Why do so many of us have the need to be trendy, to do or say things we think make us look as cool as the people we’re copying? Trends through the ages have included everything from style statements to full-on body modification.
We all like to feel cool, right, But how far are you willing to go to feel like you're part of the popular crowd? How about walking around bent in half because it made you look fragile and afflicted, or having mismatched heels on your shoes so you'd walk with a limp. Oh laugh. Today folks get giant butt implants to look like a Kardashian. I'm Patty Steele. Weird trends just to be cool. Next on the backstory. We're back with the backstory. What is it about an awful lot of us that makes us so desperate to be a part of the cool set that we're willing to do or wear almost anything to feel like an insider. That's what trends are all about. Take a look at more recent trends. In the nineteen sixties, women went from that curvy, platinum blonde look of the fifties to the frighteningly skinny look of supermodel Twiggy, who weighed just ninety pounds. That look drove, by the way way too many young girls into anorexia, although Twiggy says she just had a speedy metabolism and ate like a horse, at least like a ninety pound horse. That super skinny look had a resurgence in the early nineties for a much more sinister reason. It was the advent of heroin chic, with supermodel Cape Moss the most well known of that bunch. It was a look that went beyond models and included the grunge world of Kurt Cobain and so many other musicians that eventually lost their lives to it. By the two thousands, while we still worshiped tall, thin models, we started to embrace a curvier, more natural look thanks to stars like Jennifer Lopez. Then all hell broke loose when the Kardashians and their super sized rear ends arrived. Suddenly, women who didn't have a lot of junk in the trunk were actually getting oversized butt implants to go along with their oversized breast implants. But none of this does desire to change what we were born with. Is new. Now it's the fifteen hundreds, and you want to look like the royals who could afford tons of very expensive sugar, which naturally rotted their teeth, so you purposely blacken your teeth to look shishi. Some doctors at the time would even pull blackened teeth out of dead bodies and use them as primitive implants for their ohso trendy patients. And teeth blackening wasn't just in Europe. In fact, it was way more common for hundreds of years in the Far East, including Japan and India, but also in a lot of South American cultures. Why they saw it as a sign of beauty and sexual maturity, and in some cases because they felt it differentiated us from animals. And then there was a long time trend in China that sounds unbelievably tortuous. For centuries, parents would repeatedly break and then fold the feet of their baby girls to gree a tiny little feet that they felt was the epitome of femininity. If you had tiny bound feet, it showed that you came from a wealthy family and wouldn't need to work in the fields. Your feet would be wrapped with long ribbons to keep them from growing. And if your toes withered and fell off, better yet major feet even smaller. You then would wear what they called lotus shoes, which cupped your tiny feet in what looked like a lotus flower bud. Now imagine walking around in heavy fitted clothing and spending your day leaning forward at the waist like you were in the middle of bowing. Talk about a major backache. You're doing a thing called the Grecian bend, a popular trend in England from the late eighteen twenties to the early eighteen eighties. The effect was created by a massive amount of bunched up fabric positioned above your rear like a bustle that forced women to lean forward and take tiny little steps to carry all that weight, similar to the figures on Grecian urns. The Grecian bend was erotic to Victorians because a woman's breasts and rear jutted out. Also making the bend more appealing was the belief that any woman who adopted the Grecian bend was bold and daring, yet at the same time fragile and afflicted, which they loved. Pretty creepy, right, But One of the weirdest trends popular in the eighteen sixties was called the Princess Alexandra limp. What was that all about? Well, again, the beauty of being fragile. Alexandra, whose father was the King of Denmark, was married to British Prince Edward the seventh in eighteen sixty three. In no time, this teenage girl became a fashion icon, actually very much like Princess Diana. One hundred and twenty years later, everything Alexandra did and wore became a huge fashion fad. She started wearing ornate choker necklaces to hide a surgical scar on her neck. Pretty soon, ever, everybody was wearing chokers, a trend that lasted for fifty years. They all wanted to look like Alexandra. But the craziest trend she set off through no fault of her own, was the Alexandra limp. She had an illness in the mid eighteen sixties that left her with a very stiff knee and a pretty noticeable limp. Soon tons of young women in England began copying her limp, using walking sticks at times to hobble around, even though they had no reason to limp. It was the next big thing in British fashion, as people across England and all over its colonies found it fashionable to walk in the exact same way. Most amazingly, shoemakers purposely created shoes that matched one another but which had different height heels to make limping a breeze. It finally ended when the press pointed out how disrespectful the fake limp was to people who had an actual limp. So we look back at the craziness of some of those trends and we laugh. But we really have to ask ourselves what makes black teeth, wrapped feet or a fake limp all that different from butt implants and heroin chic? Is it all a misguided need to be popular, to stand out by copying what makes somebody else unique an excellent reason to love yourself as is and embrace what makes you an individual. I hope you're enjoying the Backstory with me, Patty Steele. Please subscribe, and if you have a story you'd like me to dig into and share, please dm me on Facebook at Patty Steele or on Instagram at Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Durand Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser, Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Feel free to reach out to me with comments and even story suggestions on Instagram at real Patty Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.