More podcast recommendations!

I've really fallen down the podcast rabbit hole and have a few more topical shows to recommend to the readership!

Historical footwear purveyors American Duchess host a podcast of interviews with various professionals and experts relevant to historical costuming and reenactment. The crossover between that field and costume production for theatre/tv/film/etc means they've interviewed some fascinating folks, including Cynthia Settje of the costumes-and-corsetry business Redthreaded, and the heir apparent to the scholarly pattern history work of Janet Arnold, Jenny Tiramani. Lots of great conversations about subjects relevant to scholars of dress, theatrical costumers, fashion historians, reinactors/living history professionals, etc.

Another topical podcast of potential interest to my readership is Unravel: A Fashion Podcast. In their own words, "Unravel podcast was started by fashion scholar Jasmine Helm and textile conservator Dana Goodin in 2015 as a means to fill a gap in the canon and lexicon of fashion. We want to educate the public about the importance of fashion in history and daily life, inspire conversation and discussion within our digital platforms. With these concepts in mind Helm and Goodin brought on fashion and history scholar Joy Davis. Unravel continues create more accessible content for listeners and readers." This podcast fluctuates between short features ("Fashion in Focus") which address the nature and origin of an article of clothing (The Ruff, The Sandal, etc.) and longer episodes involving discussion about prescient issues like decolonization of fashion history or the semiotics of prison uniforms throughout history. They seem to be connected to the Costume Society of America, which is a professional organization for scholars of the history of dress and adornment.

Historical Sewing is a podcast for primarily historical reenactors. This one had some recording quality issues with the most recent episode, with weird glitches throughout. I'm least enamored with this one, because unlike the other podcasts I've checked out which feature group discussions or topical interviews/conversations, this seems to just be the host talking extemporaneously about a given topic in more of a lecture format. It also seems aimed at more of a beginner/hobby level, which is great for those listeners, but for the readership of this blog, you may find it remedial. Alternately, you may wish to recommend it to students or new employees working at the entry level as a means of learning about a range of sewing tools, details on threads for hand sewing, and so forth.

What are you listening to these days?

Irrelevant image:

Parasols on display for my master class session 

at the USITT-Southeast conference this fall