From the book Killer Style: How Fashion Has Injured, Maimed and Murdered Through History by Alison Matthews David and Serah-Marie McMahon. Available April 15th, 2019.

Restrictive clothing, poisonous products, fake health trends, and unsafe working conditions have a long history of fashion victims. Here are just some of the ways fashion has been seriously dangerous for your health.

1. Death By White Lead Make-Up
Ancient Romans were pretty creative with their skincare. They dabbed mixtures of chicken fat and onions onto pimples. They tried using the ashes of fish bones to remove freckles. And the crocodile excrement face mask was extremely popular. Compared to these concoctions a foundation made of lead, called ceruse, must have seemed downright tame.

To make it, lead was soaked in vinegar then dried, leaving a remarkably opaque white powder. Lead is one of the densest metals in existence, yet is soft, melts easily, and clings fantastically to skin. It feels smooth and shows color brightly. In other words, lead seemed like an ideal substance for cosmetics. For thousands of years ceruse was liberally applied to eyes, mouths, and skin. Ceruse may have given a smooth, blemish-free look, but it causes skin to age rapidly and erupts with sores. Which, of course, requires more ceruse to cover up these new imperfections. All the while, lead built up in bones and slowly destroyed nearly every organ system in the body.

Even once these side effects were well known, ceruse remained popular for centuries. When Queen Elizabeth I was twenty-nine years old, she survived smallpox noticeably scarred. For the rest of her life, she painted a thick layer of ceruse on her face, neck, and hands—a practice many believe hastened her demise in 1603.

2. Death by Tight Skirt

Sack-race for hobble-skirt wearers or “La course d’entravées,” Illustrated London News, August 13, 1910. Collection of Alison Matthews David


In 1908, Edith Berg was the first woman to fly in a plane. But when she climbed aboard the Wright Brothers’ Flyer, its open-air cockpit meant her large skirt was sure to fly up in her face. Undeterred, she grabbed a length of twine and tied it around her knees.

The unusual silhouette of the last-minute fix became a hot trend. Women started wearing narrow skirts cinched at the knees or even the ankles. Because it effectively shackled its wearers, the new dress shape was named after a device used to keep animals from running away: the hobble.

The style made for a stunted saunter. In 1910 at a Paris racecourse, a horse (which ironically wasn’t properly hobbled) escaped and bolted into a crowd of spectators. One woman, slowed down by her fashionable hobble skirt was unable to get out of the way in time and was tragically trampled to death. The next year, the hobble skirt of an eighteen-year-old girl caused her to trip while stepping over a gate on a bridge, and she fell into the icy water below. It turned out the hobble wasn’t very good for swimming either. She drowned.

3. Death By Flannelette Pajamas

Perkin’s Non-Flam flannelette has only a tiny burn at the hem after 2 minutes, whereas ordinary flannelette has been almost completely incinerated in half the time (60 seconds), fold-out leaf in Fire Tests with Textiles: The Committee’s Report, British Fire Prevention Committee, 1910. Wellcome Library, London.

Wellcome Images

In the late Victorian era it was widely believed warmth could cure illness. Flannel manufacturers, wanting to capitalize on the textile’s ability to preserve body heat, claimed it had actual healing properties. But real flannel was expensive. In 1877 they started producing a brushed cotton that felt like flannel yet was much cheaper to make. They christened it flannelette. Now, they could make even more money selling this fake health trend to folks who could not afford the real thing.

Except flannel is made of a tightly woven wool, which is an animal protein and virtually fireproof. Flannelette, on the other hand, is soft, fluffy, made from plant fiber and instantly flammable. Working-class homes relied on open fire for both heating and cooking, and typical cramped quarters meant kids in their cozy flannelette pajamas were usually no more than a few feet from open flame. Over a five-year period, 1,816 children caught fire and died in flannelette in England alone. Young boys’ pajama styles were fitted, which significantly decreased their chances of catching fire. Girls were less lucky. Their loose, layered dresses provided a perfect fuse, and three-quarters of the victims were girls.

4. Death By The Color Green

| Green silk dress that tested positive for arsenic, 1860s, Ryerson Fashion Research Collection 2014.07.406 ABC, Gift of Suddon-Cleaver Collection. Photo by Suzanne Petersen.


Nineteen-year-old Matilda Scheurer worked long days at a London factory constructing wreaths of artificial flowers for fashionable ladies to wear in their hair. From morning ‘til night, she dusted green powdered pigment onto fake leaves with her bare hands. And on November 20, 1861, that green would kill her.

The press reported Matilda’s demise in all its gruesome details: Her fingernails and the whites of her eyes had turned green. She’d told her doctor that everything she looked at appeared green, then she vomited green water and finally stopped breathing.

Her case caused public outrage, and finally a source was found. It turns out a single headdress contained enough arsenic to poison twenty people. A green gown could easily contain nine hundred grains of arsenic and shed sixty grains over the course of an evening of dancing. It just takes inhalation of four or five grains to kill the average adult.

Once its lethal potential went public, there was mass fear of everything green. Even after a nontoxic green dye was invented, no one wanted to wear it. It wasn’t until 1863 when French empress Eugénie wore a brilliant-green gown to the opera did people come around to the new, safe hue named nouveau vert.

5. Death By Tulle Skirts

Detail of ballerinas including Gale Sisters on fire at the Continental Theatre, September14, 1861. “Fire at the Ballet,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 28, 1861, 312–13. Courtesy of the House DividedProject at Dickinson College, USA.


One September evening in 1861, the audience in a crowded Philadelphia theater waited impatiently for a ballet performance to begin. Little did they know tragedy was about to strike. That night, fourteen-year-old ballerina Cecilia Gale and her three sisters were rushing around backstage, getting ready to dance. They put on tutus made of tulle (a material newly made by machine and widely available for the first time) worn in practically weightless layers that made dancing look like floating.

In Cecilia’s haste, her large tutu brushed against a flame. Seconds later she was on fire. Her fellow dancers all rushed to help her, but anytime one got close, their costumes were also set ablaze. In the end six ballerinas perished, including all four sisters.

French authorities tried to stop ballerinas from burning by putting a law into place requiring all costumes to be coated with alum, borax, and boric acid. The chemical compound prevented the tulle from catching fire, but it also gave it a yellowed, stiff, and dingy look.

Beloved ballerina Emma Livry refused to wear the treated tutus. During performances, stage floors were lined with gas footlights so the flickering flames could draw attention to dancers’ legs. On November 15, 1862, as she waited to dance a dress rehearsal, her skirt got too close to a footlight. Instantly, she was engulfed in flames three times her height. She ran onstage, but by the time they put her out with a blanket, she had already suffered burns over 40 percent of her body. She died months later in terrible pain.

6. Death By Denim
Invented in 1873 by Jacob Davis, blue jeans were an instant hit with cowboys, miners, and dock workers because they were so hard to destroy. A hundred years later, jeans would be valued less for their ability not to fade, and more for how good they looked once they were faded. Designers accelerated deterioration by washing the pants with acid or stones, and in the early 2000s, they discovered sandblasting. Originally invented to clean the outside of stone buildings, the technique could also rapidly age brand-new denim by literally blasting it with sand from a hose. The process was fast, cheap, and effective. It is also frequently fatal.


Faysal Demir was only twenty when he left his small Turkish village of Taşlıçay in 2002. Jean manufacturing was booming in Istanbul; the industry was selling $2 billion worth of the product every year. This incredible demand meant jobs for the country’s desperate workers, who flocked from all over to the big city. Demir's eight brothers soon followed.

Given only a simple and wholly ineffectual facemask as protection, Demir was instructed to sandblast denim daily in an enclosed and poorly ventilated room. By 2004, he was beginning to feel unwell. Tired and short of breath, he complained of a cough that would not go away.

What he couldn’t know was just recently two fellow jean workers, teenagers also from Taşlıçay, had sought medical treatment about their own breathing troubles. The doctors provided the first of what would become a common diagnosis: silicosis.

The sand you find on a beach contains tiny silica grains invisible to the eye. When inhaled, these particles damage the lungs. The more sand is inhaled, and the longer it’s inhaled, the harder it is to breathe. Eventually, breathing becomes impossible.

After sandblasting jeans eleven hours a day for three years, the teenagers had advanced cases of silicosis. Doctors would confirm thousands more, with three hundred of those cases—including all nine of the Demir brothers—in tiny Taşlıçay. The Turkish government finally banned denim sandblasting in 2009, but hundreds still die every year, including Faysal Demir in December of 2017.

Serah-Marie McMahon founded seminal independent magazine WORN and edited The WORN Archive: A Fashion Journal about the Art, Ideas, and History of What We Wear published by Drawn & Quarterly. Currently, she sells, edits, writes, and breathes children’s books in Toronto.

Dr. Alison Matthews David is Associate Professor in the School of Fashion at Ryerson University in Toronto. Her 2015 book Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present looked at how fashion harmed its makers and wearers by transmitting disease, leaching toxins, and causing accidents. In 2018, she co-founded a new open-access online journal called Fashion Studies.

Text and images excerpted and modified from Killer Style: How Fashion Has Injured, Maimed, and Murdered Through History by Alison Matthews-David and Sarah-Marie McMahon, illustrated by Gillian Wilson, published by Owlkids Books, © 2019.