5 Fashion History Facts That Sound Crazy Today

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By Luis Gustavo. See how we research and review our content.

A rider in tenth-century Persia, a Venetian lady on stilted platform shoes and an Elizabethan courtier in 1574 would each be baffled by a modern closet. Everyday items such as heels, shades, denim and a bra all started life with a job to do, and the job was rarely “look good.”

The five stories below follow those items back to their first purposes. A couple of popular claims turn out to be only half true, so the notes on what the record does and doesn’t support are part of the fun.

1. High heels were originally made for men

The earliest ancestor of the high heel was practical gear. Persian cavalry wore heeled boots, often dated to around the tenth century, that helped lock the foot into a stirrup and keep an archer steady at a gallop. Because riding was expensive, the heel gradually became a sign of wealth.

Heels reached Europe in the early 1600s with Persian envoys, and noblemen adopted them as a status marker: only someone who didn’t labor could afford such impractical shoes. Louis XIV, shown in heels in his 1701 portrait, was a famous wearer. Women took up the style in the mid-to-late 1600s, and by the late 1780s high, thin heels were firmly seen as feminine.

2. Sunglasses were once used as a “medical accessory”

That label is only partly accurate. Tinted eyewear is much older than fashion: Inuit snow goggles with narrow slits date to around the thirteenth century, and in China, flat smoky quartz lenses were used by judges, possibly as early as the twelfth century. James Ayscough’s tinted lenses of about 1752 were meant to correct vision, not to shade the sun. The popular tale that tinted glasses were routinely prescribed for syphilis has no confirming sources.

The better-documented medical link is industrial. The British government asked the Royal Society to investigate cataracts among glassworkers, and the chemist Sir William Crookes developed a cerium-bearing glass in the 1910s that absorbed ultraviolet light. Lenses made from it, known as Crookes glass, are regarded as a precursor of modern sunglasses.

3. Jeans were born as tough workwear

The patent is the clearest proof. On May 20, 1873, Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis received US Patent 139,121 for work pants reinforced with copper rivets at the points that tore most easily, such as the corners of pockets and the base of the button fly. Davis had the idea but lacked the money to file, so he proposed a partnership with Strauss.

The famous number came later. In 1890 the company began assigning lot numbers to its products, and “501” went to the copper-riveted waist overalls. Why that number was chosen is unknown, because the company’s records were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

4. Specific colors have signaled social status for centuries

Purple is the classic case. Tyrian purple came from sea snails of the Murex family, and an experiment published in 1908 found that about twelve thousand snails yielded no more than 1.4 grams of pure dye, enough to trim a single garment. The Greek historian Theopompus reported that the dye once sold for its weight in silver. In Rome, senior magistrates wore a toga edged in purple, and by the fourth century AD only the emperor could wear Tyrian purple.

Law kept pace with price. A proclamation issued at Greenwich in 1574 under Elizabeth I forbade anyone outside the royal family from wearing purple silk, cloth of gold or sable. Sumptuary rules like this one tied clothing to rank and could be enforced.

5. The modern bra is less than 120 years old

Breast bands existed in antiquity, and fragments of linen bras found at Lengberg Castle in Austria are dated to 1440-1485, but corsets dominated Western underwear from the sixteenth century onward. The design most people recognize arrived in the 1910s. In 1913, nineteen-year-old Mary Phelps Jacob, later known as Caresse Crosby, reportedly sewed one from two handkerchiefs and ribbon so a whalebone corset wouldn’t show through her evening dress.

US patent 1,115,674 for her “Backless Brassiere” was issued on November 1, 1914, which makes the modern bra a little over a century old. She sold the patent to the Warner Brothers Corset Company for $1,500. Demand for metal in World War I helped push corsets out of fashion, and in 1932 one manufacturer began tying bust size to the letters A through D.

Venetian chopines and a three-inch rule nobody followed

Before heels reached the court, Europeans used pattens and chopines, platforms that lifted wearers above muddy streets. By around 1430, some chopines are reported to have reached about 15 inches (38 cm). Venice reportedly tried to cap the height at three inches, but the rule was widely ignored.

How sunglasses turned into a street fad

Movie stars helped popularize dark lenses in the early 1920s. In 1929 Sam Foster started selling inexpensive celluloid sunglasses in Atlantic City under the Foster Grant name, and Edwin Land’s Polaroid filter made polarized lenses available in 1936. By 1938, Life magazine called them a “new fad for wear on city streets,” estimating that only about a quarter of American buyers needed them for eye protection.

To keep exploring this subject, take a look at facts about famous writers and photography facts. Royal dress codes get more airtime in 5 facts about kings and queens, and the pigments behind some of those expensive colors turn up in facts about great painters.