Dress, the history of fashion, is a production of IHeart Radio. With over 7 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common.

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Welcome to Dressed The History of Fashion, a podcast that explores the who what went of why we wear we are

fashion historians and your host Cassidy Zachary and April Kelly so cast first thing the very first thing that comes to your mind when I ask you this question,

oldest fashion brand in the US. Go.

Hmm, that's actually a very good question and makes me wonder.

I mean, I guess if I would have to guess off the top of my head,

I would say something like Levi Strauss.

Close, but not quite.

It's actually Brooks Brothers and I think that we have may have like

very very briefly mentioned this on the show in the past but Brooks Brothers

is actually the oldest continuously operating

fashion brand in the United States and actually has more than 200 years of

company history behind it.

So there's bound to be maybe a couple skeletons in the closet

when your brand has been around that long.

And today we're actually joined by Dr Jonathan Michael Square

to discuss some of his really intriguing object-based research that hits at this

intersection of fashion history and the history of slavery within the United States.

Dr Square is a scholar of fashion and visual culture of the African diaspora at Harvard University where his work examines the ways

quote dress and a dormant served as a form of radical self-determination.

When enslaved peoples did not have direct access to revolutionary quote unquote text they often used textiles

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