I'm Too Busy TV! - w/ guest Richard Thompson Ford - I'm Too Busy!

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to I'm Too Busy, an interview based show hosted
by a talented makeup artist, Christina Black. Christina offers viewers
a unique blend of personal stories, inspiring journeys, and practical
beauty tips. Join the conversation as Christina features successful individuals
from various industries who share their insights on health, wellness, makeup,

(00:25):
and the keys to their success.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
So now please.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Welcome the host of I'm Too Busy, Christina Flack.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Hello, and welcome to another episode of I'm Too Busy TV,
where we dive into the lives of aspiring entrepreneurs and
industry professionals who are making waves despite their pack schedules.
I am your host, Christina Flack, and today I am
so excited of a very special guest who's transforming our
understanding of law, race, and fashion through his groundbreaking skyship

(01:00):
and public engagement. Please join me in welcoming Richard Thompson Ford. Hello,
how are you.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
I'm doing great? How are you I'm fine?

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Thank you, Thank you for being here today. I'm very
honored you have accomplished so much in your life. It's
just incredible. So tell me your work spans academic scholarships
and public writing. What motivated you to bring these two
worlds together.

Speaker 3 (01:25):
Well, I had always been interested in reaching broad audiences
as well as specialized audiences, and so even early in
my career, I was interested in writing for opinion pieces
for the popular press. And I've also always been interested
in popular culture, and so it was just kind of

(01:49):
a natural fit to try to bring some of my
work on law and also in popular culture to a
popular audience.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
Did you always know you wanted to go in law, No.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
I didn't. Actually I only discovered my real interest for
law probably my junior year of college. I took a
few law school courses that were available to undergraduates and
really loved all of them, and at that point thought, well,
maybe this is a career for me, and the rest

(02:22):
just kind of followed naturally.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
So when you started, you know, you went to law
school and you got out, what was what was your
career looking like?

Speaker 4 (02:29):
Then?

Speaker 2 (02:29):
What did you do?

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Right after I got out of law school, I practiced
at a large San Francisco law firm for about two
years and did a variety of types of legal work,
mainly business litigation, but I also had an interest in entertainment. Law.
At one point I thought I might be, you know,
like a lawyer to the stars, or lawyer to musicians

(02:55):
that I admired, or something like that.

Speaker 5 (02:57):
But I got the opportunity then to explore my scholarly interest,
which had really been building throughout the time I was
in law school, and I got the chance to go
back to Harvard to do a fellowship that would allow
me to just write and research.

Speaker 3 (03:17):
And it didn't pay very much. It is a fraction
of what I was making as a lawyer. But the
idea that I could get paid anything to just pursue
my own writing was so attractive that I took it,
and I moved back to Cambridge, Massachusetts and worked on
what turned out to be my first law review article.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Wow, and how long were you there?

Speaker 3 (03:36):
So I was there for another two years, and the
whole time I spent researching and writing, kind of learning
how to be a scholar, talking to people at the
law school and at other departments, and you know, a
lot of time alone in a library. Back when people
used to you know, everything was on paper, and so

(03:58):
you had to go to the actual library and pick
up a book in order to get information.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
So what happened after that.

Speaker 3 (04:05):
So after that I went on the market to get
a teaching job, and when all over the country talking
to different law schools. It's funny. When I was first
asked by my mother, well, if you got your dream school,
what would it be, I said, Stanford. I went to

(04:26):
Stanford as an undergraduate. I love the Bay Area. If
I could get back to California and do this out
here at Stanford, it would be great. But my advisor said,
you know, if you were holding out for a job
at Stanford, we're going to tell you to go back
into private practice. The odds of that happening are not great.
It's a hard, you know, school to get, so you

(04:46):
could just be open. And as it's things turned out,
I did get that offer from Stanford, and I'd been
at Stanford ever since. I visited at other schools. But
this has been my home since the mid nineteen nineties.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Wow, And so how many classes are you teaching there presently?

Speaker 3 (05:05):
Right now? I teach three classes a year and one
class I teach to undergraduates. It's a seminar I call
Law and Inequality, and it explores the variety of ways
that law can help to fight inequalities and also some
ways that the law might make inequalities worse, but it's

(05:26):
for undergraduates. And then at the law school, I could
of rotate through a few courses. I teach constitutional law,
particularly focused on the fourteenth Amendment, which is the part
of the Constitution that deals most directly with questions of equality.
I teach an employment discrimination class. I teach a class

(05:46):
on modern legal thought, which is sort of a law
and philosophy class. And then sometimes I will teach other
classes as needed.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
That's so that must be so stimulating for you it
is to be engaging with these students. Still, do you
miss being in private practice?

Speaker 3 (06:06):
I occasionally miss the energy of preparing for a trial
and the kind of immediate effect that one can have
on people's lives through successful legal practice, you know, whether
it's helping broker a deal or it's being involved in

(06:27):
litigation and vindicating someone's rights. But I love being in academia.
You working with young students who are starting off on
their careers and you know, interested and open minded, as
well as being able to do research that I find
personally interesting and important. You know, it's a real privilege.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
Tell me a few stories of any of your students
you don't have to say their names that have just
been like memorable to you.

Speaker 3 (06:57):
Oh wow, there are quite a few one of my
students who you know, when you get a student at
the beginning of their career, they're exploring and they're grappling
with issues. And I had I can think of more

(07:17):
than one, but one in particulars coming to mind, who
you know, was just trying to figure out where she
wanted to take her interests and is now a law
professor at one of the top law schools in the
United States. Uh, and is doing work that you know,

(07:37):
I couldn't have imagined for myself, much less for one
of my students, transforming the world in important ways. I
have several students that are doing things in government, in
academia and in private practice that really are remarkable. And

(07:57):
you know, so I feel some small amount of pride
that I had a little bit of influence perhaps over
what they've ultimately achieved.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
You've clearly inspired them. That must be so gratifying.

Speaker 3 (08:10):
It is. I mean, it's really it's gratifying to teach
students and see them learn. It's one of the real
privileges of the job is to see that kind of
light bulb go on over someone's head while you're describing something.
I mean, just a couple days ago, I was in
my office with a student and I had been explaining
some concept in class that I felt was fairly you

(08:32):
know mundane, And you know, he came into my office
and said, you just blew my mind when you said that.
You know, you put together these things that I've been
trying to figure out. And you know, I thought, well,
that's you know, that's worth everything to think that you
could take someone who's struggling with a set of issues
and help them to move their thinking to the next

(08:55):
level or.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
Get some clarity that they didn't have.

Speaker 3 (08:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
So your latest book, dress Codes, explores the intersection of
fashion and law. What sparked your interest in this particular subject, Well.

Speaker 3 (09:10):
There are two reasons, once professional and one's personal. Professional
reason is that there are a lot of disputes involved
in clothing and grooming codes and dress codes in American law.
There are workplace stress codes that are challenged by employees

(09:30):
as either a form of race discrimination, a form of
sex discrimination, the type of religious intolerance. There dress codes
in high school that are challenged by students as a
restriction on their rights to free speech, or is just
plain uptight. There's widely wide disparities in enforcement in high

(09:54):
school dress codes. Most of it's directed to girls, and
that raises equal issues. And one of the things I
found in reading the legal literature and the case law
was that when the case when the courts would address
some of these disputes, they did so in a way
that I always found unsatisfying.

Speaker 6 (10:16):
It seemed as, yeah, well, it seems as if the
typical approach was to say, fashion address are trivial and
for the most part would be beneath the attention of
the law.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
But perhaps they've touched on some important value like race
or sex discrimination or First Amendment concerns. But by beginning
the analysis by saying that what the people were arguing
about is basically trivial, it seemed to me that they
missed a lot of the point of these disputes, and

(10:52):
so in many ways the analyzes were somewhat unsatisfying, and
I think sometimes the courts missed a lot of what
was important and sometimes came to the wrong conclusions. So
I wanted to look at why clothing and fashion is
important to people so much so that they would sue

(11:12):
about it, that employees would risk losing a job, that
employers would risk losing a good employee, that people would
lose time at school, and that schools would send students
home that they had an obligation to teach over what
they were wearing. So that was the professional reason. Personal

(11:34):
reason is that I've always been kind of interested in fashion.
It's been a way for me to, you know, not
only express myself, but kind of navigate the world and
deal with sometimes new or difficult social environments. That you know,
clothing seemed important to me. I think I learned that

(11:56):
from my father, who was the first African American in
many circumstances that he found himself in in his professional career,
and he always took great pride in his appearance in
his dress, and it was clear that he thought it
was important more than just as a matter of vanity,
but as a matter of dignity. And that stuck with me.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
And what does your father do?

Speaker 3 (12:24):
Well, he's he's no longer with us, but he used
to be the dean of the School of Health and
Social Work at cal State Fresno, WOW, and he was
the first black administrator at that school. And we moved
from New York to California for that job, and he
held that position for many years.

Speaker 2 (12:45):
That's incredible. I personally feel like with dress. I mean,
and you know, I'm a makeup artist in my other
world besides doing this, but I always feel that it's
you should always try and look your personal best, you know,
regardless of this situation. I just think it's less distracting
when you feel that you look and are dressed appropriately

(13:08):
because you can just focus on what we're discussing right now,
other than oh my god, do I my eyes? Is
my shirt? Like? Am I in pajamas? And I also
do think it is a form of respect to you
that I come, you know, to meeting with you or
whomever looking like the best version of myself. I mean,
don't you think that's important? Because I know in the

(13:29):
tech world, you know, there's CEOs that wear t shirts
and flip flops, and that set the tone for the
industry that you know, women wearing I'm quoting you here.
Women wearing fashionable dresses or high heels faced ridicule in
the tech world, and some venture capitalists refuse to invest
in a company run by someone wearing a suit. Do
you find that really true.

Speaker 3 (13:49):
Yes, yes, there was a quote from the entrepreneur Peter Thial,
who's kind of famous now as a conservative political activist
as well, but you know, he was a big deal
in the tech world and once said, never invest in
a company where the CEO wears a suit. When Marissa Mayor,

(14:09):
who was the CEO of Yahoo, appeared in a Vogue
fashion spread, she was ridiculed, and one person said, and
I think this kind of encapsulates the attitude. She looks
like she's on vacation or going to a party while
everyone else is working. So her fashionable clothing was seen
as distracting from her work ethic. Almost that, you know,

(14:34):
demonstrated that she was superficial and you know, everyone else
is working while she's not worried about what she's going
to wear.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
But I mean, don't you find that discriminatory as well?
I mean, I mean I find that offensive, you know,
because I do work in the fashion world as well,
and it's like, why is someone making that presumption that
because someone dress as well, that they have a poor
work ethic. I mean, if you would look at it
from a different perspective, someone wearing a T shirt and
flip flops would look like they're on holiday, right, Yes.

Speaker 3 (15:02):
No, absolutely. That's what's so ironic about it that this
dressed down aesthetic has come to symbolize the work ethic
in Silicon Valley. So, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg wants to
get to the reason I wear a great T shirt.
I'm paraphrasing, but the reason I wear a great T
shirt is because if I wasted time on trivial things

(15:22):
like what to wear, I wouldn't be doing my job
to make Facebook the best company it can be. And
so right there, now, the T shirt's not a matter
of indifference. You know, he didn't say, who cares what
I'm wearing. What's important is the quality of my work. Instead,
the T shirt became a symbol of the work ethic,
and so it's just a new dress code in a

(15:43):
different form. But I do think that it has implications
for gender equality, because that kind of dressed down aesthetic
really works best for men and women I think struggle
with that. So on the one hand, if they dress
up too much, they're going to be ridiculed as vein
and superficial. But if they don't, I don't think they're

(16:05):
going to get the same benefit. Of the doubt that
a man does wearing a T shirt and flipflops.

Speaker 2 (16:10):
Completely agree. On a separate note, I was hired by
Fox to do the grooming for Mark Zuckerberg, Dana Perino,
and Tucker Carlson, and he declined my services, and I'm like,
I'm getting paid, Okay, you're not. So for me, it
was kind of We're like, I'm hired to do my
job and you're declining even though I'm just going to

(16:32):
make you look a little bit better. I found that
kind of offensive.

Speaker 3 (16:37):
Actually, yeah, And it's kind of it's really surprising as well,
because the way you look on the camera is very
different than the way you look in person. You know,
when I first had my big TV my first TV
appearance where I was actually in front of like lots
of lights and cameras, and they had someone come in
to make me up and said, a lot of people

(16:57):
look washed out on camera, and I said, well, I
don't think that's going to be my problem. But she's
a trust me, you know, and for sure, like in
the absence of that, you know, every tiny imperfection shows up,
every wrinkle, every weird thing. It's a real skill that
you have.

Speaker 2 (17:16):
Really well. And it's also when you're doing the grooming
for a man on TV, a good groomer and I
consider myself one you no one would even know you
have anything on you like a little bit fresher and
not shiny, and just a better version of you. So,
speaking of your television appearances, you've appeared on The Colbert Repair.

(17:38):
How do you translate complex legal concepts for broader audiences.

Speaker 3 (17:43):
Yeah, that is a challenge, and it's one of the
things that I've spent a lot of time thinking about.
You know, The Colbert Report was the first big television
show I was on, and I was just as nervous
as you could possibly be. But I'd gotten a lot
of advice from people who had either watched it or
been on the show about when you have one keeping

(18:04):
your answers short, having that kind of elevator pitch statement
of your idea. That's hard for academics to do. You know,
we're used to having a captive audience for an hour
where you know, we can go on and on. No,
you need to have something very short so that people
don't turn off the television. And so that's one thing
I found. Telling stories is a great way to translate

(18:30):
complicated ideas to a general audience. And if I can
find a good story that illustrates my point, then I
don't have to spend very much time explaining in an
abstract terms that start to become boring.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
So you've been on you were also a featured TED
Talk speaker, and you've appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show,
and you've been a former host on Sirius x sem
Stanford Legal. Tell me about that. Did you enjoy that
and did you find that to be something that came
naturally or did you kind of have to learn how to,

(19:06):
you know, speak to people in a different way. I mean,
you mentioned earlier that you have to be a little
more concise with your answers. But what else you learn about,
you know, being on these shows? Oh yeah, maybe how
you teach your courses.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
Oh actually, yes, I think it has affected the way
I teach my courses. And the TED in particular puts
you through a very rigorous training before you give the
TED talk. And so what's interesting is that these TED
talks look like they're someone just having a conversation, but

(19:41):
in fact they're really really, really well rehearsed. They're really
well thought out down to you know, the seconds of time, Like,
you know your talk is going to be nine minutes
and thirty two seconds, and here's how you're going to
make these transitions. And so it taught me a lot
about precision and that way small differences can make the

(20:03):
difference between, you know, keeping your audience and losing their attention.
They were great at coaching me on how to pack
a complicated set of ideas and do a very short
period of time. So you know, they're like, you've got
ten minutes no more. How do you get your point
across in ten minutes? So that was a great experience.

(20:26):
You know, it's a little different on a podcast like
Stanford Legal, where we have a bit more time, but
a lot of the same things. Apply a lot about
trying to be more concise and find ways to tell
a compelling story that will grab read or listeners attention

(20:46):
right away. So yeah, I think I have brought that
to the classroom in a variety of ways. I'd like
to think that my lecturing style and my teaching style
is more engaging as a result.

Speaker 2 (20:57):
Oh I'm sure it's done nothing but help, But I'm
sure you were amazing. Regardless you've written extensively about race
and the law. How has your perspective evolved throughout your career?

Speaker 3 (21:09):
Well, in a few ways. I My earliest work about
race and the law was designed to get at how
things that we overlook can cause racial inequalities. So rather
than looking at the you know, stereotypical bigot who's deliberately
trying to keep people of color down or something like that,

(21:30):
I wanted to look at the way things like local
government boundaries, things like the way government operates differently in
different neighborhoods, can reproduce racial inequalities. And I guess that
work got me thinking more about how questions of race

(21:53):
discrimination are often not simple. We like to tell, you know,
a simple story of racist who is a morally evil
person and deserves condemnation, and you know those people are
out there. Don't get me wrong, but a lot of
what we're experiencing now doesn't involve that. It involves people
who are you know, decent, people whose activities are just

(22:20):
thoughtless with respect to questions of social equality, and or
people who are in tough circumstances and are perpetuating racial
equality because they're you know, really busy trying to focus
on something else that's all so important. So they're trade offs,
and I guess that's the way that it's has affected

(22:41):
my thinking about it, is to see these things as
more complicated and a little less black and white, if
you will, then I may have thought at one time, can.

Speaker 2 (22:54):
You tell me a little about the research process behind
dress codes and what surprised you along the way. And
I love this quote from your book, one can make
a gentleman from two yards of red cloth?

Speaker 3 (23:05):
Yes, right, causemode Metici, the great patriarch of Florence during
the Renaissance, said this, and it reflected the idea and
an anxiety that people were dressing above their station, and
that in a society where a lot was communicated visually,

(23:28):
the ability to look like an aristocrat, to look like
a gentleman often was all there was to it, and
so there was a worry about changing social hierarchy and
the power of fashion to affect those social hierarchies. You
were asking about the research process, and I mean, it's

(23:48):
the most fun I've had doing any writing project. But
I spent a lot of time digging through history articles
and books and going into archives trying to find examples
of legal rules around clothing, because I thought, well, I'm

(24:09):
a lawyer, and the way I can get at this
is by looking at what laws were in place at
the time. And I guess what surprised me is how
many of them there were. I'm expected to find a few.
But there were a vast number of rules and regulations
from the late Middle Ages through about the early sixteen
hundreds about dress, regulating it in great detail. And so

(24:34):
this was not a small thing. It wasn't an isolated thing.
It was something where you know, in a single year
there could be two, three, four acts of apparel that
were attempting to regulate clothing. There were law enforcement campaigns
that involved people with lists of citizens or subjects at
that time they wouldn't have been citizens according to their

(24:57):
social rank, to make sure that no one was where
clothing that was above their station, you know, elaborate enforcement.
It was quite surprising to me and really fascinating.

Speaker 2 (25:09):
This is so interesting. I have never thought about this
from this perspective at all, And to go back in
time in history to think that this was such a
such an issue is really remarkable to me. How far
back did you go historically?

Speaker 3 (25:25):
Well, so the book really begins in the Late Little Ages,
and that's a moment I talk tiny bit about the
ancient world, but only in order to contrast this moment
in the Late Little Ages thirteen hundreds that some historians
described as the birth of fashion, and that's when clothing
really begins to get varied and expressive. You get tailoring

(25:50):
techniques that create like bold shapes, big collars with big roughs,
or puffy sleeves or puffy trousers, you know, things that
really become uh uh, you know, an art form, and
that leads fashion to become a new kind of status symbol,

(26:13):
but also a new way of exercising political power. And
so you know Queen Elizabeth, for instance, a lot of
her clothing was designed to convey royal authority. People said
that she almost looked otherworldly, and that was by a design,
and it was an important part of the way she

(26:35):
exercised power and asserted her right to rule. So that's
you know, that that that birth of fashion is a
way of conveying that kind of meaning that we're really
familiar with today but wasn't always true. That's where I
started and then kind of and that's right when these
laws started as well, beginning to regulate what people could

(26:56):
wear according to their social rank. And then I moved
forward into the press.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
So could you tell me? And I don't know if
this is what you can quote me on here, but
what was like the first law? Like who went to
somewhere and decided we're going to make a law about
fashion and about what people are wearing in their rank
and where they are in the world. I can't even
imagine that happening.

Speaker 3 (27:20):
Yes, so this started. I think one of the first
ones was sometimes that actually in the late.

Speaker 2 (27:26):
Twelve hundreds, really.

Speaker 3 (27:30):
But they really got going in the thirteen hundreds and
kind of kept accelerating all the way through the fifteen hundreds.
And the first laws were designed to control consumption, and
in particular, conspicuous consumption. According to Well, So, you had

(27:53):
concerns that people were buying things they couldn't afford. You
had concerns that people were foreign products that were going
to contribute to a negative trade balance for various regimes.
But most of all, you had the concern that people
were dressing above their station, putting on airs, taking on

(28:14):
the pretense to be of a higher social rank and
importance than they really were. According to the hierarchies at
the time, and it became really clear that that was
the biggest concern. That these kind of things coincided with
economic booms where skilled trades people and merchants were making

(28:38):
a lot of money. So now suddenly they could afford
fancying luxurious clothing. And they looked around at their riskocrats
and said, well, if it's good for them, maybe it's
good for us as well. But they were kind of
a new social class that was asserting itself, kind of
flexing their muscles. Not so much that they wanted to
pass themselves off as aristocrats, but maybe what was more

(29:00):
subverse it to say, we're just as important as aristocrats,
we deserve this fine clothing as well. And I think
that was really threatening.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
It's so funny. It seems like the government was very involved. Yes,
and that's really surprising to me.

Speaker 3 (29:20):
Yes, the government was very involved. Some of these laws
involved the church and were regulations on modesty, so those
were that those were often directed premierily at women, although
not always, but a requirement that people behaved modestly and
therefore not adorned themselves with vanities. But a lot of

(29:44):
them were from royal courts. I mean again. Henry the
Eighth and then even more so, Queen Elizabeth the First
in England passed a lot of acts of apparel or proclamations.
Parliament past acts of apparel and were involved with the
concern that people were acting above their rank and it

(30:10):
was confusing to the general population and threatened to overturn
the appropriate established order. These arguments were made openly. So
one of the things that was great for me is
a scholar, about reading about these early laws is that
people were quite upfront about the fact that we have
a hierarchy. It needs to be maintained. It's not acceptable

(30:32):
for people of lower orders to dress in the way
that's appropriate for people of higher orders. We don't say
that anymore today, even though we sometimes act like it,
But back then they were perfectly fine with seeing it.

Speaker 2 (30:44):
So what would happen if someone was convicted of such
a crime back then? Like, what were the what would happen.

Speaker 3 (30:51):
The penalties one person? One of the main penalties that
you see is that they have the offending clothing seized
by the government, So you're not supposed to have that.
We're going to take it. Public humiliation was a common penalty.
One person for instance, was arrested on the streets of
London for wearing what the authorities described as a monstrous

(31:14):
and outrageous pair of trunk hose. And trunk hohs are
these big puffy trousers that you might associate with, you know,
Sir Walter Raleigh or William Shakespeare. They were big min's
fashion and they could get very big and puffed up,
and that was the fashion for the elite. So this person,
who was a tailor or, the taylor's apprentice, had these

(31:37):
trunk hose and was arrested and the linings of his
trunk hose were torn out by the yet yeah ripped
out while he was wearing them, and then he was
marched through the streets of London with the lining trailing
behind him for all to see, back to his place
of residence, where the constables searched and found other offending

(32:01):
garments that were likewise torn in front of him. So
that was one example. Another person had his offending garment
seized and then posted in a public place as an
example for everyone of his extreme folly. And then there
were also monetary fines.

Speaker 5 (32:22):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (32:22):
So between the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has changed
these laws or what like, what was different in those
previous centuries.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
Yeah, the laws kind of fell out of favor around
the sixteen hundreds, and by the seventeen hundreds most had
either been repealed or simply were no longer enforced. Part
of the reason this happened was that as fashion continued
to mature and in advanced it became harder and harder

(32:55):
for authorities to list the things that would convey high status.
And fashion is just changing too quickly, you know. In fact,
at one point in the late fifteen hundreds, the Venetian
Senate passed a law that simply said, all new fashions
are hereby banned, because they clearly had been raising to
catch up with the latest fashion, and now we have
to ban this. Now we have to regulate that. So

(33:18):
they just let's put an end to all this. But
of course that didn't work, and so status started to change.
It started to change from something that was conveyed through
flashy and ostentatious display to something that was conveyed through subtleties.
So by the time of let's say Bo Brummel in

(33:41):
the early eighteen hundreds in England Regency era England, he's
the avatar of masculine vanity, but he was known for
his understatedness that he didn't wear flashy clothing. Everything was
subtle and subdued, but all of the details had to
be perfect. And so this new way of exhibiting fashion

(34:02):
was something that didn't require the same type of overt
regulation but served some of the same functions. And you
can read in periods of the time the kind of
handbooks that will advise about all the variety of details
that the well dressed gentleman or the fashionable lady would wear.

(34:22):
And it gets quite elaborate. You wear this in the afternoon,
and this for tea, and this in the evening, and
you have to have five different outfits, but they have
to be of the appropriate cloth and cut and everything else.
So it was about know how rather than about just money.

Speaker 2 (34:37):
Did you find most of these laws applied more to
men or women?

Speaker 3 (34:42):
Well, the early laws applied to both men and women,
although it was really men who had the most fashionable
clothing up until sometime like the late seventeen hundreds. You know,
all of the new innovations were masculine, and women borrowed them.
All of the sexiest fashions were masculine. Women, for instance,

(35:04):
were all required to be draped to blow the waist,
whereas men had you know, stockings that showed off their
legs and things like that, and it was understood to
be very sexy. But that changed in the seventeen hundreds
and then it was women who were fashionable and men
were just well dressed. And so you had this stark

(35:24):
shift in the way people thought about fashion. No, it
doesn't mean that men didn't care about the way they looked,
but they didn't want to be seen as fashionable fashionable anymore.
That was frivolous. Now we're just well dressed. And so
the rules then started to apply more to women as well.

(35:44):
The women needed to have five different outfits during the day,
you know, if they were wealthy, of course, and lots
of elaborate things. But for men the rules were often
unstated but very important. Importance of a suit that's well cut,
that fits properly, that's of the right refined fabric, you know,

(36:07):
those things became extremely important and anyone who knew would
be able to tell the difference between you know, the
well dressed gentleman in a well fitted suit and the
you know, upstart or the wanna bee wearing a poorly
fitted suit or wearing the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Speaker 2 (36:26):
So was color ever a factor in the fabric?

Speaker 3 (36:30):
Yes, the color at the time when men started to
kind of renounce the flashier fashions, and some one historian
described this as the great masculine renunciation. Men cast off
all of that. The colors became much more subdued, and so,

(36:53):
you know, first it was gray's and beige type colors,
subdued but still somewhat colorful, perhaps with a colorful waistcoat.
Over time this matured into the black brook brother Brooks
Brothers style business suit, and the typical man was wearing

(37:15):
this very somber outfit that kind of conveyed practicality and
civic virtue and a lack of vanity. So there's kind
of a direct line between that shift to dark colors
and to you know, Mark Zuckerberg's gray T shirt, the
same message as being conveyed, I have better things to

(37:35):
think about than what I wear.

Speaker 2 (37:38):
So what about in the last one hundred years, has
any of these issues legal from a legal perspective, arose arisen?

Speaker 3 (37:48):
Yes, there are still a variety of ways in which
fashion in law intersect. In the early twentieth century, for instance,
it was still unlawful many American and European cities for
women to wear pants that was considered to be indecent.
Yet early twentieth century there were lots of workplace dress

(38:13):
codes prohibiting women from, for instance, showing their legs or
showing their ankles. When the flapper fashions began to become
popular in the nineteen twenties, one of the things that
was most scandalous about them was that the skirts were
for that period of time short, in the sense that
they were just below the knee, so that the entire

(38:33):
leg could be showing, and that was seen as a
huge scandal. In a provocation, the outfits were form fitting
rather than big draped skirts, and that again was seen
as quite provocative. Some condemned it is not feminine enough,
some as too sexy. But either way, people didn't like it,
and employers passed rules prohibiting women from wearing these kind

(38:57):
of right, your question was whether we've had any of
these rules about clothing in the twentieth century. So, yeah,
where where should I pick it up? Go right there?

Speaker 2 (39:15):
Just start right there if you want to say that again.

Speaker 3 (39:17):
Okay, so we do still have rules about clothing even
in the twentieth century. For example, in the early twentieth century,
women could be arrested in some American and European cities
for wearing pants and not tight pants or see through

(39:38):
trousers or anything, but just regular men's clothing was seen
as a real provocation. Clothing that showed a woman's legs
was considered quite scandalous, and employers, for instance, passed laws
against what were described as flapper fashions, which included the

(40:00):
the newly for the time short skirts. They were still
cut below the knee, but that showed the women's legs,
and that was a new thing and on considered to
be quite provocative women. Of course, many women liked these fashions,
and the fashions managed to proliferate despite these rules. But

(40:22):
there was a long period of time in which people
suggested that women wearing flap or fashions should be subject
to arrest for a decent exposure, that they were inviting
sexual assaults and therefore had no cause to complain if
they were assaulted given that they were dressed like this.
You know, all kinds of ideas and of course, again
employers that outlawed the fashions and scandalous and then you know,

(40:47):
as you moved through the twentieth century, public and decency
laws were used for people who cross dressed. So you know,
one of the first examples.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
Was all that if that was absolute in historic history.

Speaker 3 (41:04):
Yes, yes, so, I mean one of the earlier examples
where women wearing trousers was considered, you know, kind of
a form of crossdressing that was a masculine style, and
it was seen as sexually provocative. You know, if you
think of like Marlena Datrich in Morocco with the tuxedo,
you know, that's our sexy thing, and that's the way
people looked at women wearing pants at that period of time,

(41:27):
because that suggested the woman was going to assert the
social prerogatives of men, and that, you know, meant a
certain sexual openness that women weren't expected to exhibit lack
of modesty. But crossdressing then, you know, later, of course,

(41:47):
involved more concern about men dressing in women's clothing and
laws prohibiting cross dressing, usually under the rubric of indecent exposure.
Republican decency continued in the United States through the nineteen seventies,
they yes through the people. In fact, there was some

(42:11):
litigation around these laws in the nineteen seventies where they
were eventually challenged as interestingly unconstitutionally vague. So the reason
that they were objectionable is because they were too vague.
One court said, we don't know, given the change in fashions,

(42:31):
how do we know what's a masculine fashion and what's
a feminine one. You know, men were wearing, you know,
kind of the romantic look with the ruffled shirts and
things like that, and so the court said, well, how
is that a woman's blouse and subjects for you to
arrest for in decency? Or is that a man's fashion?
We can't tell, So this law is too vague to

(42:51):
be enforced. And they kind of then fell into were
either validated or just no longer enforced. But that was
quite recent, even as recently as the early twenty first century,
and maybe even today, their laws about that have been

(43:13):
used about sagging pants, you know, the kind of hip
hop style, and again prosecuted as public in decency, you're
showing your undergarments. That's the official reason for arresting people.
One person wearing sagging pants was actually thrown in jail
for contempt of court because you know, the judge found

(43:36):
it contemptuous that someone would come into his courtroom wearing
stagging pants. So we still have some of these those.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
In decent like almost like in decent exposure or how
yes one determined.

Speaker 3 (43:49):
Yes, Well that's just the claims that it's in decent
exposure because you're wearing these pants that show your underwear.
You know, I think realistically the objections had more to
do with the African American subculture that that style is
associated with. But a lot of people felt that it

(44:09):
conveyed a lack of respect. And you know, it's worth
noting there were many African Americans who objected to the
sagging pants too. There was a whole group of almost
a little movement in the early two thousands that was
kind of called pull up your pants, get a belt,

(44:30):
buy a belt people. And these were sometimes you know,
African American churches, African American leaders saying hey, you know,
pull up your pants, show some respect. So that dovetailed
with the enforcement the legal enforcement with some of these
publican decency laws to date.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
So is there anything in the last fifty years of
any laws or any legal cases that one would say
have affected fashion, or that someone's getting persecuted or something
not persecuted, but you know getting and having an issue
with the law because of clothes.

Speaker 3 (45:08):
Well, yes, I mean other than the sagging pants cases
which were recent, all braided hairstyles were a subject of
legal disputes since way back in the nineteen seventies. There
was a woman who was a flight airline I believe,
a flight attendant who had an all braided hairstyle, and
the airlines had a lot of rules about how the

(45:31):
flight attendants could dress and said that that was not
consistent with the dress code, and she sued for race discrimination.
Now she lost that case, but the conflicts involving all
braided hairstyles continued, and now we're beginning to see legislation

(45:53):
that prohibits employers from forbidding all braided hairstyles. They're called
the Crown Act. Californi and several other states have adopted it,
but not every state, and so there are still workplaces
where locks or braids are prohibited by the employer, and

(46:13):
they lead to legal conflicts as to whether or not
those rules are either discrimination or sex discrimination or both.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
I'm going to switch to other subjects, But is there
anything else that I've missed that you want to share
about your book or you know, going back in history
from a legal perspective with fashion.

Speaker 3 (46:35):
Oh, there are so many interesting incidents involving the complexities
of the way fashion signifies things from dignified dress for
African Americans to the variety of ways in which women
have struggled with gendered expectations around clothing. And maybe the
biggest theme is that it is that it's complicated in

(46:57):
the sense that sometimes women embrace tradition, femininity and feminine fashions,
and sometimes they resist them. And similarly with African Americans,
there's a whole history in the Civil Rights movement of
wearing one Sunday best to protest unjust laws. Today that

(47:17):
might seem strange, but at the time it was a
powerful symbol of a demand for racial dignity. So looking
back in history allows us to get a different perspective
on a lot of a variety of perspectives on the
way that fashion signifies and why it's important to so
many people.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
Are there any other cultures besides African American cultures that
have been affected by these laws.

Speaker 3 (47:41):
Yes, yes, there are. In fact, in the nineteen forties
in Los Angeles there were suit riots and the zoot
suits were It was a fashion style that was worn
in some places by African Americans, in some places by
Italian Americans. In Los Angeles by Latinos, and the Latino

(48:05):
community embraced certain subculture of the Latino community wasn't everyone,
but embraced this style of you know, the kind of
baggy trousers, long coats, and they were seen as insolent
and unpatriotic and got into fights with American servicemen who

(48:30):
had been you know, stationed in Los Angeles. And there
were a series of these zoot suit riots in which
the servicemen in the in the zoot suesars fought and
when when the serviceman won, they would take the zoot
suits and burn them on a pyre and so and

(48:51):
that they they raged for several days. People suggested legislation
one California politicians and said, you know, if we can
arrest people for being underdressed, we can arrest them for
being overdressed. So we should pass a law against these
zoot suits and these crazy styles. So that's another ethnic

(49:13):
group that had been targeted. Chinese Americans had at times
been targeted for the braids that some used to wear
in let's see the eighteen hundreds, and that was, you know,
outlawed as a way to target that population.

Speaker 2 (49:32):
Wow, that is amazing. I didn't realize the zoot suit
was such a scandalous form of fashion. Yes, yes, really interesting.
So what does being named one of the ten one
hundred most influential Black lawyers meet you professionally and personally?

Speaker 3 (49:49):
Oh? Thank you. Well, it's a great honor. I have
tried throughout my career to do work that's important, and
at times it has been unusual work, you know, I
mean a book about fashion, for instance. But a lot
of my work has taken a somewhat unconventional tact at

(50:11):
looking at issues involving race and race discrimination. And so
it's really gratifying to have that work recognized.

Speaker 2 (50:19):
Oh, that's such an accomplishment. How do you manage to
balance your responsibilities as a professor, an author, a media personality,
and board member of multiple organizations?

Speaker 3 (50:29):
Ah? I try to keep a careful Apple calendar, and
I try to prioritize. It's the thing that I focus
on most is to ask each day, what's the most
important thing that I can do today? What will have

(50:51):
the most impact? And where can I make the biggest difference.
Those are two questions because sometimes there's an activity that
a lot of other people could do. I could do it,
but I'm not uniquely qualified or needed, and that may
take a lower priority than something where you're think, you know,

(51:12):
if I don't do this, no one else will correct.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
So what do you do when your day isn't flowing?
Because we all have those days.

Speaker 3 (51:20):
Right, Oh? Absolutely, you know. Well, I mean I probably
like most people. Sometimes I stare at the computer screen
or you know, pace up and down and try to
figure out what to do. But my most effective strategy
is to take a break and do something else. And
so one maybe one advantage of having a few different

(51:41):
things going at one time is that if I'm feel
like I'm hitting writer's block with one project, I can
shift to another one. Or if I can't write that
day for whatever reason, then maybe I can think about
some other kind of advocacy or organizing I'm doing.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
Do you ever shut it down and just go I'm
out of here. I'm going for a walk, or I'm
going to the gym or I'm going to do something else?
Does that?

Speaker 3 (52:03):
Oh yeah, definitely?

Speaker 2 (52:04):
What do you do to escape when things are like that?

Speaker 3 (52:08):
Sometimes I go for a run and that can clear
my head. Sometimes I just read a book, you know,
about something else.

Speaker 2 (52:23):
I'll have a novel doing situation.

Speaker 3 (52:25):
Yeah, yeah, just to clear my mind and get to
think about something else for a little while.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
You've lectured in twelve countries across five continents. How do
you How do perspectives on law and race differ internationally?

Speaker 3 (52:41):
Well, they different fascinating ways. I spent quite a bit
of time in France as what was called an Equality
of Opportunity fellow, and the idea of the fellowship was
for me to talk to people doing civil rights work
equality law work in France. And one of the things
I found was that identical commitments, you know, a commitment

(53:04):
to equality of opportunity, for instance, might be pursued in
very different ways that made sense given national history and
national culture. And so that was a really fascinating thing
to see the way that things I took for granted
as an American would be seen as the wrong approach

(53:31):
in another country. So, for instance, in France, there is
a great deal of resistance to collecting data about race
or having official recognitions of race, and so a lot
of what we do in the American civil rights tradition
is collect data to see where the disparities are, and
then we'll know where the problems are. That seems to

(53:52):
be the way to do it. My experience in France
was that there are committed since your people who believe
very strongly that that's not the way to do it,
that that reinforces ideas of racial division. And although that's
a position that I have been resistant to in the

(54:13):
American context, I had to take it seriously and respect
it in the French context. And so it made me
think that there are a lot of different ways to
approach the same issue.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
As a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance, what
do you see as the most pressing challenges to academic
freedom today?

Speaker 3 (54:33):
Well, they're coming, sadly, they're coming from many different directions today.
When the Academic Freedom Alliance was started, I would have
said that the main concern was a kind of group
think on both the left and the right that made
it difficult for unorthodox or heterodox thinkers to find a place.

(55:00):
On many issues. There would be an immediate kind of
polarization and a crystallization of a position or set of positions,
and it was really hard to break out of that.
You know, if you're on the left, you to toe
this line. If you're on the right, to them that line. Today,
I think the main threats to academic freedom, sadly, are
coming from the government. We have, for the first time

(55:24):
in my lifetime, government that has sent out lists of
banned words to organizations that you are not to appear
on websites or proposals for grants, under the rubric of
attacking what they describe as DEI, which is a very

(55:46):
vague and undefined term. We have the suggestion that talking
about the history of racial injustice, talking about the prevalence
of gender inequality is unlawful or will be met with
the suspension of federal funding, and that even if it

(56:10):
doesn't have formal consequences, I mean, even if the government
doesn't follow through, has a real chilling effect. And I've
already seen that in my own experience.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
That's interesting. Your books have been selected as notable books
of the Year by the New York Times multiple times.
What's your writing process like?

Speaker 3 (56:31):
Well, I begin by developing a working hypothesis, and then
I start to explore to test that hypothesis. Now, you know,
not in the sense of statistical testing, because I'm not
I'm not a quantitative social scientist, but in the sense

(56:54):
of looking broadly to see whether the historical record, the
sociological accounts, and reported incidents line up with my intuitions
about a particular social problem, and then start writing. So

(57:15):
I'll begin to I'll map out, you know, a vague
idea where I think the book is going to go. Now,
I have to admit it never goes exactly the way
I think it's going to. When I start writing, I've
got a plan, and then one has to be flexible
depending on where both the evidence and the most interesting
material is. But that's that's my basic writing process. I'm

(57:40):
almost always reading and writing at the same time. I
have a bunch of books out, and i'm you know,
checking sources, and I'm looking at various things. And then
I'll write a little bit and then go back to
the books and for more inspiration and for more information.

Speaker 2 (57:56):
Are you currently working on anything new or do you
have an idea for your your.

Speaker 3 (57:59):
Next I am actually working on a new book. And
then in a way. It was inspired by dress codes,
but it's taking things in a slightly different direction. It's
tentatively called The Virtues of Advice, and the idea of
this book is to look at activities that have historically
been condemned as vices. And I kind of got this

(58:20):
from some of the issues around modesty and dress and
the way that was considered to be a sinful, vanity
or advice type behavior. But to look at some of
these activities and see why its people are engaging in them. Now,
I don't want to argue in this book that it's
good to engage in vices. That's not the point. But

(58:41):
it is to try to figure out why it is,
for instance, that someone might want to use mind altering substances,
Why are people drawn to gambling, why are people drawn
to elicit sex? And why how is illicit sex defined? Because,
of course, for much of European and American history, any

(59:02):
sex outside of marriage was elicit. Certainly until very recently,
sex between people of the same sex was ilicit. For
a long time in American history, sex between people of
different races was elicit. So looking at all of those
why did people what were the political consequences of having

(59:22):
these kind of ideas about vice and who were the
people who either resisted those ideas or transgressed and is
there anything we can learn from those people? That's basically
the idea in the very early stages.

Speaker 2 (59:39):
That's exciting. How long does it usually take? How long
do you anticipate this taking.

Speaker 3 (59:45):
I'm hoping this book takes a little bit less time
than the last one. The last one probably took me
about five years wow, from concept to finished book, and
I and my editor are both hoping that it will
take more like two or three years. Think I've learned
something from the last book in terms of how to
streamline the process a little bit. But you know, again,
you never know until you start to really dig into it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:08):
How is your experience practicing law and working with various
city governments informed your academic work.

Speaker 3 (01:00:15):
Ah, it's given me. One of the great things about
the law and study of the law as compared to
let's say, the study of something like philosophy, which I've
also long been very interested in, is that you're really
dealing with practical on the ground issues all the time.
And so what is plausible world of trade offs and

(01:00:38):
a world of practical constraints is very much in the foreground,
and work in policy or with government is all about that,
and so that has informed my work in a variety
of ways because it's made me always foreground the question
of practical constraints, of real world situations, and of the

(01:01:02):
effects of ideas on real people in their day to
day lives.

Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
What would you tell your twenty year old self.

Speaker 3 (01:01:11):
Oh huh, what would I tell my twenty year old self?
I would probably tell him to spend a little bit
less time at nightclubs and more time studying, but also

(01:01:35):
follow your passions.

Speaker 2 (01:01:37):
I think that's wise advice. What advice would you give
to law students who aspire to make an impact beyond
traditional legal practice.

Speaker 3 (01:01:48):
I would give them similar advice. Follow your passions, but
look to ask yourself why you decided to go to
law school and keep that at the center of your focus.
That's what I would say. It's very easy to get
distracted by what everyone else is doing with the direction

(01:02:10):
that you think the legal profession is headed the jobs
that are the most prestigious or that pay the most,
and forget why you decided to go to law school
in the first place, as opposed to something else. But
I think for people who can keep that initial passion
in mind, even if the way they get their changes

(01:02:32):
or the means change, that serves as a good load star.

Speaker 2 (01:02:37):
What is your favorite quote or motto?

Speaker 3 (01:02:40):
Oh huh, let's see there is. This may or may
not be my favorite, but it's just popped into my
mind and it's one that I like quite a lot.
And I wish I could remember the exact quote and
exactly who said it, but it's something. I'll send you

(01:03:01):
the exact quote later. Something like opinions are like watches.
Everyone's reads something different than yet everyone trusts their own.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
Oh that's a good one. And what about a motto?
Do you have one?

Speaker 4 (01:03:21):
A motto? I don't know if I have a motto?
Let me You got to get back to get back
to you with that.

Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
Another show on that? Okay, anything that I've missed today
that you want to share.

Speaker 3 (01:03:41):
Now? I can't think of anything.

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
I think we've covered everything.

Speaker 3 (01:03:44):
I think we've covered quite a lot. Yeah, you're a
great interviewer. A lot of probing questions.

Speaker 2 (01:03:51):
Well, thank you, Richard Thompson Ford. I cannot thank you
enough for being here. It has been I could chat
with you all day. I'm going to have all your
information in the show notes. I wish you the best
of luck. I can't wait to hear about your next book,
and I'm going to continue looking at the other book
that you just finished. I think it's great. Thank you

(01:04:11):
so much for being here today.

Speaker 3 (01:04:13):
Thank you so much. It's been delightful to talk to you.

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
Oh, thank you so much. This has been I'm too busy.

Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
With host Christina Flack. Tune in each week as Christina
approaches the concept of success holistically, recognizing that achievement is
not solely measured by financial triumphs, but also by maintaining
a healthy work life balance and focusing on self care. Wednesdays,
seven pm Eastern on the Bold Brave TV Network, powered

(01:04:45):
by B two Studios

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}I'm Too Busy TV! - w/ guest Richard Thompson Ford