melannen | (no subject)

Things I am not posting about this week:

1. Brexit
2. Guardian fandom, slash as an abstract concept, and the difference between queercoding, queerbaiting, representation and tokenism, and how that has played out across media and cultures in the last twenty-five years
3. The difficulty inherent in switching constantly between Guardian liveblogs and Guardian episode recaps ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
4. How it looks like I'm going to end up having to dig out my old Mike Gravel for President merch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
5. The difference between historical fashion and historical clothing and why it gets my goat when people erase the difference
6. My current project, inspired by the search tips post, of going through my entire 600 pages of logged-in AO3 history to bookmark and tag stuff I want to hang on to

I am not writing posts about them, but feel free to ask me anyway, the rants are on tap.

I did, however, post to

fictional_fans about what types of fanfic are good for readers who don't know the canon, so you should go there to talk about that.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Is the gap between historical fashion and historical clothing the gap between appearance and function?

More or less? (If I'd fully thought it through I'd've posted about it.) But the precipitating thing was a piece I caught on NPR yesterday where someone was talking about historical womens' sporting clothing and said something like "the 1920s were the first time women could wear clothes for sports that actually took freedom of movement into account" and I was just like. No. The 1920s were maybe the first time in a few decades where women didn't have to choose between high fashion and practicality, but if you think the vast majority of women who went skating in the 19th century were wearing high-fashion single-purpose 'skating costumes' right out of the fashions plates, you are very very wrong. Like. Most historical womens' fashion is impractical, uncomfortable, and unhealthy. But most modern womens' fashion is impractical, uncomfortable, and unhealthy. If you are teaching a social narrative based on the idea that most women wear things out of the fashion magazines most of the time... you need to rethink your narrative. Most women, most of the time, through most of history, have worn the most comfortable and practical things they can get away with and still keep their jobs. As I am doing today! And is is nothing that ever appeared in a fashion plate let me tell you,

This sounds a lot like my rant about historical marriage choice and class.

Honestly, I could probably adapt it to any number of popular historical narratives on the theme "the way people did things in the past was inherently worse than the way we do things now". The historical marriage rant is a classic though!

(Even something like slavery - yeah, the way the slaveholders did things was inherently worse, obvs., but, like, the enslaved people - of whom there were many, many more than the slave owners - actually did pretty amazing stuff within the constraints they had, and I'd rather treat them as the default people ....)

I think my favorite by which I mean most hated running theme here is, "...poor women [who are anywhere up to ninety-nine point nine percent of women depending on period] were not subject to these restrictions, but are not within the scope of this work."

Like, if non-elite women don't veil in your period, women in general mostly don't veil. Likewise picking their own spouses, working for a living, leaving the house by themselves, traveling alone, and whatever else it is Women Don't Do.

(Like, Melania Trump's life probably resembles Random Medieval Noblewoman's life waaaay more than either resembles mine, and that's not a coincidence!)

Ugh, yes.

I also like the ones that run along the lines of "five different laws forbidding this were passed in ten years, so clearly, nobody ever did it and it was taboo in the culture." Uh... that's not how that works. If people aren't doing it en masse, you don't have to constantly pass new laws about it.

As we all know, cultures which frequently prosecuted people for gay sex had no gay people because of their strong taboo; cultures which rarely enforced their laws against gay sex had no gay people because if they did they'd have been arresting them; and cultures without laws against gay sex had no gay people because if they did, SOMEONE would have objected, right?

"the 1920s were the first time women could wear clothes for sports that actually took freedom of movement into account"

HAHAHAHAHAHA

did that person never see a Jane Austen period accurate movie costume or

The moment I learned that the reason Austen characters change their clothes to go to dinner, go walking, or receive visitors was because otherwise they just basically stayed in pajamas all the time was the moment I became a true Austen fan. :D

And Empire gowns: comfy! Flattering! Pretty!

....of course in the famous awful P&P adaptation with Olivier? I think they re-use the GWTW dresses. Oof.

The Empire gowns actually had less range of motion in some ways than the earlier/later ones because of the narrower skirts, but they made up for it in other ways!