Ben Franklin: Fashion Icon

**This transcript comes from a previous broadcast. There may be small changes between the audio you hear above and the text.**

PETER: We’re back with BackStory, the show that looks to the past to understand the America of today. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balough.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Today on the show we’re exploring the role of fashion in American history.

PETER: As we do with each of our shows, we’ve been inviting your feedback on today’s topic on a website. A listener named Cash left us a note and we decided to give him a call. Cash welcome to the show.

CASH: Thanks. It’s great to get to talk to you guys today.

PETER: Yeah, what do have for us?

CASH: Well I was having a discussion with some folks the other day at work about fashion and we had talked about Ben Franklin’s fur hats that he wore while he was serving as an envoy to France during the American Revolution. He was painted with them and the French just really came to associate Franklin with these fur hats as a symbol of America. Were there any earlier examples of American fashion being exported back to Europe instead of us just importing everything?

PETER: No. In fact I would question that was an American fashion, because who made it fashionable? It was the French, who got all excited about this Quaker– supposed Quaker, of course he was a phony Quaker– wearing this funny hat. He found it was fashionable and then he had a lot of them made, and that was his look.

ED: Peter, Peter Peter. That’s so cynical man. So let me ask this, why would this fake Quaker show up in Paris with a beaver on his head, if he did that think that there was some purpose behind it?

PETER: Well he was Mr. Natural. And nature used to be a bad thing. That is nature’s associated with the wilderness, which is a terrible, howling, place, barbarism, savages. But there was a cult of the natural in the enlightenment and that people like Franklin could exploit it. And that is getting close to nature, being authentic, understanding nature’s laws, and being at one with nature. That was a cool thing, and that’s what Franklin knew he was exploiting. That is, the only comparative advantage you could have coming from nowhere in the new world, was that you were closer to nature.

BRIAN: Hey Peter I have a question.

PETER: Yeah.

BRIAN: It seems to me that fashion is also about difference. Right. If we all dress the same, I can’t imagine calling that fashionable.

ED: It would one giant college.

BRIAN: Exactly. Wasn’t Franklin, really a difference maker, showing up there in Paris. Might that not be the basis for a new fashion trend.

PETER: Oh Yeah. I think that’s a good point Brian. His very presence in Paris showed that the world was changing in a fundamental way. Remember the French had recently lost much of North America to the British in the Seven Years’ War. And here, all of a sudden it looks like the British empire is going to fall apart, so the monstrous empire that overthrew the French and North America was now on its back heels and these backwoods people we’re showing them a good fight in the revolution. So, I think he brought a lot of cred with him to Paris, and I think that’s right, there’s an aura about him because he is American. He didn’t have to do anything.

BRIAN: Right. Just different.

PETER: Just be different.

CASH: Yes. And also, it was really part of Franklin’s political savvy. That when he goes to France, he adopts this character. He creates this persona of the wildness of America. When the whole life of he and his contemporaries in the colonies had been to try to tame the wilderness, to try to bring their style of civilization to the new world.

BRIAN: So speaking of wearing animals on top of our heads, Ed, I want to know when people started wearing raccoons on top of their heads.

ED: Well the American Indians had done it for a long time and this is kind of parallel to the story Peter was telling. In the same way that the ultra fashionable French people were taken with wearing at least pretend beavers on their heads– the women styled their hair so it had the same kind of shape– so did the American frontiersman, the white guys, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, adapt from the Indians the idea of using the entire animal skin, complete with the tail, but taking Franklin one step further I think, of the raccoon. And so, much in the same way that Franklin showing up in Paris in the 18th century, these guys who, one ends up being a congressman, shows up in Washington with a raccoon on his head, and it becomes distinguishing for him for the same reason.

BRIAN: So could we tease out a theme here? Because, honestly when I think about the 20th century, I think about blue jeans, which come out of the West. I think about cowboy boots. These are all things in America exported to the world. Is that what America has to add to fashion for at least 200 or 300 years? Our kind of frontier stylings.

PETER: Yeah, I think that’s right Brian. Think of the ways in which American vernacular music, jazz, blues, what we now call folk, all this stuff represents the opposite of high culture.

ED: That’s right and if you think about the other fashions we’ve exported, even after blue jeans and black leather jackets, it became sports wear. Right. I remember when I first went to Europe and people were friendly to me and said Ed, we can always tell Americans because they’re wearing athletic shoes all the time. So America really has nothing other than informality to sell.

PETER: Hey thanks for calling Cash.

CASH: Absolutely. It was great getting to talk with you guys.

ED: Thanks very much Cash. Bye.

[MUSIC PLAYING] I know that I’m looking fine now in my beaver hat. That’s cause Damon shaped those beaver–