How did Indra Devi turn the sari into a wellness guru lewk? What bold statement were the TV designers making when they dressed Richard Hittleman and his yoga models back in the 1960s? Did Lululemon founder Chip Wilson invent the category of “yoga pants” so that yoga instructors could correctly assess posture, or so that creeps could create NSFW subreddits, or so that the culture war would have yet another reason to police the bodies of girls and women?
Journalist Beau Brink (see ep 143: “Trans Reality, Trans Possibility) is back—this time as our aesthetics correspondent—to school Matthew in yoga, gender, fashion, the historical relationship between the onesie and fatphobia, the price of cotton in China, and what it means to take your clothing, your identity, and your privacy seriously. May the best Yoga Drag Queen win!
(Correction: Beau meant to reference Sam Levinson, not Sam Levine. Apologies.)
Show Notes
Brief: Marianne Williamson’s Spiritual Therapy Schtick — Conspirituality
Google Ngrams: "peperomia"
Google Trends: “peperomia”
Google Trends: “minimalism”
Google Trends: “maximalism”
Google Ngrams: “athleisure”
Kyle Chayka, “The Oppressive Gospel of ‘Minimalism’”
Rosemary Feitelberg, “Politicians and Fashion Designers Increasingly Team Up to Benefit Both Sides”
Louis René Beres, “Aesthetics and politics: Donald Trump’s idea of art and beauty”
Clare Kane, “No, You Don't Need Lululemon — Here's What "Yoga Clothes" Really Look Like”
Michelle Goldberg, The Goddess Pose
Nehmat Kaur, “The Sari Has Never Been About a 'Hindu' Identity”
Adriana Aboy, “Indra Devi’s Legacy”
Hilary McQuilkin and Kimberly Atkins Stohr, “The complicated history of women's fitness”
Caroline Hamilton, “Dancewear Through the Decades: 100 Years of Studio Fashion, From the Chiton to the Leotard”
Maren Hunsberger, “Why Do More People Prefer to Practice Yoga at Home Versus the Studio?”
“Lululemon founder Chip Wilson says pants 'don't work' for some bodies”
“Yoga Clothing Market to reach USD 70,291.0 Million by 2030, emerging at a CAGR of 7.8%”
“List of yoga pants subreddits,” Reddit, 2020
“r/girlsinyogapants stats,” Subreddit Stats
Stephen MacDonald, Fred Gale, and James Hansen, “Cotton Policy in China”
Margaret Talbot, “Abercrombie’s Legal Defeat—and Its Cultural Failure”
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And this week, the paradoxes of yoga fashion.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
And I'm Beau Brink.
And we are on Instagram at Conspiratuality Podcast, and you can access our Monday bonus episodes through Patreon or Apple Subscription.
So, Welcome to Episode 177.
We're calling it Yoga Drag Race Season 1.
And I'm joined by Bo Brink, who's one of our most beloved guests from over the past years, who's joining us now in the correspondence seat as our expert guide through the world of wellness, textiles and fashion.
And Bo, you're our expert today because you do yoga, right?
Sometimes.
Okay, but also, you do drag, correct?
Also, sometimes I made the mistake of choosing to crochet my drag, and it takes a long-ass time to put even one look together.
Oh my gosh.
Okay, well, is that really a mistake, though?
Or are you just so committed to it that it's like a spiritual path?
It really shouldn't be easy for you?
You know, that's what I tell myself, Matthew.
Okay, well safe to say that you know a lot about gender and performativity, is that right?
Absolutely, and let's chalk that up to being a theater kid.
Okay, and you are an obsessive fashion researcher, yes?
Yes, an obsessive researcher of all things decorative.
That makes me really happy, and this has been a joy to plan out this episode.
I'm so glad you're joining me.
Because, I mean, first of all, it's lovely to have you back.
Your guest visit on episode 143, it got huge waves of positive feedback, and I learned a ton from it.
Secondly, after a month of Russell Brand, we need to lighten things up around here.
I would say thirdly, We have to focus a little bit more closely, I think, on the material and aesthetic stories that are behind the charismatics that we study.
I suspect that they may communicate as much or more as their dodgy ideas communicate.
And then lastly, we're not very good at doing that.
I don't think it's natural to us.
As three cis dudes who we frankly don't have to think that much about how we appear in the world, you know, which is not to say we don't experience dysmorphia or body anxiety, but we're more able to suppress the effects of those things, I think.
Right, or that nobody's requiring you to think about it so much.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, to the best of my knowledge, no one is out on social media speculating about my genitals or what health care I should have access to.
And so there's a silence around that, and that means that I'm allowed to go about my business, you know, and not feel like I'm constantly in the crosshairs of some social acceptability hunger games.
But, I also think that that silence and normalcy is also a clue as to how, like, protected from, you know, the culture, war, chaos a person is.
And the flip side of that is that when you're protected by silence and normalcy, you don't really have to look at yourself and ask, like, how is my body and identity constructed?
Like, how do I perform it and You know, it doesn't, like, I don't have to think about my ill-fitting jeans and my, like, hoodies and dad bod t-shirts as real choices, right?
Right.
Well, and in my opinion, enforced choices, like perfectly valid choices, but enforced.
You and I have talked about this before, but you know how much my heart breaks every time I walk into the men's section of a DSW and see boring cis men's, how boring cis men's choices are compared to the high glam of the women's section.
Yes, and that was really eye-opening to me to think about you walking into this sort of divided world of, oh, these people can have this, but these people are conditioned to not want anything more.
So your heart, you know, breaks.
Yeah.
Maybe mine would, too, but, like, that would have to be after I got over this general feeling that I've inherited that I don't do glam, that I don't deserve it, you know?
Yeah.
Well, and that's the enforced part, I think, is, like, a lot of guys feel that way, and you have to, like, specifically Go against social norms in order to like, you have to make an active choice to break out of a mold for yourself in order to wear something glam as a cis man and in our culture, at least.
Anyway, yoga drag race is our topic today.
And it emerged when I realized that you had, you know, this expertise because we started chatting over Slack.
about a video that I analyzed for an episode that I did on Marianne Williamson, where she did this dominance-based pseudo-psychotherapy shtick with a younger woman on stage at a fancy retreat event.
And so that episode was called Marianne Williamson's Spiritual Therapy Shtick.
And in the episode, I mainly focused on the dialogue, because that's what I'm familiar with on how Williamson used the key words and jargon of A Course in Miracles.
I concentrated on affect and power dynamics.
I had a general sense of the aesthetics, the setup, what the retreat room looked like and felt like, you know, what the fixtures would have been like, the lighting, the fabrics, but they kind of sort of fade into the background for me.
And then, and then you are, you and I are talking about the video and you start going off about the hem on Marianne's sleeves.
And then the plants on the coffee table, I think there were succulents that were between them.
And when those plants started to come into vogue, you know, and it made me realize how much of this world I'm not seeing.
Because there are whole supply chains of labor and meaning that, you know, to me are just kind of white noise consumables.
But you're reading a story of things as part of the context for that whole encounter.
So, do you remember the thumbnail of that scene?
Like, what did you see?
So it was the plants that caught my attention first.
They're pepperonias.
Okay, so those are a type of succulent.
No.
I wasn't going to correct you on it directly, but no, they're of the pepperonia type.
I guess I just see plants in a fancy location and I think the word succulent, but there's nothing behind that whatsoever.
Well, actually, I think there might be because succulents and pepper, not to get too much into it.
Succulents and pepperomias do tend to have the same sort of like thick structure.
So they're not entirely dissimilar visually.
I wouldn't, I don't blame you for thinking, oh, is that a succulent?
Okay.
All right.
Um, so no, they're, they're, um, my, my first thought looking at this was like, oh, of course they have pepperonis because they've been trendy since about 2014.
And, uh, that's around when they started making appearances in fashion and design magazines like Vogue or Architectural Digest.
Pepperomias tend to have those thick, sturdy stalks with glossy, thick leaves.
They're very sleek and minimalistic looking.
They look very structured, so it fits in nicely with the minimalist aesthetic that was popular at the time.
They're going out of style now, and I think it's because the minimalist aesthetic has been seeing a backlash that started around 2016 and really gained momentum during the pandemic, so public interest in it is falling off.
Okay, so we're talking about the kind of life cycle of the Marie Kondo fad.
Right, exactly.
So clean lines, white spaces, chrome fixtures, no visible clutter.
The pandemic probably made a minimalist aesthetic impossible for a lot of people because kids were home, jobs were lost.
There's no real time with the family out of the house where you could keep everything really, really tidy.
Yeah, hotel room or new condo or Airbnb tidy.
Right, exactly, which I don't know how anybody does that anyway.
But right.
Even with the family out of the house, I have no idea.
But yeah, and then, of course, you there's there might not be money to hire somebody to clean your house for you in any way.
Like during the pandemic, it wouldn't have been safe to have a stranger in your home necessarily.
Right.
And a lot of people just wanted their homes because that's where we all were all the time to be as like cozy and comfortable as possible.
and like this like, you know, white marble countertop kind of thing.
It's like, it's, it's feels cold and not very personal.
And to be frank, death and the fear of it doesn't really inspire people to let go
of all their belongings, particularly those that are even mild sentimental value.
I think that's an amazing statement because on one hand, the Zen feeling of Kondo
seems to point to reading oneself of attachments.
You know, I think there's, there's some sort of buried Orientalism in there as well,
that might point to some kind of, you know, global Buddhist tropes or something.
But maybe in the real world, that minimalism feels like avoidance or bypassing.
There's this, you probably, I don't know if you saw The Last of Us.
I saw 45 minutes of the first episode.
Oh, was that it?
Okay, so you had to get to the third episode.
I know, I know.
I want to watch it so badly.
Well, maybe you will after this, if you have some time.
But like, there's this incredible house that is lived in and maintained by Bill and Frank, this gay couple who have survived in the middle of rural Massachusetts or wherever, whatever it is.
And they're survivalists, so they have to hoard stuff, but they're also committed to holding on to, like, every piece of dignity that they can in the midst of the zombie apocalypse, and that means they're gonna keep every fish knife polished, and they're going to, you know, have all of their formal wear pressed somehow and ready to go, so Marie Kondo is not going to help anyone surviving the fungus people.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, yeah, survivalists are not known to like... Have clean countertops, right?
Yeah, it's not really the priority.
Right.
Yeah.
I didn't know what the third episode exactly was, but like hearing you talk about it, it's like, oh, that would be me in the zombie apocalypse.
It would totally be you.
Yeah.
I think one thing that Kondo does well that I really appreciate is respect for belongings.
Like, that was a message that she had.
I mean, I read The Art of Tidying Up, and I, you know, went through a few decluttering phases and wound up having to buy some stuff back, unfortunately.
Right.
Which is one of the criticisms.
But one thing that I do really appreciate about her approach is a sense of like, you know, your belongings deserve respect and gratitude.
I think you'll probably hear a lot of that in what I have to say today.
But like, but yeah, I mean, that doesn't sometimes that doesn't mean letting it go.
Right.
But yeah.
So but as far as Williamson goes, The aesthetic choices that were made in the way that this room was set up were, first of all, catering to trends, you know, this minimalist thing, which I think is a mistake for a political hopeful.
And two, specifically catering to a trend that's out of date as of the time this video was uploaded to YouTube, which is... I personally, looking at it, see a lack of visual literacy, like a lack of engagement with aesthetics.
And it extends from the setting of the retreat center to Williamson's choice of outfit,
which in contrast to both the sort of like naturalistic backdrop,
which, you know, there was like a window in the middle of it where you could see like bamboo growing outside.
And also like her guests sort of flowy sage green jumpsuit.
Her outfit is this like stark black, very structured top.
It does have like bell sleeves, which I think is like a cool,
a nice little visual reference to sort of the boho aesthetic she comes from.
But the fact that it's like this, this like this stark black kind of structured thing,
it makes her stick out rather than stand out.
That sounds like an extremely important distinction, and I'm not understanding it entirely.
Yeah, so if you're a public figure and you're trying to get people on your side, you should match the vibe of whatever room you're in, but to make an impression of power or status or authority, you'd want to elevate the style of the people you're talking to in your own choice of dress.
Okay.
That way you are aspirational to your audience.
You're like one of them, but you're like bigger, better, more equipped, more qualified, someone they can look up to.
But instead of feeling like she's part of the room, Williamson here looks like she's an interloper.
Huh, okay.
Which she shouldn't.
Right.
All right, she shouldn't.
Certainly not the things that are coming out of her mouth don't feel like they don't belong,
but the visuals are, it's a mismatch.
Right.
Political events usually have a stage designer and increasingly politicians are establishing
long-term relationships with fashion designers to help curate a sense of personal style
that's appropriate to their political goals.
And if I had to guess just from what I can see in this video, I would guess that Williamson doesn't have those kinds of connections.
Unfortunately, that communicates to the audience, either consciously to somebody like me, or I think also subconsciously to other people, that she might not be totally equipped.
She might be She might be in over her head running for president.
Right.
She could maybe spin this into an underdog or outsider narrative, but the only person who's made that argument successfully in recent memory is Donald Trump, who, first of all, does have the connections, and second, has always done a really good job of communicating his version of power through aesthetics.
Well, I would say that Williamson needs to play on some kind of outsider edge being the New Age preacher candidate, because the content that focuses on miracles is doing that.
And she has some retro references in her general sort of presentation, and then also an accent that's a cross between, like, mid-Atlantic elite and a white Southern drawl.
So, do you think that she could find a stylist who could make all of that pop together, or is that a really tall order?
No, I think that it would be a really compelling sense of style.
I think that there would be stylists who would be kind of thrilled to make this work.
Because I think that it could be really, really compelling.
I think that she could I would love to see her version of political power in a more sort of, you know, cohesive way.
But I could see designers like Holtzweiler or Bora Oksu, Bronson Banco, or maybe Papo that work with like flowier fabrics and some retro visual references, creating some really stunning suiting for Williamson.
And I think working with newer design houses would underscore that like outsider note of So we're going to do a makeover for Williamson.
She's going to soar in the polls.
We're going to be responsible.
I don't know about that.
We're going to be responsible for it all.
OK, but a quick aside about Trump.
Like, how do the cans of hairspray, the bronzer?
Oh, we just learned this week that.
I can't, I can't, I can't.
That the bronzer is why he sided with the anti-maskers, because he didn't like the fact that it came off on the mask.
He also does his, like, double, you know, jerk-off dance.
Like, how did that translate into alpha male gold?
Yeah, I can't.
I can't.
It's too much.
It's too much.
I mean, like, we're laughing, but, like, inside I'm sobbing.
I know.
I know.
The alpha male crowd has always been a bunch of insecure dweebs.
Like, the aesthetic has been a laughingstock to liberals and frankly, like any conservative with an ounce of taste for like going way back to the like, Ed Hardy and fedora days.
So I look at Trump and I see somebody who is like, yeah, I mean, if we're talking about Matching the vibe and then elevating it, like these expensive but ill-fitting suits that he wears.
And the refusal to do anything with his hair other than what he's been doing for the last 30 years very much matches the vibe of his constituency and his demographic.
What was the difference?
I mean, sticking out versus standing out?
He stands out.
He matches the vibe, but he stands out.
And it's really just like he does the same thing that they would do.
He just has more money to do it with.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's the longish backstory on this episode, and today you will be inviting us on a journey through the rest of the psycho-political and economic stories that are told by wellness and yoga fashion, especially yoga fashion, down through the years.
So, why don't we start with any opening comments that you have about what yoga fashion is, what it conveys in general, and for whom?
Yeah, so what's stuck in my head about yoga fashion since we started talking about doing this episode is a Leonard McComb photo of a man practicing yoga in Central Park in 1961.
He's wearing like a t-shirt and some trousers with a belt.
Definitely not what modern practitioners tend to think of when it comes to yoga appropriate clothing.
Yeah, now I've never seen that photo before and we're going to make sure that the photos are available either on an IG carousel or in some other format.
I've never seen the photo before.
It looks like Don Draper on his lunch hour.
Yeah.
Like he left his starched shirt hanging in the office and headed out to the park with the secretary to, you know, yoga away his hangover.
Yeah, I feel like the underover on that being literally the case in this photo is pretty good.
But yeah, it kind of says to me that there's like no such thing as yoga fashion.
I mean, there is no specific garment you must wear to practice yoga.
You could do it wearing practically anything, which suggests to me that any attempt to align a specific garment with yoga practice is a marketing exercise and nothing else.
Yeah, and I think what we're going to get to, what you're going to tell us, is that the main object being marketed is the self and or the identity.
Is that on track?
I think the self, the identity, maybe the persona more than the identity.
And really, like, the thing being marketed is the, like, quote-unquote authentic knowledge of the teacher.
When, of course, there's a lot of debate over what qualifies as authentic knowledge of yoga and over whether any appeals to a notion of like one true yoga, so to speak, is in and of itself colonial because yoga evolved and changed a lot over time before white people ever knew anything about it.
Okay, so we've picked out some yoga icons to look at through these aesthetic and material lenses.
Who have we got?
Who's up first?
Indra Devi.
All right.
The first lady of yoga, I guess.
Right.
Indra Devi, not to be confused with Savitri Devi, who was the Greek fascist who became
a devotee of both Hindu proto-nationalism and Hitler.
So Indra, not Savitri, was born Zhenya Pedersen in 1899 in Riga, Latvia.
And she became one of the first breakout, globetrotting yoga influencers, hugely responsible for laundering medieval yoga techniques of their philosophy and esoterica so that she could eventually present the stretches and breathing practices as complements to the beauty regimes of Hollywood starlets.
Sobo, we're looking at two old black and white photos here.
She's wearing very well-fitted and sumptuous saris in each.
And in one, it's a solo photograph.
She's seated in half lotus with a diaphanous length of the sari draped over her hair.
And her right hand is raised in a gesture called Surya Mudra.
or the sun sign, which is believed to purify the body by welcoming in the rays of the sun.
But it also, like, it strikes me that it could be a hand gesture in Drag Race itself.
Like, I can imagine RuPaul waving with a hand like that.
And in the second photo, she's in another rich sari, taking a knee beside a youngish American or European woman
sitting in a lotus position that looks like it's blowing out her knees, unfortunately.
And she's wearing a black onesie tank top and shorts.
And the student's hair looks like it's styled neatly for the office.
Do you think those are good descriptions, Beau?
I do.
I would say styled neatly just generally.
I know women in their 40s, Typically, if they left their house, their hair was going to look nice.
Right.
Particularly women of this sort of demographic here, probably wealthier, white, probably somewhere in Southern California.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the mudras because I have noticed as a non-spiritual practitioner of yoga, very casual non-spiritual practitioner of yoga, that in videos and such, there are some teachers who will encourage you to do the mudras and some who won't.
And I don't know the spiritual significance.
So is this something that is like specifically tied to Hinduism?
Yes, it is, and they come from a variety of sources.
So, I'm not an expert in this by any means, but there are tantric ritual symbols that are given.
You'll often see deities in the iconography positioning their hands in various mudras, and they have different significances.
They will indicate the invitation of the sun.
They might indicate a kind of A power to vanquish all internal obstacles.
They might be, you know, the mudra that Siddhartha Gautama displays as he's touching the ground is meant to convey that, you know, I will base my philosophy on the real, on the thing that I know that is here.
You know, as the earth is my witness, I'm going to sit here and become enlightened.
And so, yeah, when modern postural yoga teachers kind of pick this up from wherever they pick
it up, sometimes there's this feeling that the hand gestures themselves will communicate
some kind of insight or will contain a, I don't know, there will be some esoteric power
associated with them.
I don't think that most of the time there's enough education on board for that to really be felt in any kind of deep way.
And so I think sometimes it becomes a kind of performative I don't know.
I am, you know, embellishing this physical practice with something spiritual.
But I do think that sometimes people do feel very kind of concentrated and devotional as they make these gestures.
Yeah.
I was wondering because, I mean, for reasons that I think we're about to get into.
But yeah, I mean, when we're talking about, like, they picked it up from somewhere, it's like, well, maybe they picked it up from Davey.
Right?
Well, yeah, they definitely did not pick it up in a forest ashram or in, you know, some kind of monastic tantric college in, you know, in the Tibetan exile community.
They most likely picked it up from images on the Internet or in yoga manuals.
When people talk about cultural appropriation in terms of clothing, I think one reaction
that white people in particular tend to have is like, who are you to tell people
that they can't wear something?
But Indra Devi is a perfect example of how clothing choices can legitimately
be colonialistic or appropriative.
Devi was a Latvian woman who followed a white American self-help author
involved in the New Thought movement who was calling himself Yogi Ramacharaka.
I don't want to be shady, but you know.
Um, he.
She followed him to India partially to avoid an arranged marriage.
She bullied her way into learning under Tirumalai Krishnamacharya by complaining to the Maharaja of Mysore that he wouldn't let her study.
She left India just as it was gaining independence and the British were returning home.
And then she came to America to teach yoga, where because of the Alien Exclusion Act, South Asians were barred from immigration.
Okay, that is a very eloquent train of burns.
Good summation.
And I'm just gonna add that Krishnamacharya himself was an abusive battle-axe of a teacher.
And he would have refused her as a student because of the standard sexism and xenophobia of his cast.
But part of that would have involved whether it was ritually pure to have her around him in whatever she was wearing as a student.
But then his employer, who you tagged, this is the Maharaja of Wadiour, he was an oligarch liberalizer.
He was educated by Oxford tutors.
You know, he lived a kind of Downton Abbey life, touring his estates and fancy Bentleys and Rolls Royces.
He would go on tours to Europe, taking whole orchestras on his personal steamship.
So, he was very interested in Western sort of glamour and also the Western visitors that came calling.
So, Devi didn't really have to twist his arm too hard to get Krishnamacharya, who by contrast wasn't worldly at all, to teach her.
But what's hilarious is that Devi actually studied with Krishnamacharya for only something like three months, and then she built her entire authority on that, plus the fact that two of the other top entrepreneurs of global yoga, Pattabhi Joyce and BKS Iyengar, were also students of Krishnamacharya, so she shared with them a famous root.
But I think she also used these aesthetic cues to build up her own sort of authority and authenticity.
Right, yeah.
I'm sorry, I was laughing there because the idea of a personal steamship, it's like, get me one of those.
Yeah, I know.
I don't know what it was called, but he was one of the wealthiest persons in the world at that time.
The gender politics in this place at this time, that's part of the reason that I'm saying, like, bullied because of that, like, the sense that it might have been ritually impure.
It's like, I think it's worth considering whether an Indian woman would have been able to do this same thing to get her way into Krishnamacharya's, like, tutelage, or if Devi's whiteness was the currency that unlocked access to Krishnamacharya.
Yeah, indeed.
Also, I would say, like, can you imagine studying something for three months and then creating an image for yourself as the first lady or man of it?
But you can because that more or less describes most of the people you talk about on this podcast.
It really does.
She's kind of she provides a blueprint or a template for influencers going forward.
I mean, she's not the first, but yeah, this kind of, you know, I had the cash and the resources for a Bout of spiritual tourism and then I became an expert in my homeland.
That's a huge theme.
It's very weird.
Yeah.
Yeah, at every step along the way in her life in India, her life in America, her life elsewhere, Devi seems to be extremely invested in her own social advancement and taking advantage of any opportunity she could find to promote herself.
And in this photo that we have here, we do see her using Indian cultural dresses marketing.
And so this photo looks like it was taken in the 1940s or something like that.
for the time period, for women in the time period.
It's like a black onesie or maybe like a tight-fitting top and shorts, very similar to the type of clothing
wore for dance practice at the time.
And so this photo looks like it was taken in the 1940s or something like that, is that right?
Right, in the 1940s or 50s.
And do you think that Davy's sari is sort of speaking, whispering to the onesie, like, you're too immodest,
you're not spiritual enough?
Oh, see, ooh, is the sari saying it?
That's what I... I don't think the sari is saying anything.
I think the sari is saying, I'm a sari and I look great.
But yeah, no, I think maybe by Western standards, This would have been, you know, there's a sense of like, oh, the sari is more modest and therefore superior.
But I mean, by and large, Devi herself seems unconcerned with the woman's modesty.
at least in this photo, she looks to be very pleased to be teaching this woman and unconcerned
with the woman's dress.
Like, I think it's almost like, oh, yes, this is what I expect here, which kind of underscores
this sense of that it's more like you're too Western, not exotic like me, and the exoticism
is part of the sales pitch.
It's important to note, in case anybody's wondering, that the sari isn't a religious garment,
and Devi doesn't appear to have practiced Hinduism anyhow, so there's no need for her to be photographed wearing a sari
other than for marketing.
The purpose is to communicate to a white audience something along the lines of, I'm white, so you can feel comfortable, but I possess South Asian cultural knowledge, so you don't have to actually go to a South Asian person to learn about it.
Ouch.
I mean, that's that's the heart of cultural appropriation.
Yeah, she she used this costume to market herself to make herself visible in a time in America where a lot of women were invisible to create a legacy as the quote unquote first lady of yoga where She can control the narrative about what Indian culture and what Hinduism really are to an American audience that not only doesn't know better, but is actively hostile and violent to actual people of South Asian descent.
I mean, consider the fact that even today, Indian Americans make up just 1.35% of the U.S.
population, and that for a huge portion of white folks in the U.S., their only contact with Indian culture is through the yoga that this Latvian woman interpreted and imported.
There's a trickle-down story about Davy's influence that I have, because I think specifically the dress and the affect continue to have a kind of currency right up into my Yoga era in the early 2000s.
So this is the period in which travel to India for spiritual tourism Became really accessible flight prices dropped more people had more credit cards So increasingly it became a thing that if you could do a teacher training program in India either at an Indian school or at a resort in Goa or Kerala where an American teacher would hire out the rooms and And then the practice hall for like a month, they could turn a tidy profit because of the really absurd exchange rates.
There were a lot of people therefore flying to India and forking over 5,000 US dollars for a month to get a yoga diploma while Dalit women cleaned out their cabanas for a dollar a day or whatever they were paid.
So, at the risk of stereotyping, the white, middle-class woman student in her early 20s or late 30s, because there was a lot of post-divorce, change-of-life people involved in this career change activity, They'd arrive at the Indian training with their yoga togs ready to go.
And if they were, like, well-prepped by the school with, they read all of the travel memos, they would have been told to pack modest clothes with long sleeves because with these trips there would always be these extracurricular, you know, little junkets to temples or to sacred sites. And so everyone was aware that
there would be one dress code within the retreat and another outside. And the outside
trips had this religious nature to them.
You'd be attending a puja or a fire ceremony. You might be going to an astrologer to get your
horoscope read. And it would have been completely fine for those students to get their modest
clothes out of their suitcases for those occasions. But what often happened is that
they would hear about clothiers in the local market and they would decide to get together
like a few of them and go to the market before these trip days.
days.
Because they wanted to be even more respectful.
They wanted to get more into it.
They were going to really prepare for the field trip, so they would buy saris or Punjabi ensembles.
And the saris were often problematic because you had to learn how to wrap them.
It's really awkward if you have a disheveled sari, which is kind of easy to mess up.
But if they got the outfit, they emanated this impression that they were more invested, more present, more respectful of the environment.
So subconsciously, they may have also felt kinship with forebears like Indra Devi, who blazed the path for Western women to go and take in this knowledge.
Let me ask you something.
Yeah.
They emanated the impression that they were more respectful.
Emanated that impression to whom?
To each other.
This is a great point because I remember distinctly, and I was young enough to, and I think ignorant enough, to not really clock How I was being sort of understood or regarded by the people who were basically hosting me as a spiritual tourist.
I do remember this feeling of like, oh, what does this look like to them?
You know?
Yep.
That would be my question too.
Yeah.
And so did you, are you sticking out or?
I mean, it's neither, really.
It's pretending something for your own benefit.
So yeah, I mean, there's a clear co-optation that Davy sort of models for this culture, and she uses it to her advantage.
But then also, downstream of that, there's a tragicomic mimicry.
going on in a lot of this, that we have a lot of culturally deracinated white people,
probably from the suburbs, who are looking to try on something that feels real to them.
And, you know, maybe they have a yearning for belonging or they are rejecting the immodesty of their own culture in a reactionary way that they can code as spiritual instead of conservative.
So, I don't know, maybe this question is too big for this episode, but it's kind of in our title.
Are these the anxieties and pleasures and performances that are really the raw content of what drag culture tries to work with?
Yeah, that's a big question.
I think that tragicomic mimicry is a really great way to describe drag, at least the kind of drag that I like.
I think the difference is that drag is self-aware that it's tragicomic.
That's really the humor of it.
It's like very John Waters, kind of dark.
It's an open acknowledgement that at least for Cis drag performers and the complexities of trans drag performance I'm not going to get into.
So just talking about cis drag performers.
There's an open acknowledgement that they are not what they are portraying and they are not the costume that they're wearing.
But by contrast, there's no humor in cultural appropriation or in white guilt.
And there's no self-awareness.
And I think that one of the pieces of media that as we were getting to know each other, really sort of foregrounds the centrality of humor and the sort of morbidity of humor in contexts of oppression and that was like you sent me this incredible performance of Cabaret.
that was really important for me to absorb because it really exposes how the culture that I'm looking at always depends for its sort of ego existence on a lack of irony.
You know, somebody like Aubrey Marcus cannot dress up like a Maori warrior without really buying into the bit.
Because if he acknowledged that he was LARPing, that he was doing live action role play, Which, if you're a LARPer, you know that you're LARPing.
But if you know that you're LARPing, if that's what he knows that he's doing, there's this fragile artifice of, you know, my authenticity is what I'm selling here.
That would collapse.
A drag performer wants your money, right?
Aubrey Marcus also wants your money, right?
Drag performers, although they are wearing a costume, although they are like doing it for money, they are doing it as a performance for money.
Like there is an honesty there.
Irony can feel dishonest.
It can feel sort of performative and poser-ish, I think, to a lot of people, but the irony In drag is like so apparent, so at the forefront.
This is like, it's like an open, honest acknowledgement that like, no, I am not what I am pretending to be.
This is all a performance.
This is all entertainment.
So there's an honesty in a drag performance that there really isn't in practically anything that Aubrey Marcus does.
And it's like, well, if you're going to give your money to anybody and it's somebody who's like basically wearing drag, give it to the people who at least are like, we're really just here for a show, guys.
That's all this is not somebody who's like putting on a show and pretending that it's that it's real.
Right.
Yeah.
I think for at least for people who aren't clutching their pearls so tightly that they're about to
choke on that.
It's permissible and okay to play with gender in this self-aware way, partly because there
has always been a spectrum of gender presentation.
There have always been feminine men and masculine women and people who just kind of like to
look confusing in every culture and every corner of the globe.
And because what counts as women's clothes or men's clothes is kind of arbitrary, or at least it varies a lot depending on where you are.
But race and culture are not spectrums.
They're pretty absolute.
You know, like you're in this case, and in many cases, you're white or you're not white.
You're Indian or you're not.
You're black or you're not.
You come from the culture that you came from and you really, you can't change that because it's the past.
Gender is a part of culture, which is one of the reasons why typical gender presentation varies so much around the world.
You can't explore other races, but you can explore other gender presentations and play with them, at least in the U.S.
for now.
I know that there will be people out there who maybe have feelings about sex and gender, who would like to say that the same logic that I'm applying to race and culture here also applies to gender.
But just to be clear, I am talking about gender and gender presentation, not chromosomal sex.
So, Indra Devi, how did she do?
Is she still on the stage?
Is she still one of our contestants?
I'm going to say sashay away to Indra Devi.
Who have we got next?
Okay, so we've got Richard Hiddleman's boudoir.
Okay, Richard Hiddleman.
And what we're looking at here is a screenshot from a television show that ran in various iterations and markets in Southern California from the early 1960s onwards.
It was called Yoga for Health, and it was the brainchild of Richard Hiddleman.
He was born in 1927.
And unlike Indra Devi, he was completely self-taught.
Although, He did gain a master's degree in Oriental Mysticism at Columbia University.
I think we'd love to see the reading list for that, Beau.
And he hung out with other autodidacts like Alan Watts, whose fashion we should also look into sometime, I think.
And Hiddleman authored a pretty famous manual called Richard Hiddleman's Yoga 28-Day Exercise Plan, and that was in 1968.
And in the book, as on the telly, he featured women model students wearing onesies and with a kind of sheen.
I don't know what the fabric is, really.
The exercise vibe is all very sinuous and sensuous.
There's nothing muscular about it.
And Hittelman himself had kind of a diminutive physique and a pretty formal affect.
This is Richard Hittelman welcoming you to Yoga for Life.
You are about to embark upon a fascinating adventure into well-being, a journey which will leave you with a lifetime method for gaining unequaled health of body and mind and the sense of a new life.
Please sit down easily and gracefully on your practice mat.
Do that now and lower yourself slowly with control and pause.
When you are seated, slowly extend both legs straight out before you and relax for a few moments.
I feel it is important for you to know that yoga is the world's oldest and most effective system of physical and mental health and development.
You will find these records a most convenient method for learning and practicing the wonderful yoga techniques.
Use them as a supplement to my television program, Yoga for Health.
So that's what he sounds like.
That's his tone.
And I know, Bo, you're going to talk about the TV set styling here as well.
But let's talk first about the presence and absence of that muscular vibe.
I mean, I would say mostly absence, right?
I think Hiddleman here There's a lot of different ways to sound authoritative, right?
And Hiddleman's approach is not muscular.
No, it's not.
And it has a lot to do with, like, his extremely precise enunciation.
Yes.
Which comes out of, like, sounds like a very early radio kind of era.
Yeah, I was going to say broadcast.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And very Midwest.
Right.
Like it has almost a almost a Cronkite.
There's something strange in it.
I'm not quite sure what the accent is.
Yeah, it's that implacable thing that Marianne Williamson has going on too, just a little different, you know?
Right.
There must be a kind of, I don't know, global new age wellness yoga accent school, or there was a series of tapes that got circulated around in the 1950s and 60s, like talk like this if you want to make an impression.
Yeah, you know, we had talked about Williamson's accent over Slack once, and I think my answer to you about like where that originates from or why it is the way it is, it just strikes me as like broadcast prior to, I mean, really the 2000s.
Like I'm thinking of broadcasters Black broadcasters who have been chastised for the way that they speak, if they're just off the cuff, that they have, as we all do, different enunciations and speech patterns and stuff than is really encouraged in broadcasting.
And that is starting to fall by the wayside.
Broadcasters are able to You know, speak in a way that's more authentic.
And I think, you know, podcasting, for instance, is one thing that's kind of forcing their hand on that.
But but yeah, I think prior in in this era and really also in Williamson's era, there was a sense of like, if you want to sound authoritative while you are broadcasting something, you speak in this particular way.
And yeah, I mean, like you could go to a broadcasting school and they would teach you how to speak this way.
Um, people talk about, like, the NPR voice still.
Absolutely.
So first we have to say, or reiterate, that Hiddleman's whole vibe here is gentle and sinuous.
Like, nobody is working very hard.
Even though the focus is fitness.
Prior to the mid-20th century, women in the U.S.
were discouraged from doing much strenuous exercise in case it made their bodies too unfeminine.
Part of what he's trying to convey to his female students is that they can have some kind of yogic attractiveness plus health without becoming unfeminine.
So is that really about Muscularity, because, you know, I guess the CrossFit women of today would be just monstrous in this older context, right?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
And to be fair, a lot of people still tell women that it's unattractive to be muscular.
But I think women who are interested in these really intense forms of exercise have embraced what the Amazons knew, that physical strength and femininity are not mutually exclusive.
Also say that in my experience, old school boxing and CrossFit gyms can be really cool, inclusive spaces where your fitness goals matter and your gender, race, sexual orientation and so on really don't.
Just to shout out one that I love, Liberation Barbell Club in Austin, Texas is a really good example.
They have a specifically inclusive mission.
It's Liberation Barbell Club, which is such a fantastic name.
I imagine that a barbell club has to feature like flapper-era advertising drawings with like gals in striped bathing togs and dudes working out with waxed mustachios and bowler hats.
You know, it's funny you say that because the first person to introduce me to these kinds of gyms was a guy I dated who had a handlebar mustache.
That was 2013, okay.
As a, I would say, casual mustache wearer, casual in the sense that I don't really know what it's doing, does the handlebar mustache consist of, let's just get this clear, is it just the lengthening of the hairs that start from the middle of the top of your lip outwards?
Or are they all bundled in together?
Uh, I think you wax everything outward.
Okay.
And then sort of like twist the ends.
Okay.
Like you roll them, pinch and roll, and then twist them upward.
Okay.
All right.
I don't think I'm going to try it.
Anyway.
Yeah, it was like 2012, 2013.
It was a thing at the time.
It was also a crossover political thing because didn't Gavin McInnes and a bunch of alt-right assholes wear them as well?
Uh oh, big sigh.
Let's not talk about it.
Let's not talk about it.
Let's not talk about the kind of guys I was dating at the time.
Oh, all right.
All right.
The past is the past.
The past is the past.
We are in the present.
But yeah, so barbell clubs are more like those bare bone gyms that don't, that have like a lot of unassisted strength equipment.
So like no machines or anything, just barbells.
Right.
And no treadmills.
Nice.
But yeah, so dance was always an acceptable way for women to stay in shape and you know, Earlier in the 20th century, especially forms of dance that were as focused on rigorous control of the body as ballet.
When yoga started reaching the U.S., I imagine it was easy to sort of treat it as an extension of or complement to Western dance since the movements you make in your body aren't entirely dissimilar.
So, yeah, you wear your bodysuit or your leotard and leggings, which you already know provide enough flexibility and range of motion for the task.
And the models or the participants that Hiddleman is platforming in this show and the stills that we have that we'll post, that's what they're doing.
They're in dance onesies.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And this image comes after the invention of Lycra in 1962 when it became easier and more affordable to create skin-tight but flexible clothing.
Skin-tight clothes, by the way, are a very Western preoccupation.
One of the first forms was the leotard, which was invented in France in the 1800s for dancers and acrobats.
Now, before we have lycra or other, I imagine, polyester-based materials, is the leotard like a really expensive specialty item?
I'm not sure about the expense because leotards at the time were, I think they were made with like pretty standard like cotton materials, that sort of thing.
So it was the kind of thing where it's like you wear it, you do the thing in it, and then it's kind of like stretched out and you have to launder it again.
Boil it.
Yeah.
You have to boil it.
Yeah.
Right.
To shrink it back.
Okay.
Yeah.
Right.
But Jules Leotard's initial iteration was for men in circus arts.
It certainly wouldn't have been worn outside of a circus or dance environment since it's so immodest.
Okay, now is there a correlation between the popularization of the onesie from the leotard to lycra and the rise of fat phobia?
Because it seems that the more skin tight the fabric, the more the wearer is asked to maybe shrink or something like that.
Yeah, so I looking into this because it's like, this is like a whole thing.
I can imagine like some PhD thesis being written about it or something.
But yeah, right.
Just sort of as a starting point, I looked up, I looked up in Ngrams where it's like, Fat, skinny, singlet, lycra, leotard, like all those things.
And I saw that in particular the words skinny singlet and lycra all started seeing an upward trajectory around the same time in the 60s.
So you can't prove causation based on that alone.
But I think maybe the hypothesis here is that rather than fat phobia per se, an obsession with skinniness may be correlated with the introduction of skin-tight fabrics.
That's amazing.
It's a very also historical materialist view, and I think you're poisoning our listeners' minds with queer Marxism.
And what?
Right.
Okay, but what can we say about Hiddleman's look here?
He's got the stovepipe pants.
He's got a Nehru jacket.
It doesn't look like he's as mobile as the women in the clothes that he's wearing.
No.
No, it doesn't.
Well, and he, he doesn't need to be because he's just sort of, he's like sort of standing and walking around in this very sort of closed in way, like telling them what to do.
Right.
Yeah.
I think, I think we're seeing the same thing we saw at Devi here where the teacher is sort of required to wear a costume that gestures toward India while their students wear typical Western workout clothes, in this case, leotards and tights.
Um, it is interesting that these Western teachers costumes are very modest where that's not Not necessarily the case with Indian teachers.
Krishnamacharya, Iyengar, and Joyce were frequently photographed wearing very little at all, at least earlier in their lives.
Yeah, that's true.
Looking at the backdrop of Hiddleman's boudoir.
Boudoir is such a great word.
There are these sort of jolly, like, window screens in the background that are a nonspecific gesture toward Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
What does jolly mean?
Is that the shape of the arch way of the opening?
It's the type of window screen.
So it's like the type of windows where it's like it's kind of carved out in sort of like almost filigree kind of pattern.
Got it.
OK.
But yeah, it's interesting that this video was titled Yoga for Health, meaning that the priority for this video was to sell yoga as an exercise method rather than a part of like a spiritual practice originating in India.
But the producers still felt a need to make that gesture toward Indian culture as a marketing tactic.
I mean, like, once you take the spiritual practice out of yoga, does a white appeal to authenticity really matter?
Well, I mean, health and wellness marketing, I think, has always been so thin in terms of the evidence that it offers for its claims that I really wonder whether it could have survived without the Orientalist mystification.
Because at the same time that Hiddleman is making this show, Jack LaLanne is promoting a much more all-American aesthetic through, like, gold gym-type imagery and pulling trucks and swimming across Tokyo Harbor, pulling boats behind him and his teeth.
And his pitch is, like, strength and manliness and, you know, the juice tiger and...
You don't appeal to the mysteries of brown bodies if those are your goals.
But if your goal is transcendence and you're going to code that in flexibility and a kind of mysterious sexuality that evokes the divine feminine and masculine, then yeah, you've got to make sure that you have the sitars strumming in the background, you want to button up your Nehru jacket nice and tight, and, you know, you go for those window screens.
If you're trying to be a good ally at the same time that you're trying to cultivate a yoga practice, this is where things get really uncomfortable because it's like, why is it necessary to have a bunch of white people in a room surrounded by the aesthetics of the South Asian subcontinent?
And it's uncomfortable going in both directions because one of the remedies to the cultural appropriation issue is an appeal to those white liberal practitioners to become more respectful of or cognizant of Specifically Hindu culture.
And so there can be sometimes a tacit encouragement to go even farther with that.
But to do it better.
To be better than Indra Devi was at being Indra Devi.
Do you know what I mean?
It's very difficult to figure out the remedy.
Okay, I'll give Indra Devi this.
I don't think anybody's gonna be better at being Indra Devi than Indra Devi is.
Right, okay.
Okay, all right, so that is Hiddleman.
Now, the next thing that we've got isn't an icon, but it is certainly iconic, and that is, what have we got?
We have Lululemon leggings.
All right, let's go.
If you Google, when were yoga pants invented?
Google will tell you that it was 1997 by Chip Wilson, who founded Lululemon.
But like, give me a break.
Chip Wilson did not invent soft, tight workout pants.
As we've seen, Westerners have been working out in clothes exactly like this since at least the early 20th century.
But Chip Wilson did actually invent being a very particular kind of West Coast asshole, we have to say that.
Yeah, I think that predates Wilson.
Yeah, okay, good point.
But yeah, no, Chip Wilson's actual contribution here is just calling them yoga pants.
Wow, cha-ching!
Yeah, well, yes, unfortunately.
But yeah, calling them yoga pants and aligning workout leggings with yoga right at the time that yoga was being mainstreamed in the United States.
For the first 19 years of his career, Wilson founded and ran a company called West Beach Snowboard that made apparel for snowboarders, skateboarders, and surfers.
So his niche in the clothing industry has always been apparel for alternative modes of fitness, and I guess that he saw market trends turning toward yoga, saw an opportunity in the apparel market, and struck while the iron was hot.
By positioning these leggings as yoga pants, quote unquote, and not just workout leggings, Yoga was able to create the impression that there's a certain uniform you have to wear to do yoga correctly and Lululemon can provide it.
Like at a time when a lot of people in the United States didn't, would have been asking like, okay, what do I wear for this?
Like, what do I do?
What am I supposed to, like, what's the right thing?
In fact, I asked that exact question, not in 1997, but it was around, I don't know, it was around, well it might have been actually, around 1999 or something like that because I walked into Downward Dog Yoga Center in downtown Toronto.
And the teacher at the front of the room was Scott Davis.
He's still here.
He's still doing his thing.
And he was wearing shorts that looked like they were super comfortable.
And I can't remember what I was wearing at the time, but it was not comfortable.
And I went up to him after class and I said, can you just tell me what am I supposed to wear?
Where did you get these things?
And he kind of looked a little bit bashful, a little bit like, I kind of don't want to tell you that it comes from this store down the street that's a little bit stylish, it's a little bit expensive, but it's called Lululemon.
And that's how it started!
Exactly!
Yeah, that's exactly how, that was Chip Wilson's magic.
He was standing there over our shoulders, whispering in our ears, and helping us connect over this new way of looking at our own bodies in Luan fabric.
That does not surprise me one bit.
But yeah, I mean, like I started practice, the first time I practiced yoga was maybe around this time, maybe like 99, 2000, something like that.
But yeah, by that point, it was already just like, Lululemon had taken everything over.
It was just known, like what you wear for yoga is yoga pants.
Right.
So.
It happened overnight.
It was a coup, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, so the other thing that happens though is that, you know, it tags these pants or Wilson, you know, makes this happen and then ends up sort of eliding his product as into a sense of the yoga sensibility.
That you could then signal throughout your day.
It wasn't just that you were going to go to yoga, but that you could, you know, take that vibe and those apparent values around, you know, self-work and discipline and so on outside of your actual practice space.
Yeah, you know, that is true.
And I thought about it as we were, you know, putting the research together here, but I kind of cut it out mainly because I'm hesitant to criticize anybody for signaling a sensibility through their choice of clothing.
That's really just cultivating personal style.
And frankly, I would be a hypocrite for criticizing it.
I walk around in literally Vitali jewelry and these punk rock looking Lockwood 51 shirts that say stuff like, only queers go to heaven.
Because I want it to be obvious what kind of person you're going to get when you talk to me.
That critique can be a slippery slope into misogyny, especially since it's mainly aimed at women and the notion that caring about what your clothes say about you is vapid is deeply tied to the fact that caring about fashion is seen as feminine, shallow, insubstantial.
So I have to say, like, I'm low-key busted on exactly that because it's true that I can't actually think of a men's analog in the same way.
I mean, currently, John Fetterman is saying that, you know, his cargo pants and hoodie are as appropriate for representing his Senate constituency as they would be in an Allentown bar or on football night.
But that's different because he's actually rejecting a kind of social expectation And men have the capital to do that, and that's different from revisioning a social expectation.
Yeah, Jon Fetterman does that, and it makes the news for like maybe a week, but like AOC wears a tax the rich dress to the Met Gala, which is also squarely within her constituency, and people on the right still won't shut up about it.
Right.
Back to yoga pants.
As far as like the justifications for like having yoga pants be quote-unquote yoga pants, there's a line of thinking that I saw when I was researching that goes that yoga pants are more practical than baggy pants for yoga practice because they allow teachers to correct posture more easily.
But in my opinion, that argument falls apart with any scrutiny.
First of all, 85% of yoga practitioners practice at home.
And even if you're doing an online class, the teacher isn't really going to be able to see your posture well or correct it.
Second, the practice of yoga evolved over centuries without the availability of lycra, spandex, nylon, luan.
So it seems anachronistic to frame yoga pants as the optimal attire for yoga.
And third, look, Most people aren't wearing yoga pants to do yoga.
They're wearing them as comfy pants to do everything in, including conventional strength and cardio workouts.
And that's great for Lululemon, obviously, because hey, now you're top of the line, $100 plus moisture wicking yoga pants can also be used for literally every other activity you could possibly do, which is a better selling point than dropping over $100 for one pair of pants for one single activity.
So here we can.
Observe a market motivation for blurring the lines between yoga's spiritual practice and yoga's workout.
There's something ugly too about, and sexist, and it played into a kind of rape culture and rape apologism within the yoga world that I want to point out about this claim that, you know, the teacher, if they saw you in a skin-tight piece of clothing, that they'd be able to correct your posture more easily.
That became a kind of doorway into the normalization of the teacher's gaze being sort of primary in assessing not only the health but also the biomorality of the student.
Because especially in disciplines that are influenced by the very precise technical aspects of something like the Iyengar yoga method, The teacher is beholden to look extremely closely at very, very small parts of the body to see whether or not they are doing the right thing.
And there's this obsession in a lot of the discourse around what are you doing with your thighs and your groin and your pelvic floor and all of this stuff.
That, you know, the yoga pant actually, as we'll discuss a little bit further, is actually going to expose.
And so there's something very weird going on there too that goes along with a kind of, you know, a tacit sexualization within the culture that has some really terrible outcomes.
I think that you're able to speak to that a little bit better than I am.
I have always practiced yoga at home and it has always been Frankly, really difficult for me to wear yoga pants, workout leggings, whatever, to the gym or to a practice space or anything like that.
I typically opt for baggier clothes when I go out.
So I have never been in a position where a teacher is treating my body that way.
But I recall that you have had experiences that were like quite violating from stories that you've told on the podcast in the past.
I think my main thing is that We'll talk about it a little bit later.
But this sense of like, I think people's bodies deserve to have privacy.
And sometimes that privacy can be afforded in the form of baggier clothes.
Like, like, you just shouldn't have to have your the The shape, the curves of your body, the shape of your body, the lines like the, like every little thing about it, it shouldn't have to be exposed to other people or surveilled by other people all the time.
And, and that has pretty consistently been like my way of operating with like workout clothes in particular, because it's a pretty.
Intimate thing to do.
You know, you are individually, like regardless of the fact that you're in a class or whatever, you are making an individual choice.
You are individually going out to this place.
You are making the individual choice to work on your body.
And it's, it's a very intimate thing to do.
And, um, I, I don't want to feel too exposed in that environment.
And I think that the, The social pressure exerted by marketing, by style advice for fitness practitioners or whatever, there's a pressure that is exerted on women in particular to, yeah, wear leggings and bras and have that be the outfit.
Have we all stopped to consider whether that's really what we want or whether it's really necessary to wear these very revealing clothes?
And it's like not a moral judgment, just like, do you want privacy?
Because you should be able to, you should feel free to have privacy for your body while you're doing this intimate thing.
in public if you want it.
It really flips the moralism around to think of it that way.
Like privacy is a value you might have.
And it's okay if you don't.
It's okay to wear revealing clothes, but you should be able to have privacy
as a personal value and to be able to exercise it stylishly if you want to.
And that really takes the teeth out of the rape culture kind of assessment of why would it be better or why might it be beneficial to choose baggier clothing?
Yeah, it's not about like, what are you provoking others to do?
It's about are you comfortable?
Period.
Like are you personally comfortable?
Yeah, right.
So once we start talking about yoga pants as general athletic wear, we have to at least Touch on the gatekeeping around who does and who doesn't or who should and shouldn't get to wear yoga pants.
In 2013, Chip Wilson stated in an interview with Bloomberg TV that, quote, frankly, some women's bodies just actually don't work for wearing Lululemon pants.
It's really about the rubbing between the thighs, how much pressure is there over a period of time, how much they use it.
He's talking about Fat women.
Right.
Or really, not even just fat women, not skinny women.
Where the thighs touch and the specific issue is he's being asked why is the fabric breaking down or why are there so many complaints over, like there seems to be a problem with the pants, right?
Right.
And I think that it's really telling that he says, frankly, some women's bodies don't work for Lululemon.
Yeah, like that is not customer service, is it?
No, what if Lululemon pants don't work for some women?
Yeah.
But the women are the thing, Beau, I want you to understand.
We're putting the women into the pants.
That is the message.
Some women's bodies don't work for Lululemon pants.
Come on!
Yeah.
At least he makes it obvious.
Yes!
Yeah.
And then also the other specific detail was that there were sizing exclusions, right?
Because Lululemon wasn't producing anything over a size 8 or something like that.
And if they did, they sometimes like hid those items in the back of the stores or something?
Yeah, it was size 10, but yeah, close enough.
This isn't all that uncommon in apparel retail, unfortunately.
There's a famous 2004 equal employment case where Abercrombie & Fitch was found to base hiring decisions on looks, including race and fatness, and had non-white employees work in the back of the store so that customers wouldn't see them.
Wow.
So this is part of a legacy.
Yeah, and like to this day, economic reporting around yoga pants, like fat, fat phobia is so ingrained in this industry that that economic reporting around yoga pants claims that the yoga pants and apparel industry is going to grow as the rate of obesity rises, which to me reads as like this like gross little salivation over the possibility that apparel brands can bully more fat women into buying workout clothes over the next 20 years.
Oh, yeah.
Chip Wilson designed Lululemon yoga pants with bodies in mind that he believed were ideal, those being thin bodies.
Yoga pants, as such, weren't designed to specifically be functional for yoga.
They were designed to display the shape of thin bodies.
In other words, yoga pants were designed for the male gaze.
It becomes really interesting that it was the evangelicals and Catholics in a very reactionary way, of course, that pinged this part out loud, but then they flipped it into a kind of rape culture apologetics by saying that women just shouldn't wear yoga pants because it distracts the boys.
Yeah, I have such complicated feelings about this for reasons that we're about to get into.
So, to kind of...
Open up the conversation about, like, the sexualization of yoga pants.
So...
There's no real way for me to make a count of this independently, but I found a 2020 Reddit post listing 30 different not-safe-for-work subreddits dedicated to photos of women in yoga pants.
Oh.
The largest of these communities is r slash girls in yoga pants, which alongside the growth of the
Reddit user base in general, has ballooned in size from 77,000 members in July, 2013 to 1.1
million members in July, 2023. So yoga pants, let's like follow this yoga pants were designed
by a man who cares, cared what kind of women's bodies wore his skin tight pants. And they have
have gone on to become a sexual fetish for Are these like borderline illegal photos too?
of women's bodies wear them specifically for the purpose of male sexual gratification.
Are these like borderline illegal photos too like in the upskirt genre where the people who are
being photographed don't even know what's going on? I think in many cases yes. I think that Reddit
has over the past 10 years done an okay job of cracking down on non-consensual photos.
But I think that it would be...
I I think that these men mostly would have an easier time taking a picture of a woman in yoga pants for purposes of sexual gratification than absurd photos and maybe even be able to say like, oh, well, I wasn't taking a picture of of her, but I was taking a picture of the room she was in or something.
Right.
Right.
So I think it's a little bit harder to moderate for on Reddit's part.
But yeah, certainly in the past, there's been a ton of Yeah, a ton of non-consensual photos being taken.
Yeah, I think also, so it's also worth examining the market forces that have shaped the widespread adoption of yoga pants.
So when you look at Ngram's data around athleisure, you see that the term skyrockets in popularity starting in about 2011.
Some important context here is that China is the largest producer of cotton in the world, followed by India and the United States.
In 2011, the Chinese government bought up an enormous amount of cotton stock and just held it, which created a shortage of cotton worldwide that artificially increased the price of cotton textiles.
Even a small, small increase in price in a commodity is enough to cause large profit losses for clothing manufacturers.
I don't think it's necessarily a coincidence that at the same time cotton prices were skyrocketing, U.S.
apparel brands So, the Maoists are manipulating cotton markets to force Western women to overexpose themselves.
Am I getting you right?
I'm going to let you make that joke.
It's not that intentional, right?
The Chinese government is doing this to protect their own economy, but What we have here is that, like, in addition to being designed and manipulated by the male gaze, the adoption of yoga pants as normal everyday clothing has also been manipulated by Chinese politics.
Women are having decisions made for them about what to put on their bodies by people who do not have the wholeness of their personhood in mind, and in many cases, who are obsessed with making sure that women stay thin and attractive by straight men standards.
Joking aside, I want to be transparent here as a Gen X straight guy.
There was a noticeable shift in the gender time continuum with the advent of Lululemon as athleisure, but also as corporate casual.
And it seemed to happen really quickly, like overnight.
The women in my early adulthood that I had known and dated I mean they were either Catholic conservative or they were goth or they had this grunge vintage vibe in their fashion choices.
But suddenly there seemed to be a kind of yoga pants homogeneity on the streets.
And to me it was all very like nearly naked.
It was very revealing and I definitely noticed it.
And if I hadn't had any feminism on board during that time, I could have easily let all of the weird feelings I had just simmer until Jordan Peterson told me that women were actually wrong to wear yoga pants because they were mocking me or provoking me or whatever.
And I can imagine that instinctive misogynistic judgment.
Providing a certain amount of relief because it would then outsource all of my issues onto women in a way that, like, no one could resolve except Peterson.
So how do you think about a cultural moment like that?
Like, obviously, we can't all sit down and have a roundtable where women say, so we'd like to start wearing these very comfortable clothes that are kind of generated by cotton prices in China.
In more life contexts than when we're just working out.
But we'd really like for you all to not just become creepers on us.
And then, you know, the men would say, like, okay, we'll appreciate your agency with those choices and we'll celebrate your bodily freedoms in non-creepy ways.
Like, that's not gonna happen.
So... We tried.
We tried.
Okay, we tried.
You know, I guess I want to ask you, what would the right resources or policies be that would push back against this kind of culture war chaos?
Yeah, so this is the thing that I have complicated feelings about.
I do think that when it comes to like these oppressive dress codes that we saw, particularly in the era that we're talking about, you know, somewhere between the end of the 90s and like the mid 2010s, that really penalized girls for wearing yoga pants.
I think that teaching children to dress appropriately for the situation is important.
But that's because I think that clothing is a source of power and expression.
Wearing the right clothes for the situation demonstrates respect for the people around you, the same way that saying please and thank you and being a good listener does.
And when I say like, Demonstrating respect for the people around you.
I'm not saying not distracting them.
I'm saying, like, we're all here to do something.
Let's dress in a way that facilitates that and that respects the work that we're doing.
That keeps things on topic, I guess.
That keeps the subject in the foreground.
Well, no, not so much that.
So I think that leans into the distraction territory.
Okay.
It's not about that.
It's about...
Maybe I'm a little bit like too invested in objects here and too invested in, well, we all know at this point that I'm too invested in objects.
Right.
But I, I think that the clothing that you wear for the task that you're doing should demonstrate your attitude toward that task.
It's not about keeping on topic.
It's about how important is this to you and then dress for that.
Right.
So you wouldn't go to a wedding, hopefully in a track suit.
Unless it's that kind of wedding, you know?
Right.
Or you wouldn't show up at work in lingerie.
It's not that there's anything wrong with lingerie.
You know what?
Maybe no.
Wouldn't show up to work in pajamas.
Because pajamas are for relaxing in, you know?
And work is for working.
So you want to wear clothes that respect the work that you're doing.
It's about having respect for your activity, for your time, and for the way that you choose to spend it.
I think that clothing are one way to get yourself in the right mindset for giving something your all, basically.
I think that's the thing.
It's like, whatever you're doing, like if you're gonna do something that's difficult,
like school or work, you should be giving it your like close to 100%, you know,
the best effort that you can.
And wearing the right clothes for that can put you in the right mindset to do that.
And pajamas aren't conducive to it.
And I don't think that yoga pants are either.
Let me give an example from outside of the yoga wear discourse.
Um, I.
I attended an alternative high school in Toronto in the early 90s.
No, it was the late 80s actually.
And being an alternative school, people wore whatever they wanted and it was extremely free.
And one of my fellow students was Cory Doctorow.
And the tech writer.
And he at the time wore outfits that were like punk and goth and put together with more like safety pins than fabric.
He had like really long spindly dreadlocks.
And I think that had he not been in an alternative school, that his dress would not have suited the task at hand, or it would not have expressed a respect for the work that he was about to do.
However, in the school that he was in, it was exactly the right thing for him to wear to engage with the English literature teacher who he loved and who loved him.
It was exactly the right thing to wear to honor the actual Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
It's about the right clothes for the situation, yeah.
And to me, it's an issue of being respectful and polite, but a lot of people don't respect clothing.
They don't respect fashion and style.
They think it's a stupid pursuit and that it's vain or a waste of time.
So when they get this feeling that someone's wearing the wrong clothes for the situation, they resort to irrelevant justifications like, you're distracting the boys.
And it's almost always aimed at girls.
I mean, at least like when we're talking, when it's a national conversation, it's always about girls.
It was aimed at me in middle school and high school.
Like, never mind the fact that the boys are walking around wearing big Johnson shirts or mimicking their favorite D generation X wrestlers.
And like, they did that whole, like, you know, they would like cross their arms in the X and go like suck it or whatever toward their laps.
They would do that toward the girls.
Like, never mind that.
If I so much as were like, I would like, Get like a fishnet shirt and wear it over a tank top and I would have to be sent to the gym to get a sweaty t-shirt to wear for the rest of the day.
I wasn't I wasn't making any explicit like vulgar remarks or anything on my clothing or with my behavior.
So like in my opinion no skin tight and revealing clothing isn't the right clothing for a learning environment but it's Inappropriate for the same reason that big Johnson shirts or tracksuits or pajamas are inappropriate because they don't communicate respect for the task at hand or the people who are trying to learn alongside you, which is, again, not to say that you are distracting them, just that, like, when you are doing something with people, you should express respect for those people.
So if a dress code isn't going to ban big Johnson shirts, which I think a lot of schools have, thankfully, but if they're not going to ban track suits or pajamas, then they shouldn't be concerned about yoga pants either.
In my opinion, of all those options, I would rather that kids wear yoga pants because it's at least possible to dress them up stylishly and maybe convert them into an outfit that's appropriate for school.
They can be corporate casual.
They can be like higher learning ed casual.
Or like, I don't know, wear some yoga pants with like an oversized sweater like a cute oversized sweater dress or something
like that and some keds like that'd be cute you know and and that's fine it's
comfortable but it's it's respectful um right i i think
to go on a tangent i think everyone deserves a sense of style
I know that people who are listening are going to think that I'm crazy for this, but I believe everyone deserves to exercise personal style the same way I believe everyone deserves to dance and sing and create art and write poetry.
Style is deeply embedded in our psyches.
It's literally a biblical concern, and not just because of Leviticus and the rules around clothing, but because when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, they discovered shame and
had to cover themselves. And that is the origin of our like of like a lot of Western thinking
about clothing. And that's not even to speak of all the ritual garments that have existed in every
culture and every religion that have symbolic meaning that is like deeply personally and
culturally important.
Clothing has powerful human meaning.
It is as complex and beautiful and human in art as any other.
And the idea that like clothing and style are trivial blows my mind.
I mean, we have to wear clothes by law.
It's important enough that we legislate around it.
And I guess what bothers me is that girls are stuck in this double bind where they want and deserve to have a sense of personal style and to present themselves well, but they don't decide what their culture or their context thinks is stylish.
For the most part, it's horror show creeps like Sam Levine, the showrunner of Euphoria, who determine what constitutes style for teenage girls.
And then, when girls follow the culture, a culture that adults decided and created for them, those same adults turn around and say, how dare you listen to us?
How dare you distract the boys?
And how dare you embody, if they're the creators, our own sort of fetishes?
Like, the fact that Sam Levine is able to make the television shows that he does and exploit the women who act on those television shows the way that he does, I think that is, and that he's paid well by A24 and HBO to do it, I think that it reflects some complacency among all adults in the culture.
Some expectation that, yeah, that's what teenage girls are supposed to wear.
So then they follow what we tell them to do, and then we turn around and say, like, What are you doing?
We're setting them up to fail.
Teenage girls are a scapegoat.
We don't need to be talking about how to punish girls for the clothes they wear.
We need to be talking about what we did to influence the decisions they make that worry us.
Like I said, I just yearn for women to have the choice culturally to not display their bodies if they don't want to and still have it be stylish.
I think I think we're approaching one of those moments.
Gen Z is really into baggy, comfortable clothes, and runways right now are full of boxy, oversized garments.
Billie Eilish is a really great example of someone who has a distinct, compelling sense of style, while also prioritizing keeping the human body she lives in from being constantly commodified.
So, we are definitely going to clip out your rhapsody there and put it on blast.
Cool.
So, Beau, I think what we've learned is that there are real consequences to this intersection between fashion, sexualization, and also gig work.
And I just want to focus on that last bit for a moment, which is, you know, there's this great organization in the UK called the Yoga Teachers Union.
And they point out that sexualization, objectification and harassment in the yoga world is reflective of basic societal misogyny, but it's also intensified by the economy, by gig work instability.
There are incentives for workers and also, you know, aspiring teachers within the yoga world to increase their professional capital Through performance, through aesthetics, and some of these thornier issues are going to then come to the fore.
When we're talking about yoga wear, especially for women, we're talking about this endless paradox between agency and objectification, and that paradox is always like amplified and confounded by the demands of capitalism.
So I guess my last question for you is, Do you have any general thoughts or advice for how people, like everyone, but maybe particularly young people, as they'll be setting the zeitgeist going forward, how they become smarter, safer, and more at ease with all of this stuff?
So, this might feel general, but my advice is to take it seriously.
What you wear really does matter, and it matters in so many different ways.
Where the textiles were sourced, what the worker who made the garment was paid and how they were treated at their job,
what chemical waste was produced in its manufacturing, whether the company you bought it from pays its employees a
living wage and who profits the most from your purchase, where you're going to wear it, who's gonna see you in it,
what it's going to communicate to them, whether that communication is an accurate reflection of who
you are, whether you're comfortable both physically and emotionally in what you wear,
what you do with it when it's ripped or stained or you don't want it anymore, all of that matters.
All of that exists in the garments in your closet.
There's so much meaning in these objects that so many people just toss around and refuse to take seriously.
And there are all these human beings and their real lives wrapped up in them.
So it deserves your respect.
Please do think about it.
And also, leave girls and women the fuck alone.
Beau, thank you so much.
That was Yoga Drag Race Season 1.
I don't think we have a clear winner here.
You're going to come back for Season 2 in a couple of months.
Who is going to be drag racing then?
Well, I believe Elena Broward, Guru Jagat, and perhaps Rodney Yee are on the table.
So, may the best yoga drag queen win!
Thank you, Beau.
Thanks, Matthew.
We've had some important exercise.
We've had the charging breath with the complete breath for revitalization and for helping to charge you.
And we've had a number of techniques including the Cobra and the eye exercises and the neck movements for relieving tension.
So I'm sure that right now you're in very good condition to continue on with whatever work you may have to do.
Have a very healthy happy weekend friends and Monday will start the day or I should say the week right with a great many yoga stretches.
Until Monday then, this is Richard Hittleman and Diane wishing you all of the wonderful
new life that's going to be yours through Yoga for Health.
This has been Yoga for Health with Richard Hittleman, the nation's leading exponent of
yoga exercises.
If you feel you've benefited from Mr. Hiddleman's new way to help beauty and a better life, tell your friends.
