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Vice Blog

A PRIMER IN FASHION FOLKLORE

Britain, as any American knows, is very quaint and twee. Our stiff, sportsmanlike, covertly racist society has always been supported by a thousand years worth of peculiar beliefs and traditions. Our clothes are no different. Steve Roud dedicates his life to archiving, recording and investigating the country's folklore, superstitions, and quaint little quirks. If you have ever received a clip round the ear for putting new shoes on the table, then Steve might be able to tell you why. Steve is also keeper and creator of the Roud Folksong Index, a database of over 21,000 British folk songs.

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VICE: So, Steve, are there many superstitions about clothes these days?
Steve Roud: Modern superstitions to do with clothes are almost entirely related to footballers, they have this notion that they must put on their lucky socks or something like that. That has spread back into general culture, so lots of people, if you ask them, will mention a lucky piece of clothing. Twenty or thirty years ago, they wouldn't even have thought of it. It's a modern phenomenon. Actors are very similar—again it's because their jobs depend on luck. However skillful they are, if they go on stage, on a football pitch, it can all go wrong. So you try to control it with your superstitions.

What about in the old days?
Now in the past things were more complicated. Color was important. In the 19th century a superstition arose that green is an unlucky color to wear and some people still say that. Now of course the Irish, for a start, wear green, because that's their national color. Maybe that had something to do with the myth. Some people say it's the color of the fairies, but that's a myth, fairies didn't traditionally wear green or anything like that. In the past you wouldn't wear black in general, unless you had to, at a funeral for instance. Obviously that belief has gone completely now.

What about the way you put clothes on?
There were superstitions to do with how you dressed, in other words, some people would always put their right shoe or sock on first and never their left. The general belief is that the right is better than the left and that it's very important to do the right things in the morning because then your day will be OK. Today we still talk about getting out on the right side of the bed.

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I always thought of that as right, as in right and wrong.
It can be both, but if you were really superstitious you would get out the right side of the bed rather than the left. Obviously if you're against the wall you don't have any choice, but as far as clothing goes, you put your right shoe on first, you put your right sock on first. The other thing about clothing, and now this was really strongly believed in, is that if you put something on wrong by accident, you put your vest on inside out say, it would be bad luck to change it. That was a very common superstition because things that happen by accident aren't really accidents--they are fate.

My mother always tells me not to put new shoes on the table.
Yes, that's one of the top ten superstitions that still survive, but I'm not sure where it comes from exactly, but in the past, getting new clothes was a bigger deal than it is now. If you got a new coat or something like that, the person giving it to you, the tailor or whoever, would put something in the pocket, a small coin or hanky, in the same way that you would never give someone a purse that's empty. You always put something in it, then it will always have money.
In the old days people very much liked to have new clothes at Whitson and Easter. They were the two very important times of the year when the new fashions were set. There was a superstition that if you didn't wear something new at Whitson that birds would shit on you. Quite seriously. Another general one is you never repair something that somebody was wearing.

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So you're saying if I tore a pocket, I'd take the shirt off first?
Yeah, exactly. If somebody said, oh I'll just sew that button on, you would take the shirt off. Again, we don't know why, but it sort of has the feeling to it of sewing up somebody's shroud, so that's probably where it comes from. There was a phrase, "You will sew sorrow to your back." There was also the idea that you shouldn't wear dead people's clothes.

Well, that sounds fairly straight-forward.
Sort of, but funnily enough, in the old days, if somebody died, their clothes were often all they owned, certainly all they owned that was worth anything, so they would be given to relatives. But there was a common belief that they rotted very quickly.
The people who actually made the clothes had their own superstitions, for instance if you dropped a pair of scissors, and they stand up on their double point, then you will hear of a wedding, but, if only on one point, it is a sign of death. That's a saying from Worcestershire around the start of the 20th century.

OK, are there any especially strange ones, most of these you can kind of understand today, but are there any that would seem completely alien today?
Yes, but if you believe in fate, if you believe that there are omens and portents then these things do make some sort of sense. There's this notion that if the hem of a lady's skirt is turned up by accident, it either means a letter is on the way, or they're trying to catch a boyfriend. That was a genuine saying in Somerset, noted down in the 1940s: If you stick a crooked pin in the lining of your coat, all the girls will have to follow you. Maybe they get "stuck" to the pin, I don't know. In country Longford in Ireland, they'd say that if a girl's apron takes fire in the front, it's a sign of a marriage. But, a fire on the side or the back is a sign of a misfortune Again, it wasn't unusual, especially for women's clothes, to catch fire because of the voluminous clothes they wore and the fact that all rooms had open fires or they cooked over a range. So it's not quite so daft as it sounds, but nowadays we would think any clothing catching fire would be a misfortune.
One thing that I always say is that we tend to think that we are superstitious as a society, and we're not at all, when compared to the way people in the past behaved. In the past people really did believe, whereas now, it's like reading your horoscope.

You think it's sort of affected?
Yeah, exactly. It's something we play at, very few people really believe, and if they really do, then they're suffering from an obsessive disorder, and that's serious. If you take superstition to it's nth degree, it's a serious condition and it can really affect your life. You can't leave the house until you've turned around four times, said three hail Mary's. Most of us, if we walk under a ladder, we forget it two minutes later, it doesn't really upset our whole day.

BRUNO BAYLEY