#Summer of 1926

[lifewithaview]

Louisa Binder in Hotel Portofino (2022) First Impressions

S1E1

Italian Riviera in the summer of 1926. At the newly opened Hotel Portofino, owner Bella Ainsworth is already short of both money and staff. Her guests prove to be difficult to please. And the country's political development, led by Mussolini, does not make it any easier either. Bella's aristocratic husband is obsessed with arranging a favorable marriage for his son Lucian, all in order to secure the family's property and to be able to continue his extravagant lifestyle.

*The screen debut of Louisa Binder.

[rabbitcruiser]

The US 66 was established on November 11, 1926.  

[aheathen-conceivably]

My Dearest Zelda,

The time since I returned to Henford has been full of both joy and sorrow. Young Summer is pregnant again, and I have never quite seen your brother so excited. He is such a dear with his first born, content to play as though he were a child himself.

Yet he and Summer are so diligent with this old farm, seemingly endlessly content by their freedom to work outside and be with eachother whenever they please. I have found that I cannot work as well as I once could, so their dedication to this land brings me much joy.

However, not all has been well here in England, and it is at times like these that I miss your calm smile and your beautiful voice. My dear friend Elaine has passed away on her farm. I was there with her, surrounded by our Webber cousins at the place you all loved so much growing up. She is at peace now, but I can’t help but feel as though I have lost my last confidante.

With her son in laws’ growing business in Windenburg, they have decided to sell old Webber farm. It saddens me to think of Wallace and Virginia playing there as children, or your father and my uncle humming while working the fields. But time must march on, and new families come and go where old memories were made.

With every passing day, the burden of memory feels heavier upon my shoulders. Since Elaine’s funeral, I have taken to going to the graveyard on sunny days. She is buried not far from your father and Rosella, who both slumber there amidst the dappling of oak leaves.

I suppose it is not very English of me, but sometimes I sit near your father’s grave and talk quietly to him. At first I felt a bit foolish, but now, it is as though part of him is still here with me. I do wonder if he can hear me and if there is any remnant of him left in this land that he loved so much. I do not think of myself as superstitious, but I cannot help but hope that he does remain in some way, if only so that we may be together for even a moment more.

How is your little one? The photo that we took together is my greatest treasure. I keep it on my writing desk next to a portrait of your father and I on our wedding day. It is strange to think of just how young we were then, younger even than you and your Antoine are now.

I often look at these photographs and think of how your father would have loved his grandchildren, none of whom he ever got to meet. Even thinking of their names together brings me much joy; Oliver and Violette, what a lovely pair the two of them would have been.

Please write to Summer if you have time. It would be nice for her to have a correspondence other than an old woman like myself.

With all of my love, your mother,

Florence Darlington

[loverboybrightsideghost]

[ID: A digital redraw of the “Ah yes. Me. My girlfriend. And her 500 dollar 4 foot tall mareep.” meme with the characters Aziraphale and Crowley from the tv show Good Omens. Aziraphale and Crowley are in bed next to each other, with Crowley facing away from the viewer. His black Bentley is next to his side of the bed. Aziraphale is looking straight upwards with an unamused expression. End ID]

this is all i could think of in that scene where crowley is baby-talking his car

[dreaminterlude]

on rilke, from susan sontag’s introduction to letters: summer 1926

[artdecoandmodernist]

1926 Gerda Wegener (Danish, 1885-1940) On the banks of the Loire (the artists’ colony at Beaugency), Paris

[petaltexturedskies]

Marina Tsvetaeva, from a letter to Rainer Maria Rilke featured in Letters: Summer 1926

[alrauna]

Georg Janny (1864-1935) - Summer Night (1926)

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

“When somebody dreams of us together —that is when we shall meet.”

— Marina Tsvetayeva, in a letter to Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters, Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetayeva, Rilke

[the1920sinpictures]

Summer, 1926 Cover "Artists and Models" magazine featuring dancer Mildred Espey by John de Mirjian. From The Roaring Twenties, FB.

[mote-historie]

Eduardo Garcia Benito, Art Deco, Vogue Cover, New York in Summer, July 15th 1926

[rabbitcruiser]

The United States Numbered Highway System is established on November 11, 1926.

[metamorphesque]

― Marina Tsvetaeva, Letters: Summer 1926

[peaceinthestorm]

Olga Wisinger-Florian (1844-1926, Austrian) ~ Summer's Evening (Roses in Full Splendor), 1896

[Source: leopoldmuseum.org]

[dreaminterlude]

i love people who leave detailed reviews

[marzipanandminutiae]

would you have any reading suggestions to learn more about the earrings are evil era??? I've never heard of that aspect of fashion history and I am curious

Oh man, it was wild

you saw the first stirrings of it in the 1890s, when you started to get (mostly white and middle-to-upper-class) proto-feminists arguing that ear piercing was barbaric- keep an eye on the racist undertones there; they will come up again-and forcing women to suffer for fashion. I cannot emphasize enough that, until that point, ear piercing had been pretty much normal for this race/class/gender group. For centuries. You see criticism of the practice here and there, but nothing that really stuck.

The objections slowly increased until roughly the mid-1920s, when everything reached a tipping point and pierced ears became largely taboo for most white Americans and Brits of northern/western European descent. If that sounds HIGHLY specific, it is- communities from southern and sometimes eastern Europe retained cultural practices of ear piercing, to the point where it was often used as a point against them by mainstream society. It was also associated with Latino people, Black people, and the Romani, which. Yeah. I don't need to tell you how that went down.

It also developed associations with sexual immorality and/or backwards thinking. One newspaper letter I read came from a teen girl in the 1940s, wondering why she shouldn't pierce her ears if her very respectable grandmother had piercings. The response was something like "well, they did all sorts of things in the Bad Old Days that we shouldn't do now." True in many ways, or course, but...piercing your ears? That's the hill culture decided to die on as far as antiquated behavior that we should leave behind? Apparently yes.

Earrings themselves never went out of style, which led to the birth of clip-ons and screwbacks. Ironic that the "don't surfer for fashion" crowd was so eager to embrace screwing tiny vices onto your ears, but there we are. My own mother (born 1953) remembers her mother (born 1926) always taking off her screwback earrings immediately after getting home from a party, literally in the foyer of their house the second the door shut. There had been adaptations for unpierced ears before- Little Women, published in 1868, describes Meg March hanging earrings from a flesh-colored silk ribbon tied around the base of her ear -but they'd never caught on like this before.

However, the pendulum was soon to swing back. After just 40 years of Piercing Panic, in the 1960s, girls began piercing their ears again in droves. As piercing moved from the slumber party or summer camp back to the professional jewelers whose families had been early professional piercers in the 19th century- and to befuddled doctors who had no idea what they were doing yet still received piercing requests -cultural commentators had no idea what to make of it. Some decried the new trend while most took an air of bemused neutrality. My personal favorite article expressed surprise that "Space Age misses" were adopting these "Victorian traditions."

(In 1965, my grandmother took Mom to the anesthesiologist down the street who was offering to pierce his young daughter's friends gratis, and got it done. My grandfather had strongly disapproved of the idea, but in the end it took him a week to notice the new earrings.)

As to sources...honestly, I've just gone to Google Books, specified a time frame, and typed in "ear piercing," "pierced ears," "pierce ears," etc. Tons of primary sources at your fingertips, though I'm not always great about documenting or saving what I find. There's not much written about it formally, I've found- no books or scholarly studies. It may just be too close in history to attract much academic attention, though I find it fascinating.

This little blip where something that's been normal for most of western history suddenly became taboo for a hot second.

Also my ear piercings just turned 20 five days ago, commemorating the date that I was taken with much ceremony to Piercing Pagoda (and that horrible gun; it's a wonder I didn't get keloids) to get me out from underfoot while the Thanksgiving feast was being made. Grandma got hers pierced on the same day, at age 78. Happy Birthday, Marzi's ear piercings!