Medea salted the earth and killed her children. She destroyed her cheating husband. And most importantly for this particular article, she murdered her competition with the trappings of royalty. She sent the princess Glauce a golden dress drenched in poison.
Medea was the first Greek play I ever read the whole way through, and that crazy queen has a special place in my heart. When she speaks, anger permeates every sentence; poison seems to seep from the page. Medea is not the earliest mention of a poisoned dress in history, but it remains one of the most powerful in Western literature. Similar myths have shown up in ancient Hebrew, India, and modern Europe. According to one Greek myth, Hercules was killed by a poisoned robe that burned his skin and flayed him alive.
Like other narrative arcs that replay over and over in our fairy tales and myths, the poison dress resonates for a reason. Clothing is intended to shelter us, to provide a firm barrier between the squishy stuff of our personhood and the sharp edges of the outside world. Clothing should protect us and shield our nervous parts from the thorns of Eden. Beauty is pain. The satirical image shows two skeletons dressed to the nines. The gentleman stands, hat in hand, and offers his other hand to the lady.
The wreaths in particular could cause rashes for women who wore them. But like mercury hats, arsenic fashions were most dangerous for the people who manufactured them, says Matthews David. For example, in , a year-old artificial flower maker named Matilda Scheurer—whose job involved dusting flowers with green, arsenic-laced powder— died a violent and colorful death. She convulsed, vomited, and foamed at the mouth.
Her bile was green, and so were her fingernails and the whites of her eye. An autopsy found arsenic in her stomach, liver, and lungs. Public concern over arsenic helped phase it out of fashion—Scandinavia, France, and Germany banned the pigment Britain did not.
This raises interesting questions about fashion today. While arsenic dresses might seem like bizarre relics of a more brutal age, killer fashion is still very much in vogue. In , Turkey banned sandblasting —the practice of spraying denim with sand to give it a fashionable distressed look—because workers were developing silicosis from breathing in sand. Yet when a dangerous production method is banned in one country—and when the demand for the clothing that method produces remains high—then production typically moves somewhere else or continues despite the ban.
Last year, Al Jazeera found that some Chinese factories were sandblasting clothes. In the s, men who wore mercury hats or women who wore arsenic-laced clothing and accessories might have seen the people who produced these items on the streets of London, or read about them in the local paper. All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email. However, many other countries do not have such legal restrictions, and the weed killer is widely available. This has meant that in several countries paraquat ingestion is a common cause of poisoning.
Though paraquat is not readily absorbed through unbroken skin, it is an irritant and the damage it can do to the skin will only increase the absorption of the toxic compound into the body.
He also had some difficulties breathing. Thankfully, after three weeks in hospital, Mr Zhang has recovered, but it is not known whether he intends to press charges. Knickers in a twist: the case of the poisoned pants. His wife had allegedly coated his pants with the herbicide paraquat. Thus with a kiss I die: could pufferfish be the key to a Shakespearean poison? Why are these examples so curious?
What is it that draws us to these frankly pretty horrible stories? Is it that they're a mix of the morbid and the aesthetic: death via ball gown or a beautiful headdress more interesting than other, seemingly prosaic causes? Or are we drawn to their gendered implications—the centuries-old phenomenon whereby, as David puts it, accusations are leveled at "the female consumer's seemingly irrational desire for novelty in dress rather than male economic interests"?
After all, as she continues, the medical establishment has historically been quick to blame women "for health hazards caused by larger systematic problems. The latter certainly proves true when reading a report from the New York Times in which lamented that "an average of three deaths per week from crinolines in conflagration ought to startle the most thoughtless of the privileged sex; and to make them, at least, extraordinarily careful in their movements and behavior, if it fails… to deter them from adopting a fashion so fraught with peril.
Their frivolity, it was suggested, had cost them their lives. However, as shown by the widespread bouts of mercury poisoning, deadly dress didn't just exist along gendered lines; the dangers of clothing production were felt equally by men and women of the lower class. Accounts of combs exploding at high temperatures and taking the factory with them, toxic chemicals doing everything from blackening nails to making people's teeth fall out, and voluminous skirts getting caught in machinery all point to the same thing: a longstanding culture in which garment workers suffer hugely.
In fact, when the poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi wrote a dialogue between Fashion and Death in , he imagined the former telling the latter, "Our common nature and custom is to incessantly renew the world. In myths and fairytales, women poisoned their rivals with gaudy accessories; in the 19th century, they unknowingly wore dresses dyed with arsenic. Top photo via Getty.
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