#also! I know you like historical clothing

[lackadaisycats]

Miss Tracy, do u have any advice on researching a specific time period?

(also I know u probably won't see this, but I love your art and you are awesome)

Look for books about the time period, but also books written contemporaneous to the time period, whether fiction or non-fiction. Check used book stores for out of print gems at good prices.

If photography was a technology that existed in the time period you're researching, look for photos of people doing everyday things. Take in the context, the geography, the economic situation. Look at how they're dressed and what their clothes say about them.

Newspaper archives. Sometimes newspapers of the past are free to browse. Sometimes you have to pay for access. Old shopping catalogue collections - if they exist for your time period - are great too.

Documentary films about time periods, or specific events in a given time period can be useful, even if only for a broad overview.

Museum exhibits - helpful whether you're looking for famous paintings or artifacts of past civilizations in a world renowned institution, or trying to dig up something impossibly unique in an oddity denture museum in some forgotten place in the Midwest. If you can't go in person, check online. You can find museums with vintage clothing or household appliance collections from even a few decades ago. Some museums have extensive, searchable online collections too. Take the Metropolitan Museum for instance.

If you can visit historical sites relevant to your area of interest, do it! Do those little guided walking tours. Do the ghost tours even - they're often fairly history-centric with some paranormal folklore for added spice. Sometimes they get you access to places you otherwise can't enter. Check historical societies local to cities or towns of interest.

If you need information about something deeply specific, check the internet for communities that form around that deeply specific topic. I've found tidbits of useful info searching around old forum posts from radio enthusiasts, Model T owners, and people who collect old telephone booths. (Granted, it's getting harder to search for this kind of stuff nowadays.)

-----------

Be careful of AI trash, whether it's generative images, text descriptions, or entire articles. Don't rely much on film or television for accuracy. Some things are more interested in being accurate than others, but there's almost always some artistic license taken. If you're trying to be particularly accurate about something, triple check it for confirmation. Misinformation has had a way of spreading like insidious mildew even before AI started disseminating it with delusory authority.

Lastly, if you don't enjoy doing this kind of historical research like a weird little detective-creature, consider loosening up on the 'historical' aspect of your writing. It's okay to not focus on historicity in your fiction. But if you're going to dive in whole-hog on history, bear in mind it's an ongoing, often time-consuming adventure in information-finding.

(Thank you for the kind words!)

[bingsoo-jung]

I’m going to toss on an extra addition with a shoutout to @casscainmainly ! So:

a) i was wrong, cass didn’t live in HK for a long time. I got it mixed up because it was a while IRL but IRL != comic book time. So my bad!

B) Part of the reason I specifically said Cantonese is bc of the HK thing, but also because up until very recently (IE past 15 or so years) the lingua franca of the American diaspora was Cantonese. So for a short history lesson, the Chinese American community can be split into 3 waves. duoyishu

1st was was in the 1800s, these were the railroad workers who set up the OG Chinatowns. Most of these people were Toishanese and spoke it as such. It means most of the oldest Chinese American families and communities speak Toishanese.

2nd wave was the longest, lasting from the 1920s until around 1980. Most people in this group speak Cantonese, if they don’t it’s actually far more likely that they’re Southeast Asian Chinese, meaning their families immigrated to the US after immigrating to Southeast Asia. So I’m Thai-Chinese, my family immigrated to Thailand from Teochew and then my popo immigrated to the US. We’re not Cantonese, we don’t speak Cantonese. We’re gaginang and speak Teochew.

3rd wave is from post 1980s, and features mainlanders (folks from China), and since most folks in China speak Cantonese or Mandarin, most of these immigrants do as well.

Because of this however, before recently, anyone growing up in Chinese American communities would’ve most likely spoke Cantonese. Mandarin wouldn’t have been super useful. Cass’s mom, Sandra Woosan/Lady Shiva, grew up in Detroit, meaning that she would’ve likely spoke Cantonese.

However! We do have an official hometown/ancestoral village in China for Lady Shiva, which provides us a way to actually determine what language she would definitely speak. As of 2021 it’s been explicitly stated now that her hometown was Duoyishu, a town in the Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China. Now, you may rightfully be looking at that and going “what does ‘Autonomous Prefecture’ mean?” Well, that refers to a region of China where either 50%+ of the population are ethnic minorities or it’s a historic home of an ethnic minority. Meaning Lady Shiva is from a region in China where most people aren’t Han Chinese. Actually, Yuanyuang county, which is where Duoyishu is, is only about 11% Han Chinese. And the village she’s from is known to be a Hani village. Are we beginning to see a problem here? Because, and here’s an important fun fact, most ethnic minorities in China don’t call themselves Chinese. Shiva wouldn’t be speaking Mandarin or Cantonese, she wouldn’t even be Chinese in this case, she’d probably be Hani, and speak Hani.

Which is creating a whole new confusing problem considering they keep putting her in ostensibly Han Chinese clothes. Like Mandarin collars and qipaos are Manchurian and Han Chinese clothes. They arose as a fusion of those cultures during Manchurian rule of China. I don’t know why a Hani person would go ‘yes, I’m going to wear clothes for a culture I’m not apart of despite my culture having much cooler clothes.’ Like… huh? Huh????? It also raises a new and very important question of ‘when will DC give Lady Shiva a backstory and name that sense?’

To which the answer is, obviously, never. Because they hate me specifically.

DC Comics, I’m begging you, have one Chinese person write Lady Shiva’s backstory and just… use that forever. Just only that. So that you don’t keep creating new messes.

You know a better Cassandra Cain headcanon than Cassandra Cain speaks ASL? Cassandra Cain speaks Mandarin or Cantonese mostly.

She canonically lives in HK for a long time.

limited phonemes make it easier to learn.

most chinese languages are near fucking grammarless. You want to say ‘i did that?’ You say ‘i did’ and toss in a 了 nearly anywhere in the sentence. There are 0 tenses, 0 genders, 0 conjugations. 90% of this language is a based on ‘does it sound right?’ And honestly if you get close enough people will understand you.

Hanzi is one of the few still used logograph language and by far the most popular. Nearly all others have died out. Thus meaning it’s one of the few languages which uses pictorial depictions to communicate concepts. That’s not a thing in any other extant writing system. I imagine this would be easier for someone who is used to communicating via body languages and sight based interpretations than sounds, because when you read chinese you don’t sound out the letters, you either recognize the character or you start to cry.

[thedeafprophet]

How do you manage to find so many good references to use for neath fashion???

I am like really. really into historical fashion, and focused my knowledge on the time period and local of flondon so im often like. looking up a lot of images of historical clothing in my spare time. Fallen london takes place in 1899, so i focus my search primarily between 1894-1905, with some wiggle room here or there.

Pinterest is a really great source if you know how to look [and yknow its not like. clothing from 1890s has copyright lmao. 90% of historical fashion plates are public domain], and theres a whole bunch of actual clothing catalogues from the time period digitalized on some websites, if you want to look through them. theres also some pages here on tumblr and other social media dedicated to historical fashion. There's also some people who do recreation of historical clothing, esp on youtube, which can be really helpful to understanding the making of and the different layers!

and then i just... base my designs off of those! once you know the rules of the time periods fashion, you can then bend and break them as you see fit.

i could link some good resources if youre interested XD down to specifics, im a decent place to ask, heh

[sisididis]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LUNIE!

This drawing was inspired by her fic, “Carnations” , in which Toni and Port meet in Granada, amid a sea of carnations, on the occasion of Carlos and Isabel’s recent wedding. In the background you can see the Alhambra, the palace where the royal couple spent their honeymoon.

[marzipanandminutiae]

why are skirts inherently evil and oppressive in historical fiction until men are wearing them

I've never heard anyone going on at length about how Universally ImpracticalTM the garb of a Scotsman or an ancient Roman politician are

suddenly everyone has a concept of situational practicality that previously was not there

[velvetvexations]

Note: I discuss CSA and rape towards the end.

Indeed. To say trans women are killed because we're trans women is a true statement that is also deeply misleading. We are killed for the same reason gay men are killed, and gay men are killed less now because of massive social change, but they're still killed and historically they were killed by the bushel. The animus towards trans women is an extension of the same morality and base instincts that lead to it being open season on gay cis men in the past. We are trans women and we are killed for that reason theoretically, but this does not mean that the internal motivation is not the same when it comes to killing queers AMAB.

The disconnect between rates of murder for trans women and gay men were similar in the past, and the disconnect now exists because they've only just started to separate the two categories at all, and while gay men have become more socially accepted, trans women are still struggling for even the limited acceptance gay men have gotten.

The reason why the two categories did not achieve this at the same time is largely because being trans is more of an imposition on others - using the correct pronouns, placing the ASAB you're not attracted to in the category you are, more visibly departing from norms when someone that was clearly AMAB is wearing women's clothing, and it actively requiring medical treatment for children in most cases. It's not like you have to watch two gay men have sex, though Lord knows some still act like that. Also, cis gay people are far greater in number, and have relatively more power and security as a result.

TRFs will take this and say I'm claiming it's all just "misandry," and to be clear, I'm not. To interpret it that way is, if not deliberately malicious, and it is but let's just be generous, not seeing the forest for the trees. Gay men and trans women are killed for being AMAB and queer. It's the queerness. That interacts with being AMAB, whether it be cis gay men or trans women. Queers AMAB provoke the most visceral and loud disgust because it's a direct assault on cis men's insecurity that they, too, could be fags.

Just look at sexual assault statistics. While they're fairly close overall, and both leagues above cis people, the fact of the matter is that if they saw us as women the SA stats for trans women WOULD be higher. But it isn't. Because cishet men generally don't want to fuck people they see as men.

Let me tell you a story. My aunt was sexually abused as a child by her father. For as long as my mom lived, she resented her for it. She also had NPD as I do, and she saw it as her sister being chosen over her. It's deeply sad. That's how my mother took it and it colored their relationship forever.

It's an especially pathetic and sad example of wanting desperately to be taken as a woman when a transradfem insists that the data is simply lying. Given how little they think of transmasc's status as trans people, it comes off as a weird fucked up jealousy similar to my mother and aunt, who were, of course, cis. It's not unique to trans women, but the fact that trans men are seen as women by cis society to the point of their rate of sexual abuse being higher twists the knife for some of them.

Trans women are murdered more often because they're seen as men and trans men are raped more often because they're seen as women. If we can't accept that baseline fact about why people get in their heads to hate us we're all going to die.

Okay first off please don't take this the wrong way I promise I'm not trying to say trans women all have male privilege or something. I think it is perhaps important to consider that while trans women do make up the majority of trans homicide victims, generally (cis) men make up the majority of homicide victims. In 2020 in the US, men made up 82% of victims.

I think trans women being killed more than trans men isn't necessarily because of transmisogyny being so strong or w/e, but a combination of people being more okay with killing people *they view as* men, and because transfems are much more likely to be sex workers than transmascs (though that may be caused by transmisogyny). Gay men are also killed at much higher rates than lesbians, and usually most homophobic rhetoric and laws and tropes are targeting gay men specifically, but I haven't seen this used to say lesbians have it significantly better, or have structural power over gay men, the way I have seen the same used to say that about trans men

Obviously, trans women are not men and trans men are not women, but to transphobes enacting violence, they are. Imo, it's important to keep in mind that transphobes do not actually view trans people as the gender that they are, and this means that the mistreatment of us will mirror the mistreatment of the gender we are transitioning away from, not towards.

I'm not saying that trans men have it worse, or that trans women all secretly have male privilege or something, just that less overt obvious violence towards trans men does not mean we have it significantly better, just as lesbians facing less overt obvious violence does not mean they have it much better than gay men. If you argue that gay cis men have it worse than lesbian cis women because of this, fair enough, that's consistent, but you can't define male privilege as "the privilege men of any group will always have over women of the same group all else being equal" if you do. (Or you could argue cis gay men are also affected by transmisogyny, I guess?)

Genuinely please don't bite my head off for saying transphobes don't actually view trans women as women (and vice versa) and that affects how they're treated skdkfkdjxhd if you have a good faith criticism of this post I'm all ears

[sdentii]

Hatsune Miku (Ticino edition)

[measureyourlifeincake]

my stp brainrot has combined with my casual interest in historical dress youtube and I decided to draw the Princess in a more historically-inspired outfit than her original design

If anyone's curious, her outfit/hairstyle is supposed to be from around 1828 ("around" bc my main reference/inspiration was definitely from 1828 but I had so many tabs open with different inspo images from nearby years and I don't remember which ones I actually used. also did you know it is surprisingly difficult to search for royal portraiture from a specific year) because based on some cursory googling, it seemed a lot of the elements of her canon base dress (off-the-shoulder, sweetheart neckline, poofy sleeves, straight waistline around the natural waist, skirt that isn't super full/poofy) seemed historically plausible for that time period

I also drew her hair in a more historically-accurate style for the period (but don't ask me exactly what's going on there because I'm not entirely sure myself) but I kept her canon tiara because it seemed plausible enough. anyway this was really fun to do!!!

[ded-lime]

my attempt at lily versions

[cringeborg]

1820s to 1840s Evening Wear - 2 suits

Two little edits of that one beloved Vampires suit, with three things in common: Wide hips, a slightly higher collar, and the same swatches.

From the 1820s until the mid-1830s, the fashionable silhouette for men's clothing was wide hips, a slender waist and full shoulders. This look was generally achieved through padding, corseting, and most of all, tailoring.

In the latter half of the 1830s, this silhouette began to change. The shoulders became sloped, and a "pigeon-breasted" look became more fashionable. Hips were still just as wide and the waist just as narrow. The 1840s look was, of course, also usually achieved through unnatural means.

Basically: V1 is this 1820s to mid-1830s look, and V2 is the mid-1830s to 1840s look. V1 has puffy sleeves while V2 has sloped shoulders. V2 also has a slightly fuller chest.

Swatch 1-48: Tie and vest in white, suit in many different colors.

Swatch 49-60: Suit in black, tie in white, vest in various colors.

Swatch 61-65: Suit in black, tie in black, vest in a few different colors. These are intended to be mourning swatches.

Both are BGC!

Both have the same 65 swatches

All LODs (except LOD3 which refused to cooperate with me, so it's the LOD3 of the original vampires suit)

Found in the Sets category

Appropriately tagged and disabled for random

Display index by decade

Download .zip (SFS)

Alt download (Mediafire)

V1 in swatches 1, 12 and 64:

V2 in swatches 38, 59 and 62:

Side views and back views:

[fingertipsmp3]

Maybe I did this to myself but it does irk me when people see me knitting and they ask who it’s for and I say it’s for me and the immediate reaction is “you should sell it” yeah… let me spend at least a week’s worth of my free time making an item I like, want, and would wear just to sell it on etsy, making at most a £2 profit on materials and not being compensated for my time whatsoever 👍🏻

[gingermintpepper]

What’s the significance of each color in Ancient Greece? So green is the only neutral color and it represents mostly natural and earthy things, thank you for telling me that part !! Anyway, as for my Hyacinthus design’s hair being brown, it’s due to the combination of it being a fairly common interpretation of his appearance and also because I find I like how it looks with his skin tone and the purple of his eyes.

Okay, firstly; thank you so much for answering my question too!

Admittedly you can't beat out good, old fashioned colour theory so that's completely fair haha! I still think it's very interesting that brown became the common interpretation of his features so I'm always glad to hear other people's view on it <3

With respect to what colours meant or symbolised in Ancient Greece, it's a super fascinating topic because the Ancient Greeks had a very different perception of colour than how a lot of people - and in this case I'll generalise and say english-speaking people - perceive colour. In a lot of languages, especially older ones, colour wasn't just a way to describe the physical perceptional reality of an observable object (that is, the light reflecting off the object that gives it its perceived hue - the way we perceive colour now) but colour was also used to describe the way in which the people experienced the world. A really good way to think about it is now, if you wanted to distinguish between two types of blue, you would instinctively make a distinction between their shades ("This blue is darker/lighter!") whereas these older people would distinguish based on things in their present, shared world that best matched what they were being asked to describe ("This blue is like the sky/the sea!")

That's an important concept to keep in mind because ancient greek was very unique in that, in addition to this concept of colour being completely intertwined with physical objects (and therefore also acquiring the properties of these objects in the minds of the people), the ancient greeks also did not particularly care about distinguishing between different colour hues (that is, differences in specific individual colour) but rather they were entirely focused on a colour's value - that is, whether it was considered light or dark.

Taking all of this into consideration, the question 'what is the significance of the different colours in Ancient Greece' is a bit of a tricky one to answer because unlike say, Ancient Egyptian which has very clear colours (red, white, green), very clear physical objects that give those colours their property (the desert sand, the sun, people's skin) and very clear symbolic meanings that arose from the natures ascribed to those physical objects due to their influence on the people's lives (hostility, power, new life), Ancient Greece's colours and the perception of those colours was much more abstract and poetic, contingent on their understandings and perceptions of things like light and dark, the sense of touch or taste (sweet and bitter/wet and dry) and what quality was ascribed to the object whose colour is being perceived. Colour was a matter of cosmology, of philosophy and there were many different schools of thought on it from Empedocles' physicalist theories to Anaxagoras' realist theories.

All of this is to say, take the meanings I outlined in this handy-dandy table with a tablespoon of salt! These are based on my understanding of the language used to describe things in classical writings that have survived and my own bias towards Empedocles' physicalist theory of colour and the nature of colour which I also think is very useful for people into greek mythology as a whole due to it making clear links between various gods creating things from mixtures of the four basic elements of nature and the colours that are the result of these mixtures.

I hope this helps even a little and I very much encourage you to do some research into different Greek schools of thought when it comes to colour and the perception of colour as well as how colour affects/reflects the innate nature of all things!

(Also, slight extra note, I left out Kokkinos (scarlet/blood-red) from the table because I didn't really think it was relevant for this outline despite it definitely being an ancient colour. It's a bit difficult to find examples of it with the kind of descriptors Empedocles outlines and I don't want to make assumptions based on third hand knowledge on the greek concept of the nature of things. I'd like to believe it was addressed in more detail in Empedocles' original document - only a fragment of the original some two thousand lines have survived after all - it is confirmed that Empedocles spoke on the recipe for blood and flesh, an equal mixture of all four elements as opposed to bones' four parts fire, two parts earth and two parts water (which is why bones shine white, there's more fire than earth or water) - and I don't want to conject or make assumptions.

I also left out Erythros or basic/primary red according to Plato's list of basic colours because that seemed to have specifically been preferred by Egyptian Greeks according to linguistic data. If I opened up that can of worms with respect to the shared Egyptian-Greek colour language including the way the Greeks like many early peoples did not culturally perceive blue until the invention of Egypt's blue dyes then I would be writing forever and you would never get an actual clear answer about Greek colour symbolism separate and apart from Egyptian cultural influence lmfao. )

A few of the documents that helped me consolidate this information include Sassi's 2022 Philosophical Theories of Colour in Ancient Greek Thought and Ierodiakonou's Empedocles on Colour and Colour Vision. There are also a fair few translations and discussions of the fragments of Empedocles' On Nature still floating about - my copy is a somewhat archaic volume of Leonard's 1908 translation but I never went out searching for updated interpretations and translations of the text since its constantly referenced in perceptional philosophy papers LOL

Anyway, yeah, hope this helps! :D

[ace-and-ranty]

Petty opinion of the day: Pari's Paloma's Labour bothers me for no end for the way it can't pick a setting.

The clip is very medieval-coded, she sings about fetching water from the well and tending the orchards... so like? Are you meant to be a farmer's wife in a historical past? But then she starts talking about "weaponized incompetence" which is a very modern concept that much more evokes urban living and men pretending they can't use the damn washing machine. She's sitting at his "high table", but singing about his "picket fence dreams"?

PICK A LANE, WOMAN?? Are you talking about historical or modern women?! THEIR OPPRESSION DOESN'T WORK THE SAME.

[itsalwaysdark]

how it feels to want to dress very fancy and accessoried but unfortunately have the autism where i think im supposed to just be lounging in a field naked or in like. a plain linen dress. and any accessory or makeup or nail polish or ehat have you makes me want to rip my skin off

[icewindandboringhorror]

Trying to find something to go with these tights? I don’t have a lot of bright clothes that match them, so went more in a mixing it with lighter colors sort of direction, maybe sort of sky themed (rainbow with the blue and white clouds)?

[tinta--branca--art]

Pentiment made me so unwell smh it’s ALL i’ve been thinking about for days

Joined on to the self-insert trend bc i find it really sweet ;u;; didn’t do a full body because 16th century portuguese peasant clothing resources online ?? nonexistent 😔