Sarcurious

Put the same little check on Dorothy in Kansas, Brigitte Bardot at her wedding, and a supermodel on an Alaïa runway, and it tells three very different stories. We start with gingham’s disputed name and its unexpected beginnings as a stripe, then follow the fabric from the Asian cotton trade and Manchester mills to kitchens, children’s wardrobes, and the legend of Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie’s...

Put a three-stripe jacket on a Soviet Olympian in Moscow and a rapper onstage in Queens, and somehow the same garment looks right at home on both. We start with Le Coq Sportif's 1939 "Sunday suit" and the Dassler brothers, whose grudge split one Bavarian town into Adidas and Puma, then follow the tracksuit from Franz Beckenbauer's 1967 warm-up suit and the Firebird to Bob Marley in head-to-toe Adi...

Almost everything you think you know about the fisherman's sweater was invented. We open on the Aran Islands with the myth of a drowned fisherman identified by his family's secret stitch pattern, then trace it to a 1904 play, a book of "sacred" stitch meanings that historians consider fabricated, and a cottage industry built to bring money to some of Ireland's poorest islands. Along the way, we me...

The signet ring’s story begins before written human history. Long before signatures, a small engraved stone pressed into clay or wax was your ID, your legal authority, and your lucky charm…a proxy so powerful that a seal outliving its owner could be dangerous. In this episode, we trace that object from seventh-millennium-BC seals and Mesopotamian cylinder seals, through Egyptian scarabs to the Min...

For our first-ever guest episode, we’re joined by Alexa Alper, cofounder of Alps Vintage, a Chicago-based vintage business she runs with her sister, Nikki. What began with thrifting, estate-sale treasure hunting, and selling finds online became a full-time business centered on vintage watches, jewelry, accessories, and the thrill of finding pieces with real personality. Alexa takes us inside the w...

Aviator sunglasses have spent almost a century doing double duty: protecting pilots' eyes and building an entire narrative around masculinity, power, and fashion. In this episode, we trace the shape from open-cockpit flying goggles to American Optical's 1935 D-1, through the mid-air accident that gave Bausch & Lomb the original teardrop shape and green lens, to the moment the US military offic...

What Westerners now call paisley print traces all the way back from a sacred Persian motif to a print now associated with 1960s Flower Power and the 2010’s brightly colored lunch boxes. We dig into the motif's roots in ancient Persia and Kashmir, how it got wrapped up with the East India Company and popularized in Europe, why the West named it after a Scottish town, and how it went from a status s...

Espadrilles have (quietly?) walked through six thousand years of history. What was originally viewed as a peasant shoe became a staple in the late Golden Age of Hollywood’s dressing, luxury resort wear, and many fashion houses’ resort collections. In this episode, we trace the espadrille from the Cueva de los Murciélagos and a 1322 medieval Catalan municipal ordinance through regional Spanish craf...

Lace collars have framed power, piety, and poetic drama for centuries…and they’re still quietly running the show today. In this episode, we trace how tiny stitches of linen thread became status-defining ruffs, falling collars, cravats, and jabots, then follow lace into industrialization and the modern day. We talk Wuthering Heights and method dressing, Pinterest’s love affair with Poet Core, Flore...

Pleats don’t just create movement; sometimes they give a garment its structure. In this second and final pleats episode, we continue our deep dive from “Pleats to Plissé,” moving from pleats as a surface texture into the world of structured pleats that physically build a garment's silhouette. We follow knife, box, and cartridge pleats through time: from ancient Egypt’s Tarkhan dress to Korean Hanb...

Pleats are one of the oldest trick in fashion's book; we're talking 5,000 years old, and they're still one of the most technically demanding things a garment can do. We're kicking things off with Pleats to Plissé: the first of two pleat episodes focused on pleats as surface texture — the kind that move, shimmer, and feel almost alive on the body. Timestamps: 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:56.2 Gals Catch Up...

Welcome to the first episode of Sarcurious, the fashion podcast that hopes to get you curious about your wardrobe. In our intro episode, we catch up a bit, share how we met, how our friendship grew through the stories we helped others tell, and how that eventually led to talking about the stories we tell through our clothes.  You’ll hear a bit about what pulls us toward fashion and its storytellin...