Beautiful For Ever!: The Extraordinary Life and Trial of Madame Rachel (Dressed Classic)

Dressed: The History of Fashion

Dressed Media

Society & Culture, Fashion & Beauty, History, Arts

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

Fashion history and true crime come together in this 2022 episode where we explore a scandal of the 1860s involving a British cosmetics maven who bilked her clients out of fortunes with the promise to halt the aging process and make them beautful forever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Dress listeners, Bonjour from Paris.
0:03.3	Yes, we are currently on our annual summer hiatus from the show as we conduct our summer fashion history tours of the City of Lights.
0:10.6	But worry not, we will be back with brand new content dedicated to all of the exciting fashion history exhibitions and other behind-the-scenes experiences we have encountered well here.
0:20.5	Until then, please enjoy this episode from the Dressed Archive of over 500 past shows. With over 7 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common.
0:48.8	Every day, we all get dressed.
0:51.0	Welcome to Dressed, the history of fashion, a podcast that explores the who, what,
0:55.1	win of why we wear. We are fashion historians and your host, Cassidy Zachary. And April
1:01.5	Callahan. Okay, get ready, dress listeners, because today we are about to go cross genre.
1:09.5	That is right. For some of you, today's episode might just combine
1:13.6	two of your favorite types of podcasts, and that is fashion history, of course, and April,
1:19.4	we are officially entering the true crime marketplace. Yep. April stumbled across this story.
1:28.9	We are about to share today, dress listeners,
1:30.9	and she just immediately started sending me text messages about how this may very well be the 1860s version of the recent Netflix.
1:40.1	Documentaries, Tender Swindlers, and then the docu series Bad a Vegan Vegan, which of course, if you're not familiar, are about con artists and how they extorted people for basically millions of dollars.
1:53.4	So the trial of Madame Rachel in London, 1868, was front page news at the time, and coverage of the scandal reached as far as New Zealand.
2:02.5	People were simply captivated.
2:04.8	But before we get to the infamous Madam Rachel, I'd actually like to share how I came across her story
2:10.6	because this connects back to a past episode of Dressed.
2:15.1	Some of you might recall in our episode with Ily's Carter entitled Red Menace,
2:19.2	how lipstick changed the face of American history.
2:22.2	She and I briefly chatted about this makeup practice known as enamelling.
2:26.7	It was somewhat of an odd phenomenon, and it was practiced in a very specific time period
	...

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