In the mid-seventeenth century, rapid industrialization across western Europe attracted tens of thousands of people into cities looking for a better life than the one they could achieve toiling away in fields owned by some rich dandy asshat who dressed all fancy and forced everyone to call him m’lord or some such nonsense. Unfortunately, though many did manage to raise themselves up into the crazy new thing called the middle class, many more found their lives much the same as before, only now with the addition of crazy big machines seemingly designed to maim people in every conceivable way and less than ideal living conditions. To supply the needed labor force to keep the new factories humming, people were crammed together into much smaller spaces than they had been used to before. It was the beginning of the trend to urbanization that continues to this day.
Oh what a wonderful time it must have been to be alive. Just imagine, every step being jostled by crowds of your fellows as you make your way through a human built ant colony, breathing in the musky fumes of the factories, and drinking water highly likely to be made up partly of you and your neighbors’ piss and shit. Oh, with all these wonders and more, is it any wonder that so many diseases began to run rampant through these cities? Smallpox, cholera, typhoid, and more, transformed from the annoyances they had once been out in the clear blue skies to epidemics that killed thousands. What fun. Of course, the worst of all of these was a little something called consumption, which we today call tuberculosis.
Much like the quintessential Broadway starlet story, tuberculosis didn’t get its start in the big city, but oh boy did it ever hit the big time when it arrived. By the end of the century, nearly a quarter of the people who died in western Europe were dying of tuberculosis, which given that it usually involved coughing up so much blood that you literally drown yourself, probably wasn’t all that great. If there was one thing that could be said about tuberculosis compared to other diseases, it was that it had staying power. While diseases like smallpox had a tendency to come and go rather quickly, people with tuberculosis could exhibit symptoms for years, slowly wasting away bit by bit. People who had tuberculosis tended to have low grade fevers most of the time, which left them with sparkling dilated eyes, rosy cheeks, and red lips. The fever left sufferers with little appetite, leaving them thin and pale, their hair fine and silky from the lack of nutrients. When old timey people saw these poor souls, they of course thought to themselves, damn don’t they look hot.
It’s hard to say exactly how fashion trends get started, though what happened next probably had something to do with the prevalence of tuberculosis amongst famous writers, actors, and artists; people who managed to rub shoulders with the wealthy while still living amongst the disease ridden squalor of the lower classes. The fact that most prostitutes also tended to die of tuberculosis probably had something to with it as well, since if your entire trade is sex, you tend to have an influence on what is considered sexy. Either way, even as people died coughing up blood, old timey people began to fetishize the symptoms of tuberculosis. Things being much the way they are now, women’s fashions were of course the most affected. Corsets were tightened to give a more waifish shape, makeup was applied to give that wonderful consumptive look, and dresses began to resemble death shrouds. Gussied up in such ways, fancy women would sit at parties, hunched over and giving potential suitors a languid eye, doing their best to look as sickly as possible. Men’s fashions were affected as well of course; with a more delicate air becoming prized along with the more practical use of high collars and scarves to hide the sores that developed on the lymph nodes in the later stages of the disease. Eventually, people began seeing getting tuberculosis as a sign of being intelligent and/or attractive. It was all exactly as fucked up as it sounds.
This strange fashion sense continued through large parts of the nineteenth century, until germs were discovered to be a thing around 1880. Previously tuberculosis had been blamed on all sorts of nonsense things, such as bad air and alarmingly people being too pretty, which should tell you how creepily entwined the idea of tuberculosis and beauty had become. This new understanding of course changed lots of thing about how people lived, the first things of course all having to do with fashion. Women’s skirts were shortened to keep them from dragging on the filthy ground, bringing new prominence to the shoe industry. Men became clean shaven as giant beards became seen as germ jungles. People were advised to get out in the sun more, prompting new crazes over tanning and the sporting life. Eventually they also used this new knowledge to actually combat the disease, but of course that was later.
Image: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-3951-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99