. That's crazy. Isn't it really weird when you think about it that way? I mean, that does feel wild. like that it is such a modern thing the things we take for granted yeah and what about the gents what about you know what would i be wearing in the late 19th century are we talking crotchless drawers please say bloomers am i wearing big frilly knickers sadly not oh what a shame so men more consistently do have a kind of a crotched undergarment it wasn't that we didn't like blue shorts yes yeah it wasn't that we didn't like have the technology to make crotches It's just that they weren't needed.

27:18But for men, we do have examples of that that go back to some of the earliest archaeological textiles that we have evidence of. So we know that there was underwear sent to Roman soldiers at Hadrian's Wall. We know that people like Otsu the Iceman, so one of the most ancient clothed people that's ever been discovered, had like braised kind of linen underwear type garment on. And we also know that King Tutankhamun's tomb contained 145 spare pairs of linen. Just in case you woke up. It's so many, Vic. I am so upset. I am like, I just can't believe that somebody was like, David needs a crotch. But Linda, what would she do with it?

28:06What would she even do with it? She wouldn't even know what to do with it. That's so crazy. Leave it. She can have a hammock. It's fine. so uh ancient undercrackers your favorite phrase vic i do like undercrackers they did exist um but what about in our period sort of you know post 1500s do they wear socks do they wear stockings do they wear underpants is it all one thing like do we get any kind of leg covering for men yes so it you don't have to wear anything but there is a it is possible it is a choice that you can wear under breeches essentially so that's just like a linen layer between you and your breeches.

28:42But that's not necessary at all. Breeches or, you know, the other sort of knee length type trousery garments that men are wearing stop at the knee. So the bit beneath the knee needs stockings. So the calf becomes a very sexy area for men. I've always said it. Yeah, I walked in, you said, my name is Greg. The calf is a very sexy area for men. So we get some stockings that are padded around the calf so that you get a little bit of definition and muscle tone in that area. They're padding their calves. Oh, yeah. They're padding everything. That's crazy. I love that. Yeah. But you also don't have to.

29:25If you've just got your long shirt, you can just kind of bunch it up in an appropriate manner and get a little bit of extra emphasis wherever you might want it. See, so the old tuck and plump. I'm obsessed with this. I love this. Men should be doing this more often. It should be a thing that we're sort of making it more... I guess that is kind of happening with looks maxing now. I was going to say, crotch maxing. It's kind of bringing it back. Yeah, there we go. Okay, calf maxing. Calf maxing, crotch maxing, yeah. All right, so we've met the tuck and plump, the old shirt that's, you know, it's a long shirt and you roll it under and up.

29:58Well, not up. No, not up, Greg. Just under, just under. Sorry, going too far there. But there was another way that a 16th century gentleman and could make his nether regions more voluminous. What do you think Henry VIII was doing? Vegetables. Oh, you think he's just stuffing courgettes down there? Like in Spinal Tap. Aubergine. I want to say that I'm thinking of a field hockey cup or something like that. We're doing that. You are spot on, I think. Come on, Hugh. We wouldn't call it a cup necessarily. We'd call it a cod piece. Is that right? We would, yeah. And this comes from an archaic word for scrotum.

30:36Cod meant scrotum. And this started as a very practical thing. It's essentially a triangle of fabric that you put over the area that you would occasionally need some access to. And you can just untie it when you need to go and tie it back up when you're done. So kind of like a modern fly. But it evolved through the 16th century and became a site of showing off your wealth, your virility. And the kind of sports cup bit is very relevant because in armor, you're also getting a cob piece. You need something to cover up and protect. The turtle shell for your bits and pieces. I love that. And that kind of, because obviously armor is made from metal, that's kind of a very solid thing.

31:23And that aesthetic kind of carries over into what men are wearing every day as well. um so I could make one note for people back like if I could get a message back to them if I could get one message back in time I would send it to the people doing the cod pieces and I'd say let's decorate them they can be quite because you know what I'm saying I'm like let's do like we have the little like let's do some decoration let's hand paint some flowers I don't know something lovely I mean you do get very ornamental embroidered decorated cod pieces Do you have any? I mean, not personally. Okay, great. Can I have one?

32:00No. I mean, you may not be familiar, I think every sort of child in England grows up studying the kind of Holbein paintings of Henry VIII, where he stands bestrident with a rather large codpiece. And I think it's a very clear image of what his masculinity is saying. Is it functional at all? Or is this purely ostentatious showing off, I'm the big dude? I mean, it's not functional in that you're not putting... How do you say this? But it is covering up that area. Like I said, it is kind of the equivalent of a fly or... The spaghetti is not in the bowl. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Right, okay. But you can unfasten it so that you can get access right.

32:43Was it a pocket? Could you keep stuff in there? You could, yeah. Could you? Absolutely, yeah. Oh, that's great. The murder of Tupac Shakur has generated nearly 30 years of rumours, conspiracy theories and unanswered questions. Now the mythology is about to meet the courtroom as the trial gets underway and Nevada prosecutors try and solve the mystery of who killed Tupac and what really happened on the Las Vegas Strip that night in 1996. It's time to separate fact from fiction. I'm Anushka Matanda-Doughty, and for the BBC's Fame Under Fire podcast, I'll be inside the courtroom every day, and I'm bringing you with me.

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33:34So, Vic, in the 19th century, there was a new innovation. Oh, good, another question. Yeah, sorry, I've got loads more for you. There was a new innovation in unisex underwear. Historians of fashion would call it the union suit. Yes, the union suit. And it's my absolute favourite. I love that. And I'll let Serena tell you why it's my favourite. So this is essentially, exactly as you described, a full body underwear suit. Come on. That buttons up down the front and has a wonderful little flap, again, for access purposes, at the back this time. So you don't even ever have to take it off if you don't want.

34:08Exactly. I love this. Okay, yeah. Yeah, now we're cooking. So it's a bum flap for when you need a number two. Yes, yep. You know, because it's cold, it's windy. You don't want to strip off all your underwear. Yeah. So you just lower the flap. You might have a swim meet later that day. You got to keep it all on. I am obsessed with this. I feel like modern jumpsuits need this. Yes. It's a onesie for a number twosie. Exactly. There we go. Come on, you're on fire. Look at this. and these became nichely popular shall we say in the late 19th early 20th century a similar thing is kind of happening for women's wear where the smock by this point known as a chemise has kind of merged with the drawers and become a single uh combinations they're called single one-piece garment um but it's not quite as full-on as the union suits that we're talking about sure sure sure um in about 1910 uh the closed crotch kenosha variant um appears and was patented um and those are spelled with k so it's a kkk yeah that's very unfortunate and they had buttons all the way around so that you could access everything whoa there were uh some slightly more erotic adverts for these um like in newspapers and stuff like that are they looking for models it's the career that you never knew you wanted gonna be mean um so we get erotic adverts right sort of 1915-ish we're looking at here one by uh leyendecker which was potentially based on his lover charles beach and this kind of started the trend of using sexy men to sell men's underwear.

35:57And two-piece underwear was also still the most commonly widespread worn thing. So you're still wearing essentially long johns and a t-shirt. But this was the kind of niche, sexy, different alternative approach. Okay, so the sexy closed crotch you sort of mentioned there, that's a sort of good segue back into men's briefs. Because I think the briefs are quite a modern invention, which is quite surprising. Do you know which group of men was first to embrace them? Briefs? Hmm. Hold on. It was going to be, okay, picture this. You're going on a run. Okay. You're running a marathon. Sure. And so you're going, I need something tight.

36:36I need something secure. And so it's going to be marathon runners in Greece. Good guess. It's a good guess. You said Greece at the end. Yeah. Ancient Greece? Yeah. Wow. We're going back in time. They're hopping back. and then we sort of, because time is a circle, so it got created here and then they were sort of like, they were doing that in Greece, actually. So that's my guess. So the Roman word for underpants was supplicarchulom. Did the Greeks wear underpants and did they come back as briefs in the early 20th century? I mean, the Greeks did wear underpants, but I don't think that the connection was there in the 1950s.

37:05Definitively? I wouldn't want to stake my reputation on it. There we go. Unconclusive data is what I'm hearing. You're claiming that as a win. Yeah. Who were the first community to embrace the brief? Was it marathon runners? It was not. Was it women? No. Okay. It was queer men. Oh, yeah, sure. So they became a really significant part of gay male culture in the kind of mid-20th century. So it's the kind of 1950s, 1960s that we're seeing the growth of these kind of tighter, more colourful pairs of underpants for men. In the early 1950s, a photographer named Bill Green developed a kind of cut-down version of underwear for his models to wear and began to sell them.

37:52And then there were catalogs that featured photographs of men in this underwear, models and actors. Each of the garments was named after holiday destinations that were known for their connections to queer gay culture. That is incredible. That rocks. That's so cool. So you get the can, the capri, things like this. and we even know that Sean Connery modeled for them. Is that true? Do we have the ability to super cut seven pictures of him? Smash cut into Sean Connery. I guess that's why they called it Thunderball. I love that. Happy Pride Month. Here we go. Look at this. Okay, let's move up the chest on the old body because we've gone south.

38:36We've been up to the neck. Let's go to the chest. Sure. Let's talk about corsets. What do you know about corsets? Have you ever worn one for a roll? Yeah, I played a character in a maze, in a haunted maze at a place called Canada's Wonderland in Toronto. Shout out to Vaughn, Ontario. This is going to be for two people. But there was like Halloween horror nights there and I worked in a Jack the Ripper maze. Wow. And I played a lady of the evening and my outfit included a corset. Okay, and how did you feel wearing it? Fine. Great. completely fine because it was I think just sort of fabric that was made to look like a corset and I think it was probably just printed on a dress okay you know what I mean I was going to say my work here is done but no that doesn't sound like your work here is not done no I haven't worn an official one though I heard something and I don't know if it's true should I hold it to see if the information comes out or can I ask you can ask you can ask I heard that it's a myth that corsets were like crazy tight this is true okay they were not yeah TikTok is right sometimes.

39:44Yes, it sure is. Only sometimes, though. Yeah, and very rarely. I mean, there's probably as much on TikTok pushing that they were. Yes. So, yeah, women throughout the period that we've been talking about wore a form of corset. So it starts as bodies, it evolves into stays, it's eventually a corset. They're all a sort of an evolution of the same thing, which is a garment for the top half of your body, which is stiffened with something like baleen, which is whale bone which is not bone it's this sort of protein a substance that's in the mouths of whales and it's far more like fingernail and it's actually really quite bendy and supple and more shaped to your body so there's a kind of a terminological issue there in that because we keep saying whale bone people like there's bones in the corset yeah no that's just this like flexi so it's not like you can go into the natural history museum and seeing a giant whale over your head and thinking women are wearing that yes no yeah but whale fingernails just doesn't have the same ring it doesn't no i tend to stick with baleen which is the more scientific chemical term and they were generally waist length um they can have straps they don't have to the kind of silhouette that they're creating evolves over this period as well so it's just sort of this garment which is making your body match whatever is meant to be the physical sort of beauty ideal of that time.

41:08They're worn by all social classes. There's even a charity sort of set up in the 18th century to help poorer women get access to stays, the equivalent at the time. Whoa. And they're not really about restricting your body. They're not really about pulling you in. They are just about creating the right silhouette. And it isn't really until the 19th century that tight lacing and a lot of the ideas that we now have about corsets being bad for women emerge. And they're mainly because doctors are trying to find something to blame for the medical issues that women are having. And it's much easier to blame the women than to actually understand the medical side of it.

41:52Sure, sure. There's other cultural stuff going on about why we've received that kind of vision of them. And some women sure did tight lace, but it's very, very niche. and it's, you know, still a practice that goes on today. It is still a thing that people do, but it is definitely not something that was being done throughout society. So you could wear it in pregnancy. You could wear it breastfeeding. You could wear it as a manual labor in the fields. You could wear it as a maidservant, as a governess or as a duchess. Yeah, absolutely. There's even a corset that becomes really popular towards the end of the 19th century called the Pretty Housemaid Corset.

42:26Whoa, the Pretty Housemaid Corset. Which is really, it's really flexible. It's got a little bit of boning, but quite a lot of cording. So it really is made for women doing physical labor so that they can fully bend and move. Although because it does, you can't bend in the same way as you can when you're not wearing one. So it does actually end up meaning that your posture is a lot better while you're doing, you know, you actually do have to bend your knees. You can't bend your back. All of the kind of manual labor training that we might have today. Yeah. Don't need it if you're wearing a corset.

42:56Literally a built-in back brace. Yeah. That's crazy. And so this would have been under the clothes or this would have been over the clothes at this point? So on top of your shift, but underneath the rest of your clothes. I feel like when we see corsets now in modern day, like we're really showing off some pretty like elaborate corsets in media. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And many of them were like a lot of 19th century corsets in particular are beautifully designed. designed. But that's more because they're a luxury item than necessarily because you're expecting other people to see them. But most people do just wear sort of an everyday, very practically made corset.

43:33Some of these corsets were designed to make women have a certain silhouette. Yes. And that silhouette could sometimes be inspired by birds. Vic, what is the, what would you say is the sexiest bird? Pigeon. It is the pigeon. Wait, there was a right answer on that yeah yeah i'm not saying i'm not for the record i'm not saying pigeons are sexy i don't i am okay pigeons are sexy but i'm not i'm saying the correct answer is pigeons that was the that was the trend inspiration for them well it makes perfect sense they're beautiful and they're social and i'm like there's something about their confidence that is sexy you know what i mean i'm like they'll come up to you they'll be like do you have a snack and you'll be like no and they'll be like okay let me know if you change your mind and they'll walk away and it's fine that kind of confidence you can't buy that kind of confidence you've Talk me around.

44:17Pigeons are sexy. Pigeons are sexy. Well, if you want to embody that sexiness yourself, what you need to do is wear the kinds of stays that are worn in the 1780s. So you are very gently reducing the waist, but very, very gently. But you're overemphasising the bust area. So the neckerchiefs, neckcloths that we were talking about earlier that you'd have in that sort of bouffant fashion that would be starched would make the top half seem a little bit more exaggerated, more emphasised, like a pigeon. And you'd also be wearing padding behind, which was often called a rump or a bum, which would give you the sort of the bottom half of the pigeon shape at the back.

45:01So you end up in this sort of pigeon S shape. Who is the first man that went, I want my wife to look like a sexy, sexy bird. Sadly not recorded. So it's the powder pigeon. is that the the peltier pigeon is the thing you want to emulate apparently wow presumably no wings as well people aren't going full like you know wings and little pigeon feet no I think that's not something that we have any evidence sorry going too far okay so Victorians being a bit weird and horny that's sort of classy Victorians but this is sort of the 1780s Regency era yes poetic they're like you're a bird I'm a bird well technically before the Regency era because the Regency era kind of ends up doing the opposite and you go very I was going to say, Regency's sort of empire line, isn't it?

45:44Very slim, I guess. I think it might be time for us to try some historical underwear. Are you game? Yes. I'm quite excited about this. I'm so excited. I'm intrigued. Oh, card piece, card piece, card piece. So producers Emma and Emmy are going to come and dress us, which is not normally in your job description. Oh, thank you. You know, PhD level historians. so if we go in chronological order with the two corsets that we have here so vic is wearing some stays that are from the latter half of the 18th century um so these are front lacing stays one of the most practical useful things about these is that you can wear them throughout pregnancy so if you wanted to do that you probably have two laces so you could have one up the top which holds the bust in place, and then a separate lace that can be tied a bit looser around the belly, and you can just let it out as the belly grows.

46:42So this is kind of creating a very conical effect. We're just beginning to see that kind of curve over the bust, which is the movement towards the powder pigeon look. I love this. Emmy's still yanking on mine. So this is an 1860s corset. So this is post that transition from it being stays into a corset. So really what makes it a corset is you've got things like that it's front opening. So you've got the corset busk, which means that you can get in and out of it much easier than Vic could. You don't have to start the lacing from scratch. You can just pop into it. But it also means that you actually can get a bit more reduction, a bit more tight lacing.

47:27So if you'd like to give us a twirl, Greg. A twirl. so so technically you're not laced right oh no so technically you look beautiful you pull the laces from there so that emphasizes um that you can sort of pull it in at the waist point rather than at the bottom as well great well we're now wearing our corsets how do you feel Vic I have this tied truly the loosest amount tied you can have and I feel like my posture is better Yes, mine's quite tight. But my posture is better. Serena, did corsets just keep getting shorter and that's how we get bras? Because we haven't talked about bras yet, but they obviously are, I suppose, a 20th century invention.

48:09Sort of. So we have evidence for a bra-like garment that's much older. So there was an archaeological find at Lengberg. In a castle, right? In a castle. It's sort of, it's bra-like in the sense that it has cups. and the cups are actually made in a very, very similar way to a modern sports bra. Cups would be kind of pattern cut and designed. And we think that they're mainly about compression. So it's basically a linen garment, but that fits to the body. That is full length. It's got a skirt on it, or it once had a skirt on it. It is now just some scraps with cups that are a sort of compression of the bust because in 15th century Austria, the beauty ideal was to be flat chested.

48:55um so this was sort of part of part of how you could achieve that if you were not naturally and then we have other moments where the emphasis is on the bust and not the waist and i give you my pitch for what happened yeah okay an inventor so far ahead of her time her time it was a woman inventor uh and she was like i have this great idea it's just gonna be a bra it's a sports bra people are gonna love it and everybody's like that's the stupidest idea we've ever heard becky she threw them all away. Yeah, that would explain it. That's it. Centuries later, rediscovered, yeah. So we get the kind of revival of a bra-like corset at the beginning of the 19th century.

49:34So this is the Jane Austen era, where your waistline is up here. So why on earth would you need to compress your waist? Nobody can see your waist, it's under the skirt. So it's all about the bosom. And you have a kind of lift and separate cup-like corset that's briefly in style. But then that goes away again and we move back to what Greg is wonderfully showing us. Starting to breathe slightly, but yes. Your t-shirt doing the job it was meant to do, being underwear. You're not describing the myths. That's true. My t-shirt is finally living its dream. Okay, so the bra, I guess by the mid-20th century, is the one-piece bra that we know?

50:13Yes. So it sort of evolves across the first half of the 20th century. There are various supposed origin stories for the bra, none of which I fully buy. A lot of them are a marketing spiel. But we do get quite a significant change in how women are clothing their bodies in this period. We're going from garments that need a corset to be kind of built onto and to kind of create that understructure to more flowing, loose, not quite as hugging garments. So you don't need that. So instead of the corset disappearing, it's more that it splits in half. You get a bra for the bust and a girdle for the waist and below.

50:55And I would suggest that that's never really gone away. You know, we still have the Bridget Jones pants. We still have control knickers. And that's all just an evolution from the corset, really. Do you know how the sports bra was invented? The modern one, not your fantastic inventor. Not Becky, yeah. No, I don't. It's, I mean, it's quite a fun story. Yes. So the sports bra was developed in the 1970s, and it's essentially... That late? That late, yes. That's crazy. Well, women were increasingly participating in sport through the 20th century. Allowed to, I suppose, as well, isn't it? Sure. Especially the more rigorous, bouncy kinds of sports that require this kind of thing.

51:34A woman had never played a sport until 1970. That's a fact. You can look that up. I did my PhD in it. so when they decided that women were allowed to bounce around and play sports a prototype was made from two jock straps which could be strapped around each breast my codpiece what I've been begging for and Serena you also brought in a hoop for us this was also a way of changing the silhouette of how a woman's shape looked and Vic is modelling them beautifully yes what do we call these, panniers? So these are panniers. So we've talked a lot about how women are compressing. It did fall through, but it does have a pocket-like quality to it.

52:18So we've talked a lot about how women are compressing the top, or not necessarily compressing, but shaping the top half of their body to a kind of a structured silhouette. The bottom half tends to get structured to go outwards. And it's been argued that this is actually quite a feminist thing. Women are taking up space. And most of the time in history, when there has been a move towards women wearing more emphasized bottom halves. There has been a backlash from men who don't like that the women are taking up the space. Smaller doorways. Well, if you're wearing the kind of skirt that is big enough to need a bigger doorway to go through, then you're wealthy enough to have a house that's got massive doorways in it.

52:54Double door. Yeah. There you go. Your husband's locking it. You're throwing away the key. Where is it? I don't know. You can't come to bed. That's tough. But you get an evolution of these kinds of garments through time. So in the 16th century, we have farthingales. So there's French farthingales and Spanish farthingales. So one is kind of inverted cone shape. And then the other one is more of a drum shape. And then in the 18th century, which is the period that your panniers are from, Vic, and panniers being the French for baskets. I was going to say, we're used to having panniers on a bike, right?

53:29Yes, yeah. I was not going to say. I've never heard that word before, but I love it. And you could put separate pockets inside the panniers as well. And we even have stories of women carrying entire chickens in their pockets. This is very practical. I love that. Look at this. It would be perfect. You pop the chicken in there and the little hen just pops right out there. Little pig maybe. Chicken in one, pig in the other. And a green cables. There we go. So that's the history of underwear. Oh, that's crazy. I loved that. Do you have a favourite piece of underwear that we talked about? Hot piece, hands down, not even close.

54:07The Nuance Window!

54:13Amazing. Well, it's time now for The Nuance Window. This is where Vic and I sit quietly and stitch Henry VIII's shirts for two minutes, while Serena tells us something we need to know about the history of underwear. My stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Dr. Dyer. So clothing is a fundamentally embodied thing. It shapes how we move, how we interact with other people, our environment and our relationship with our own bodies. But if we only think about the clothing of the past as observers, so by looking at paintings, by reading accounts, even when we're examining historic garments that have survived from the past, it's actually really difficult to access any of that bodily experience.

54:52And there's also a huge amount of survival bias at play and museum collections. So we have proportionally fewer examples of working women's corsets because they have literally been worn to rags. And so we risk making a lot of assumptions about the people inside those garments and aren't as equipped to be critical historians of the often quite biased texts that have survived, which talk about often other people wearing those clothes rather than yourself. but reconstructing historical garments and perhaps most importantly underwear can get us closer to understanding what it was like to wear a corset while going about your daily tasks or going to the loo in split drawers so we can understand why people made these choices and sewing these recreated garments teaches us about changing approaches to the labor of garment production how the various materials and tools worked, and while wearing them can show us how people moved, what their posture was like, how resourceful, practical and clever so many of these garments are.

56:01So it showed me, for example, that there is a very different kind of comfort to be found in wearing garments which form the fashionable silhouette around your physical body, as opposed to the predominant culture today of altering the body itself to fit the beauty zeitgeist through diets or procedures. So while we can never gain a holistic experience of what it was like to live in the bodies of the past, these experiments with clothes mean that we can better understand how ideas of comfort, freedom of movement, and occasionally restriction were experienced. Amazing. Thank you so much. Thoughts, Vic?

56:41I love that. Yeah, I mean, like, that makes so much sense. I think so much about like the way body standards change today. And I love that point of sort of being like clothes to fit you rather than you fitting into clothing. That really I think so much about. I think that, you know, a lot of people that think about fashion think a lot about that. So that is just, yeah, that was such a cool point. Yeah, it's lovely. So what do you know now?

57:08Amazing. Well, we've learned a lot, but it's time now for the What Do You Know Now? this is our quickfire quiz for our comedian. No, I forgot to take notes. No, no, no. You have taken... I literally started by writing Vicks notes, all camera speeding. That is literally my only note. Your only note is the camera's on. Well, let me try and write some. Okay. Codpiece. Codpiece. Peece. Undercrackers. Greg in underwear. Dashing in corset. Thank you. Very charming. I was going to ask, how are you feeling? I suspect, flustered? Panicked. These are all things we've talked about. Good luck, Vic. We've got 10 questions.

57:47Question one. What was the name of the most basic unisex undergarment worn for much of history? It was a SIF? Shift. Shift. I'll accept it. I'll accept shift. Very good. Question two. What practical purpose did a shirt or shift serve people? Underwear. Yeah. And what else did it protect you from? The sun. Yeah, absolutely. And from yourself and from stains. And from yourself and from stains and from snakes. Very good. Question three. What bleaching agent were people... Urine. Correct. Question four. What was unusual about women's drawers for much of the 19th century? Tunnel-shaped. Yeah. Two tunnels, two tube stations, no crotch.

58:24That's right, no train. A crime, a crime. And I hear you on that and I still think it's a crime. I'm sorry. Question five. Which male community first embraced wearing briefs in the 1950s? Oh, the gay community. It was, gay men. Question six. What was a union suit? My favorite. You repeat the question? What was the union suit? And then you said it was your favorite. So I was like, I listen extra hard because anytime it's your favorite, I go, well, I got to remember that for Craig's birthday. Okay, what? Okay, union suit, your absolute favorite. And I would like to get a... Based on your onesie design?

58:58Origin of the word? Origin of definition? What did it have at the rear? Can you use it in a sentence? My union suit is so handy for number twos. Okay, can you give me the definition of a union suit? No, I don't think so. Okay. Okay. I know this. A union suit. A union suit? We didn't talk about this. There's no way. This is the one with the bum flap. The bum flap! The bum flap, sorry. Wait, take it back and then cut it in the beginning, right? I can't give you that one. I'm sorry. Question seven. Name one purpose, a corset or set of stays served apart from creating a smaller waistline. Posture.

59:33Yeah, very good. Posture, bus support, back support for manual labour. Question eight. A sexy woman's silhouette in the late 18th century was inspired by which sexy bird? The pigeon. It was the powder pigeon. Question nine. What was the first sports bra made from? Becky made her sports bra. Well, this is a fact. Becky made her sports bra from whale bones, but that isn't going to be what your answer is. No, I'm talking about the 1970s one. Right, of course. Did we say? Yeah. We did. And we just talked about it. We just talked about it. Here we go. It was made out of swimsuit. Two. Two. Oh, two jock straps.

1:00:08Very good. Well done. Question 10. This is for 9 out of 10, which is a very strong score. Oh, huge. What was a rump? The tool that went in the back. Or like it was any, these, anything that you could fit back there. I'll let you have it. A chicken and a pig. Not a pig, but yes. Could have been. You don't know that you weren't there, Greg. Padding for the rear of the woman's dress. 9 out of 10, Vic. Well done. You powered through. It was sort of touch and go in the middle. I got scared. I got genuinely pretty scared there for a second you did very very well what's my prize? you get to take home two chickens yeah no you don't get that no we need that sure okay well that is the end of the show so thank you so much Vic and of course thank you Serena listener if you want more historical beauty and fashion trends check out our episodes on the history of high heel shoes which is a great one we did one on renaissance beauty and we did one on hair care entrepreneur Madam CJ Walker I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner we had the superb Dr.

1:01:04Serena Dyer from De Montford University Thank you, Serena. Thank you for having me. It's been an absolute hoot. And in Comedy Corner, we have the magnificent Vic McHalice. Thank you, Vic. Greg, this was a blast. Thank you for having me. And thank you for putting on the corset. I know that was a weird request. No, I love it. This is the best. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we rummage around in the historical wardrobe to unearth some more forgotten gems. But for now, I'm off to go and buy 145 union suits to be buried with me in my future tomb. It's getting bum-claps a-go-go. Bye!

1:01:48Hi, I'm Phil Wang, and this is a podcast to podcast trailer for a different podcast than this podcast that you've listened to or are going to listen to. But nonetheless, I'm talking about another podcast that you should also definitely listen to. The podcast I'm talking about is Comedy of the Week, which takes choice episodes from BBC sitcoms, sketch shows, podcasts and panel shows, including my own show, Unspeakable, and puts them all into one podcast. Maybe I'll trail this podcast on that podcast. Who's to say? I'll do what I like. Listen to Comedy of the Week now on BBC Sounds. Podcast.

1:02:27The murder of Tupac Shakur has generated nearly 30 years of rumours, conspiracy theories and unanswered questions. Now the mythology is about to meet the courtroom as the trial gets underway and Nevada prosecutors try and solve the mystery of who killed Tupac and what really happened on the Las Vegas Strip that night in 1996. It's time to separate fact from fiction. I'm Anushka Matanda-Dowity and for the BBC's Fame Under Fire podcast, I'll be inside the courtroom every day and I'm bringing you with me. Join me for Fame Under Fire, the Tupac murder trial, the testimony, the arguments, the moments that matter and all the legal analysis.

1:03:01Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.