Dressed: The History of Fashion · Dressed Media

'Tis the Season III: Holiday Gift Hits (and Misses) (Dressed Classic)

January 7, 2026·40 min·3 clips

April describes wearing Lucille Duff Gordon's 1917 black satin dress with a diamond chain and a Bulgari snake watch that sold for $350,000.

The party begins after an archive style introduction. April and Cassidy ease into their third annual holiday gift giving ritual, with April explaining that she has been stashing possible presents all year. The mood is warm, a little sly, and ready for trouble. A callback to Mimi's plant dye lesson brings back the point that textiles can get chemically weird. Then the fingernails take over. Cassidy gets a December 18, 1922 item about airplane dope being used as a nail polish fad in England. At first, the pitch almost works. The polish promises a shine like sun on marble and enough staying power to last for weeks. Then comes the catch: it smells like damp rubber, so users are advised to soak their fingers in perfume afterward. April ties it to last year's dry cleaning product, the one that had to be mixed with gas to clean gloves. It is a ridiculous gift, but not just a random one. The joke works because beauty keeps borrowing things from industry and pretending the fumes are part of the glamour. Cassidy keeps the gag gift energy going with a Life Magazine item she places in 1948. The old ads bring in Santa Claus selling cigarettes, Campbell's soup, and other holiday goods. The browsing is half the pleasure. These ads are not treated like cute wallpaper. April and Cassidy poke at what they say about gift giving, fashion, and the season's odd little sales pitches. The format stays easy: one host offers a strange object, the other reacts, and fashion history turns into a holiday game. By the end, after rubber smells, gas adjacent cleaning, and ads with too much confidence, the sanest gift left is probably a fashion history book from an independent bookseller.

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