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.

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The difference between historical fashion and historical clothing

Would be interested in your rant on this topic :)

I. Just. Am so tired of "historical women's fashion is impractical and uncomfortable."

Everybody in every culture in history wears the clothing that makes sense for them in their place in culture and time! Sometimes the purpose is to show off that they can afford to wear deeply impractical clothing (this is usually where 'fashion' comes in.) But most of the time, even with middle-upper class everyday wear, if you think it's impractical it's just because you don't understand the differences between what seems practical in your culture and theirs - pretty much every "impractical" daily wear item that gets picked up by serious re-enactors who make it in the original materials and live in it in close to the original spaces is discovered to actually be quite useful and comfortable given the constraints of available materials. (I have always loved long wool skirts, but I didn't realize how much I needed them until I spent a year in a house with an unheated, uninsulated bathroom.)

Also the vast majority of all clothing through history is not fashionable! Some of it may have been fashionable when new, but most of that probably wasn't worn as everyday wear by everyday people. I have an actual late Victorian/early Edwardian dress passed down by my ancestresses, and I can't really date it any better than that because it's just kind of .... a dress. (It's black, so it was probably kept around as emergency mourning wear until my grandmother used it for cosplay in the 1930s, much like the 90s-vintage plain black dress in my closet.)

Hand sewn. The skirt is cut in a way that's obviously more about ease of piecing and sewing than about making a certain silhouette (it's pretty much indistinguishable in cut from the modern 'easy sew' pattern we used for my cat show skirt a couple weeks ago) and can be shaped all different ways depending on underlayers. And the blouse is the 'pigeon front' style that's often described as part of the super-impractical-evidence-of-women's-fashion-being-terrible "Gibson Girl" style, but it's actually super-practical to wear because it looks basically the same regardless of what kind of corsetry (or not) is under it, there's room to store handkerchiefs in the sleeves like grandma taught me, and I can add a hidden expander really easily if I don't want to bother cinching my waist in. And it's got a century's worth of repairs, patches and alterations on it. That's what historical clothing should be like, not copying things out of fashion plates and formal portraits. (Like, there's nothing wrong with an interest in fashion if an interest in fashion is what you're interested in, but that's not an interest in what the material culture of clothing actually involved for most people.)

This sounds a little like how the Arts and Crafts Movement (William Morris and crew) would blame 'hideous' prints on technology, when technology wasn't ready to print fabric in so many colors. Actual people were making that fabric the hard way. Technology was involved, in the sense that if you habitually hand down clothes to your servants, you have to be current not to look like a servant. And a way to do that was to pay for the more expensive, conspicuous consumption of other people's lives.

until my grandmother used it for cosplay in the 1930s

OMG wait what, your grandma?

I have photos of her wearing that exact dress to her hometown's bicentennial History Days in 1932! With a group of friends in very eclectic historical costumes, at least one of which I swear is dressed as a steampunk mad scientist (although it might just be a twenty-year-old motoring costume.)

Presumably that's why that particular dress was still in her closet seventy years later when it came to me. Just in case she needed it for more dress-up, and then before long it was too old to just toss. (I have some of my mother's outfits that were about thirty years old when I first borrowed them for costume parties, too. Still in my closet just in case!)

....I love your Nana.

I would love to see those photos! (Or any photos of the dress.)

You are in luck! I have them up in an old post from way ages ago!

Apparently I misremembered the dates on the cosplay but that just makes it better. :P

Ooh, thanks for linking these; how wonderful to have provenance of past cosplay use!