#fashion museum catalogue

[fashionbooksmilano]

Made inJapan

The latest fashion Die nieuwste mode

José Teunissen

Central Museum, Utrecht 2001, 96 pages, ISBN 90-73285-79-8, Dutch and English

euro 80,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

Exhibition Central Museum Utrecht from March to June 2002

The text depicts working style (work in progress, experiments,influences), designers biography and some citations from intervierws. Richly illustrated with exhibition, catwalk photos. Text commenting on two generations of Japanese designers.

Made in Japan focused on the youngest generation of Japanese fashion designers: Hiroaki Ohya, Gomme, Shinichiro Arakawa, Masaki Matsushima, Kosuke Tsumura and - no longer a beginner - Junya Watanabe. To clarify the Japanese origin and mentality, the work of their main predecessors Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons and Issey Miyake was also presented.

21/12/23

[alessandro55]

How the West was Worn

Holly George- Warren and Michelle Freedman

Introduction by James H.Nottage, Foreword byMarty Stuart

Abrams, New York 2001, 240 pages, 23,5x30,5cm, ISBN 0-8109-0615-5

euro 180,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

To accompany an exhibition at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, chief curator James Nottage briefly reviews the evolution of clothing that people actually wore in frontier America. Then a team of popular culture historians trace the versions that have appeared in movies, television, and concert stage throughout the 20th century

26/06/24

[lackadaisycats]

Some insight into the designs and fashion of the 20s would be so cool, especially since it's kinda hard these days to sift through just costume listing :'0

Yeah, sadly, the usefulness of a Google search is greatly diminished these days. You can still find articles written by actual human beings and genuine historical garments, but you have to wade through a lot of junky costumes and AI bullshit to get there. I can't possibly fully explain 1920s fashion here, though. It's a broad enough topic to write a sizable book about...which is why people have written many books about it. Check out some books. There are things you can get pretty cheap from resellers, everything from academic screeds about the politics behind the fashion trends of the time, to clothing catalogue compilations from the 20s, to giant coffee table books full of glorious photos.

Here's a PDF version of one of those clothing catalog collections. There's an entire preface about 1920s fashion in general too.

There are some pretty well made blogs about the topic out there as well. Vintage Dancer is one of them. The front of the site is unfortunately kind of cluttered with ads for costume apparel and modern clothing inspired by the 20s, but scroll past that to the historical bits and you'll find pertinent things.

There are some great fashion YouTubers too, like Karolina Zebrowska. Although she's not focused heavily on 1920s fashion, she talks a lot about early 20th century fashion in general. She also talks a lot about the historical context of those fashions.

Also, try online museum displays. The Met Museum has a searchable collection, for instance. Look up 1920s fashion, 1920s dresses, 1920s suits, etc.

Cameras were popular and accessible in the 1920s. Look at pictures of what people actually wore. You can find these images in free government photo archives, or licensing libraries like Getty Images (you don't have to license anything to look at it). And there's always Shorpy. Poor old, underappreciated Shorpy. Their archive is searchable.

[marzipanandminutiae]

Hello!

I am an aspiring author who struggles with accurately portraying historical clothing, and I stumbled across your blog while searching for photographs and information on late 19th century/USA Gilded Age fashion. From the research I've seen compiled across books/the internet, the clothing of the upper class from that area is very well documented in paintings, garment catalogues, photographs, museums, etc....but finding information on what the day-to-day wear of normal people was like is proving much more difficult. Since you seem to be knowledgeable in the subject of historical clothing in this approximate time period, I was wondering if you knew about any good resources to learn more about what people who couldn't afford to follow upper class trends were wearing in the general era as well as any general information around these items.

If it helps, I'm focused on eastern and southeastern United States farming/small railroad town/mountain mining/gulf coast wetland communities, but even just more general resources about what sort of clothing that the average poor person during the Gilded Age wore would be greatly helpful. I've been able to find a few photographs here and there, but these probably aren't an accurate depiction of a persons' 'day-to-day' wear, and I also haven't found much on how women learned to sew homemade clothes, what garments if any would have been bought, where people in rural areas would have sourced their cloth, what undergarments were like, how work shoes were made & aquired, ect.

Please feel free to ignore this if it isn't something you're interested in answering as I'm sure you get a lot of asks, but I'd greatly appreciate it if you have any pointers!

So here's the thing about 19th-century clothing:

in many ways, it's the same all the way down

now, that's a serious generalization. is a farm wife in Colorado going to be wearing the same thing as a Vanderbilt re: materials, fit, and up-to-the-minute trendiness? obviously not. but because so much of what people wore back then has only survived to the present day in our formalwear- long skirts, suits, etc. -we tend to have difficulty recognizing ordinary or "casual" clothing from that period. I also sometimes call this Ballgownification, from the tendency to label literally every pretty Victorian dress a Ball Gown (even on museum websites, at times). Even work clothing can consist of things you wouldn't expect to be work clothing- yes, they sometimes worked in skirts that are long by modern standards, or starched shirts and suspenders. Occupational "crap job clothes" existed, but sometimes we can't recognize even that because of modern conventions.

A wealthy lady wore a lot of two-piece dresses. Her maid wore a lot of two-piece dresses. The trailblazing lady doctor working at the hospital down the road from her house wore a lot of two-piece dresses. The factory worker who made the machine lace the maid used to trim her church dress wore a lot of two-piece dresses. The teenage daughter of the farm family that raised the cows that supplied the city where all those people lived wore a lot of- you get the idea. The FORMAT was very similar across most of American and British society; the variations tended to come in fabrics, trims, fit precision, and how frequently styles would be updated.

Having fewer outfits would be common the further down the social ladder you went, but people still tried to have as much underwear as possible- undergarments wicked up sweat and having clean ones every day was considered crucial for cleanliness. You also would see things changing more slowly- not at a snail's pace, but it might end up being a few years behind the sort of thing you'd see at Newport in the summer, so to speak. Underwear was easier to make oneself than precisely cut and fitted outer garments for adults (usually professionally made for all but the poorest of the poor for a long time- dressmakers and tailors catering to working-class clientele did exist), but that also began to be mass-produced sooner than outer clothing. So depending on the specific location, social status, and era, you might see that sort of thing and children's clothing homemade more often than anything else. Around the 1890s it became more common to purchase dresses and suits ready-made from catalogues like Sears-Roebuck, in the States, though it still hadn't outpaced professional tailoring and dressmaking yet. Work shoes came from dedicated cobblers, and even if you lived in isolated areas, VERY few people in the US and UK wove their own fabric. Most got it from the nearest store on trips to town, or took apart older garments they already had to hand and reused the cloth for that.

I guess the biggest thing I want to emphasize is that, to modern eyes, it can be very hard to tell who is rich and who is anywhere from upper-working-class to middling in Gilded Age photographs. Because just like nowadays a custodial worker and Kim Kardashian might both wear jeans and a t-shirt, the outfit format was the same for much of society.

Candid photography can be great for this sort of thing:

Flower-sellers in London's Covent Garden, 1877. Note that the hat on the far right woman is only a few years out-of-date; she may have gotten it new at the time or from a secondhand clothing market, which were quite popular on both sides of the Atlantic.

Also London, turn of the 20th century.

A family in Denver, Colorado, c. early 1890s.

Train passengers, Atlanta, Georgia, probably 1890s.

Hope this helps!

[chic-a-gigot]

Where do you find all of these pictures and catalogues?

Libraries! and Museums! with robust online collections! One resource can lead to other resources because some of these links are systems of interconnected libraries. Most provide high-resolution downloads and transcribed text. I include links to all of my sources in their respective posts.

Bibliothèque Nationale de France et al (Gallica)

Ville de Paris / Bibliothèque Forney et al

Rijksmuseum, Netherlands

Los Angeles Public Library

Les Musées de la Ville de Paris

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Digital Public Library of America

Internet Archive

The Met Costume Institute Fashion Plates

[lucythornwalter]

In Greeting and Introduction:

In 1986, Pleasant Company unleashed the American Girls upon the world, and nothing has ever been the same. If you’re between the ages of 25 and 40 (sorry, Gen Z, but this is really a millennial phenomenon) and were at any point in your childhood aligned or identified as a ‘girl’, you probably have memories of decadently arranged extra-wide catalogues coming in the mail, or slim box sets of six books with names like Samantha Learns a Lesson or Changes for Kirsten, or visits to a toy store that was more like a luxury hotel, or – if you were especially lucky – unwrapping a long and heavy box on your birthday or on Christmas to reveal a much-anticipated new best friend. Even if you weren’t subjected to the rigors of late-twentieth-century girlhood, you probably knew something about this brand thanks to the way it took hold in the hearts and minds of an entire generation of – ha! – American girls who went to school with other American children and often brought dolls and books and catalogues and trip reports back with them.

So, what exactly was this brand?

1986 is a fascinating year in pop culture, and one I’ve been personally fixated on for over a decade. It’s the year of the (first) death of Optimus Prime in The Transformers: The Movie, the year of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the year of Phantom of the Opera’s spectacular West End debut, the year of Labyrinth, the year of Hellraiser. If you outgrew American Girl and trended toward the weird and darkly gothic, this is a year you’re intimately familiar with, whether you know it or not. Fitting, then, that it’s the year the dolls were born.

The story goes that educator Pleasant Rowland, in the process of attempting to buy dolls for her family, found herself frustrated by a perceived gap in the market. While baby dolls served as proxies for burgeoning parental instinct, and fashion dolls served as more mature aspirational figures (or, in many cases, adult stars of complicated child-crafted soap operas), there were no dolls that girls could look upon as peers. I find myself skeptical of this claim, largely because mythical doll origins are often hilariously selective and inaccurate – for one thing, Barbie was not even close to the first adolescent/adult fashion doll for little girls – but it is consistently cited as one of the concerns in developing the line. With that frustration to chew on, and inspired by a visit to Colonial Williamsburg (a living history museum focused on life in America in the immediate years preceding the Revolutionary War), Rowland developed the concept of the American Girls. These would be eighteen-inch cloth and vinyl dolls portraying distinct historical figures living in different eras of American history, each with their own name and family and backstory. She worked with author Valerie Tripp to develop the identities of each girl, and then launched the brand under her new company, Pleasant Company (which is such a clever idea for an instantly recognizable corporation) with three dolls ready to go.

Now, there are American Girl stores in multiple malls, and when I was a little girl there were near-mythical American Girl Places in Chicago and New York and I think somewhere in California, but when Rowland began her business model was entirely by mail with no brick-and-mortar location to visit. Little girls and their families became aware of the existence of these dolls and their stories when catalogues that quickly became iconic arrived in the mail once every few months, and despite the high prices of everything from the dolls themselves to the books telling their stories, they bought up everything Pleasant Company had to sell. Rowland had a bona fide hit on her hands.

She had launched the brand with three characters – Kirsten Larson, a Swedish immigrant and pioneer living in the Minnesota Territory in 1854, Samantha Parkington, an Edwardian girl from a rich family living in New York in 1904, and Molly McIntyre, a Scottish-descended girl from a solidly middle-class family living in Jefferson, Illinois in 1944. Each doll, when ordered, came with a book bearing their name, and there were two additional books available for purchase alongside the collections of themed accessories and furniture. This number quickly expanded to six, all bearing similar names and reflecting similar themes across multiple decades. In 1991, a fourth historical character joined the lineup – this was Felicity Merriman, a gentleman’s daughter from 1774 Williamsburg. After her was Addy Walker, introduced in 1993, a fugitive slave who escaped to Philadelphia with her mother and lived there in 1864. Next in 1997 came Josefina Montoya, a rancher’s daughter living near Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1824 with her father, sisters, and extended family. In 2000, Kit Kittredge of 1933’s Cincinnati, Ohio joined the lineup. And lastly, at least for this analysis of my own history with the brand, in 2002 we have my dearly beloved Kaya’aton’my of the Nez Perce, living with her tribe in pre-contact years in 1764.

There are other American Girls. Mattel bought out Pleasant Company and has slowly been hollowing out the brand’s credibility, but it persists. Other historical dolls have been introduced, and many of them sound just as brilliant as the ones I grew up with. But those eight, those “original” eight, were my American Girls, and it’s their stories I want to examine, and their impacts upon my life that are still felt. Kit’s resourcefulness and adaptability when her father lost her job helped me when I was twelve and my father lost his job, Felicity’s determination to find the right balance between gender nonconformity and gender conformity inspired me to never settle for being forced into a box I didn’t fit, Samantha’s fierce loyalty to her friend Nellie was a balm to my prepubescent closeted lesbianism, and Kaya’s connection to her tribe and their traditions and culture gave me something to cling to in the midst of my rootless, forcibly assimilated indigenous childhood. (Yes, I’m indigenous, no, I’m not really going to be making my writing and blogging about an #ownvoices kind of thing, because we should get to be nerds and have the same access to privacy that white people have, but it’s relevant here and it’s relevant in my original fiction because it’s part of me.)

Of course, growing up and getting an education means looking at your past again with a wiser, more critical eye. Historical education has changed a lot since 2002, and has changed even more since 1986. The stories of the American Girls are both narrative and informative, intended to capture realistic-feeling moments in time that are grounded in real historical events and practices. How do they hold up to the standards of 2024, nearly two decades since I grew into Brontë and McCaffrey and Hugo and Dumas and Homer? How do they feel to me as an actively reconnecting indigenous lesbian whose perspective on America is very different now than when I was a child and my family tried hard to pretend we fit in? Are their books and wider stories even any good?

These are the questions I’m seeking to answer in this series of blogs, which I’ll be calling The American Girls and Me. Each fortnight (that’s every two weeks) I’ll examine a different girl, starting with her main books and going forward from there. The first series of book blogs will be published simultaneously here and on my Patreon page, completely free to read and open to the public. After that, Patreon will get things a week before they’re published here, but I’m not looking to make a serious income, so if you pay me the exorbitant price of $1 you will get to see things whenever they’re posted or you can wait for seven days to catch up. There will be some Patreon-exclusive bonus content once every couple of months, though, plus when I start publishing my original fiction it will be there alongside here, so if that sounds interesting maybe consider giving me a click?

My cutoff year is 2005 – that was the last year I asked for and received an American Girl doll as a present from my grandmother, and that was the symbolic end of the American Girl era of my life. I may take a look at the two American Girl movies that came out in 2006 and 2008 and adapted the stories of Molly and Kit respectively, but I didn’t go to great lengths to watch either of them. I was too busy rewatching The Curse of the Black Pearl and Van Helsing and The Revenge of the Sith to care about people who were now three and four years younger than me, and my own visions of both girls’ lives were too precious to me to risk a bad or disappointing adaptation.

Okay, then, what exactly will I be covering?

Like I said above, I’ll start with the stories. All eight girls, all six books + their “Looking Back/A Peek Into the Past” chapters. I’ll talk about my childhood impressions, my connections with different narratives, how those have changed now that I’m in my thirties, and places where I think the books have aged particularly poorly or particularly well.

After that, we’ll look at their short stories pre-2005, and see what those add to or detract from the canon of core story beats. These were in some cases published over a decade after the books finished up, and the tonal or thematic differences should be interesting to note.

Once the fiction is finished up we’ll look at each doll. I’ll talk about my experiences with the ones I personally own, and examine their accessories and artifacts in-person, and if it’s a doll I don’t own we’ll be looking at the catalogues from 1998-2002, which can safely be considered something of a golden age for the brand. That’s how I experienced several of the dolls, and therefore that’s what I’ll be revisiting

Next, I’ll be taking a look at nonfiction books – each of the original eight girls got a Welcome to [Name]’s World book issued for their era in American history, taking the nonfiction historical context chapters and fleshing them out to give more detail and explain more about how the lives of our girls fit into the story of the country as a whole. These are apparently extremely high-quality for children’s history books, and while I never had them as a child I definitely want them now.

Finally, having finished up books entirely, we move on to crafts and ephemera. Each girl got a paper doll set, and most of them also received a craft book and cook book. There were theater kits for pretend play as well, but I’ll be excluding those for purely practical reasons – they’re often the hardest to find, and I was never interested in that kind of pretend play with these girls.

This will be a long, involved, organized blogging project unlike anything I’ve ever really done before, but I think it will be a rewarding one. These girls are like my sisters, even those with wildly different life experiences than my own. They were a fundamental part of my childhood. They deserve to be remembered and discussed, and this era in my life deserves to be loved.

After all, I, too, was once an American girl.

[dresshistorynerd]

Hiii, I love your page and you helped so much with research. I am doing a project for my costume course, I have to design costumes from 1895, 1894 and 1896 are kinda accettable, but I having problems with creating the moodboard for every outfit. I really can't find photos or archival pieces for men, especially a character who is supposed be a 17 years old and I can't really find photos/illustrations of children nightwear (boys). I know by heart every archive of every museum and I even looked on internet archive at old magazines, but still I can't find much. Do you have any niche sources that you would recommend? Sorry to bother you, just a student losing her mind

Thank you so much! And sorry for the wait! I hope you're course is not over already and I'm late with the answer :')

17 years old boy would be already dressing in basically same clothing as men. With nightwear it's also pretty easy, since all people wore basically the same nightgowns, only details would vary. Here's an 1874 example of children's nightgowns, which are long white dresses gathered at the neckline, with long sleeves and often a bit of collar. This is the basic shape everyone wore. They tended to be more simple for children and men. Women, especially rich women, might have some more decorations. Night chemise was also an option for women. It's what it sounds like and shaped exactly like a chemise, with just maybe some differences in details.

Men and boy's nightgowns were usually called nightshirts and while they were mostly the same as women's nightgowns, they were usually a bit shorter by 1890s, usually covering just the knees. Here's an add for children's undergarment with a nightshirt for boys too from 1878.

As for adult men's nightshirts, here's first a 1891 ad with unfortunately quite poor illustration of a man's nightshirt, but if does show the popular style for men, turned down lapels. Here's another example of that style in form of an extant garment form 1900s.

By 1890s pyjamas - shirt and trouser combo - had become fashionable nightwear for men, though nightshirt were still used well into 20th century. Here's an add from 1901 showing both nightshirts and pyjamas. Pymajamas were also used as fashionable evening negligee and while in 1890s nightshirts were still usually white, pyjamas were not and often had a pattern.

Underwear and nightwear are types of clothing that rarely survive history, since they are usually not fancy so they are not preserved diligently and are worn close to skin therefore quite quickly are worn down. That's why ads (in periods when they started to become a thing) are great sources for those kinds of garments. The last add is from a catalogue for mail-order clothes. These are usually excellent sources for the basics, like underwear and nightwear, which were already sold as ready-made garments in stores and by mail-order businesses by 1890s. Internet archive has several digitized fashion catalogues from around the time you are looking for so I suggest looking through them if you want to find more specific examples. This was really the first that came across me that was close enough. Some libraries also have excellent digital collections of old ads, like the New York Public Library (from where the other above ads are from), so their collections are also worth going through.

Hope this helps and I hope this is not too late for your course project!

[egypt-museum]

Ramesses Girdle

Originally described as a ‘linen belt’ but since at least 1913 it has been called the ‘Ramesses Girdle’. Paintings of Ramesses III show him wearing similar long lengths of cloth wrapped several times around the chest in a herringbone fashion, like a girdle, before being fastened around the waist.

Cartouches of Ramesses III were inscribed in ink on two faces of the plain linen at one end but this is now almost completely destroyed (Stobart’s 1855 catalogue has a copy of the text as it was when in his possession).

The girdle is woven from linen and decorated with rows of ankh signs, a hieroglyph used to write the word for ‘life’. As a piece of clothing it provided upper body support and encircled the pharaoh with life-giving protection in the battlefield.

It measures 5.2 metres in length and tapers from 127 to 48 mm in width. This tapering is achieved by taking out bunches of unbleached threads from the centre at regular intervals and ensuring that the warp ends per cm remain the same.

New Kingdom, 20th Dynasty, ca. 1186-1155 BC. Now in the World Museum, National Museums Liverpool. M11156

Read more

[oldbookist]

So originally I was just going to write a post indexing my favorite resources…but it ended up being way too long to be a post.

I am delighted to share my latest project that I think will be much more useful: Les Mis Resources, a quick and easy way to access Les Mis-relevant sources for whatever you may need.

So far the site catalogues nearly 200 resources, most of which you can read for free! Some highlights of the collection:

An English guide on how to live as a student in Paris

A book on the police force in the early 19th century

Links to the original manuscript and first drafts of Les Mis

Every major English translation of Les Mis

…and much more.

If you’re an artist, there’s also fashion plates and extant examples of clothing from museums—not just pictures, the museum links often include more angles and information on them!

I really had a lot of fun and learned a lot putting together the sources for this site, and I hope you guys will also find it useful! And if you know a resource you think I should add, just shoot me a message.

Maybe try searching your favorite character and see what comes up?

[gayaest]

your fashion and character designs are so stunning and it totally compliments your art style :)) you definitely have to be one of my favorite artists !!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!

Thank you very very much, that’s so sweet of you — genuinely love being told that others like my art or why 😭🙏 and being someones’ favorite artist ????? MY BRAIN AND HEART EXPLODES! (Not literally — but with emotion).

I’m so glad people like my fashion choices for my artwork! Truly love looking through catalogues, magazines, pinterest, ebay, and many other places like for knitting/crochet or personal seeing! I saw a lot of texture artwork back when I was still in highschool, and the art museum near me.

Anyway, thank you again, it makes me really happy to hear this!

[omgthatdress]

I really wish Caroline was around when I was growing up. Mostly because even though I took AP US History I don’t remember what the war of 1812 was about. You bet your ass I’d still know if I’d had Caroline!

All that being said, Caroline is growing up on the shores of Lake Ontario in a town called Sackett’s Harbor. Her father (the DILF) used to be a sea captain and owns a shipyard. While it may seem kind of surprising and niche for an American Girl doll, it’s actually a great representation of the Antebellum North and how its economy was based on industry, naval travel, and small family farms. Good going, AG.

Looking at the copy in the catalogue, you can definitely see that it’s no longer the mini history lesson like it used to be. However, given that this is after online shopping made catalogues obsolete, it kind of makes sense that they wouldn’t be paying as much attention to the copy.

First off fashion-wise, I need to say that I absolutely love that adorable little bonnet. Not only is it accurate, it’s just fucking cute! I love it!

Her reticule would have been hand-knit, another way for skilled ladies to show off their needlework. The toy version looks like it’s just made out of printed fabric, but given that reticules could be really complex, it makes sense that they’d cut that corner.

As far as the dress goes.... it shoulda been white. The pink isn’t inaccurate, but.... yeah, it shoulda been white. The invention of bleach meant that not only was white fabric now suddenly super cheap and easy to make, it was often the easiest to clean. That, on top of the whole neo-classical Grecian statue aesthetic that the whole Regency era was aping, meant that white was the predominant color of dresses in the era. It’s kind of outrageous that Caroline doesn’t have a single white dress. I mean, how pretty would Caroline have looked in a Meet dress like this?

(Historic Deerfield Museum)

[fashionbooksmilano]

Paul Smith true brit

Text Dylan Jones

Franca Sozzani, Aldo Premoli

The Design Museum, London 1995, 85 pages, 23x23cm, Illustrated in b/w and colour

signed copy by Paul Smith

euro 150,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

Livre publié à l’occasion de l’exposition de Paul Smith, célèbre styliste britannique, au Designmuseum de Londres du 5 octobre 1995 au 10 avril 1996

Libro pubblicato in occasione della mostra di Paul Smith, celebre stilista britannico , nel Design Museum di Lonfra dal 5 ottobre 1995 al 10 aprile 1996. Copia firmata da Paul Smith

02/06/24

[liketwoswansinbalance]

A continuation of this post.

⸻

[One day, Rafal's students upload a video that doesn't conform with his usual content, and it causes his viewers to start turning out conspiracies. Rafal had left his phone unattended in a classroom one day, and Marialena got ahold of it. She is the ringleader in maintaining the online presence he doesn't know about, and she curates all of "his" content.]

[A shaking phone camera turns on and starts recording a red speck perched on a branch. The sound quality is poor and it sounds like Rafal is filming inside a wind turbine. The camera zooms in and focuses on a bird, and Rafal's voice is heard as the camera stabilizes.]

Rafal: Log, the second, overcast Tuesday, four hours in, stationed outside the mortuary, sighting #1 of the elusive scarlet tanager. She's a beaut, isn't she?

[Then comes the sound of heels clacking on pavement, and a second voice chimes in.]

Unknown speaker: Who's a "beaut" that isn't me? Why are you wearing that welding mask? And what are you doing behind that shrub, Rafal? You told me you were taking a stop at the mortuary, and said you'd drive us to Rhian's luncheon.

Rafal: [groans] Quiet. Just wait a little longer and I promise I'll get you a new set of earrings. I'm trying to get it on film!

Unknown speaker: That bird? I've been waiting four hours in your car, you know, thinking that all along you were checking the thermostat, so your new "acquisition" would be properly refrigerated, and now, I step out of the car to powder my nose only to find you out here! Doing God knows what in that contraption!

Rafal: I didn't want to get a sunburn and this mask was the only thing available to cover up with. The electrician must've left it last time he came around to check the lighting in the vaults.

Unknown speaker: You should've listened to me when I told you to buy a sunhat from this season's catalogue, darling.

Rafal: Please just stop talking so loudly—we can discuss this after I get my recording.

[The bird flies offscreen in that instant.]

Rafal: Shoot. Look what you did.

Unknown speaker: Hmpth, well, your neck looks as red as the silly bird of yours.

Rafal: For the last time! It's not silly! If I'd gotten useable film without all your wittering on, I could've sold it to the natural history museum.

Unknown speaker: Goodness me, if you keep pursuing hobbies like these you might as well be a fossil yourself.

Rafal: It's gone. I've lost it.

Unknown speaker: Oh, boo-hoo. Can we leave now?

Rafal: No. There's a nest. It might return.

Unknown speaker: Rhian will be mad if we're late.

Rafal: The luncheon won't start 'til we're there. Rhian always waits for me.

Unknown speaker: Fine. Be like that. Marry your rare bird instead of me.

Rafal: I never said I wanted to marry it!

Unknown speaker: Well you're spending more time with it than at your own wedding shower!

Rafal: Wait. That's today?

Unknown speaker: Yes.

Rafal: ...so that's why you told me to wear a suit.

Unknown speaker: And you've mucked it up with-with dirt and worms, and, and—what is that? EEG gel?

Rafal: Liquified organs and vitreous fluids. An eyeball burst on me.

Unknown speaker: Oh, eww. We can't go one day without you soiling something, can we? At least it's not blood this time.

[There's a shuffling sound and the phone falls to the ground, screen going dark.]

Rafal: That's it. I quit.

Unknown speaker: Oh, no. Are you sure?

Rafal: Sure. Let's be fashionably late to the luncheon and give my brother a heart attack.

Unknown speaker: Finally. Remember, you're a host this time. Try to socialize with our guests.

[There's a scraping sound.]

Unknown speaker: And, you're not bringing that tripod on my watch. There won't be any birds indoors.

Rafal: What should I do with it then?

Unknown speaker: On second thought, you could use it to film the guests.

Rafal: Would it get me out of greeting duty?

Unknown speaker: Might as well do it myself—you look too slovenly to do it now.

Rafal: Deal.

Unknown speaker: Lovely. I'd kiss you if you weren't disgusting. Oh! Look at that—your phone's still filming.

Rafal: Hell. Is it—

[The recording clicks off.]

[lackadaisycats]

I’m so sorry if you’ve already answered this somewhere, but how do you design your characters?

I’ve been trying to make an OC from the prohibition era and it turns out there’s basically nothing to work with for men’s outfits, so I’m curious how you made this many that look unique and fitting to the characters

There is so much to work with, though! You will tend to find more of a focus on variety in women's fashion, but there is still quite a lot of menswear to ogle too. I suppose it's just a matter of searching out ideas and inspiration in the rights corners. Here are a few suggestions:

Old Clothing Catalogues -

Collections from Sears-Roebuck and other popular clothing retailers are pretty easy to find compiled into relatively inexpensive books, or just floating online.

A fair bit of it is in the public domain now.

--Here's an entire 1922 catalogue of stuff to flip through.

-----------------

Contemporary Artwork -

Some phenomenal illustrators were working in this field amidst the "Golden Age of Illustration" and featured prominently on the covers of magazines and on the ads inside. There was a lot of emphasis on fashion.

Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post are a couple of the more prominent and easily searchable resources. The costuming on the cover art always has a lot of personality.

There's Rockwell, of course, and it's almost impossible to go wrong with J. C. Leyendecker. He's probably best known for his Arrow Collar ad art, but even his sock ads are like…

There were numerous other amazing and influential illustrators working at the time too. Here's a list of some of them. Here's a bonus Henry Raleigh featuring some of his fabulously-dressed people.

-----------------

Blogs and Articles -

There are so many of them! If you want historical accuracy, be wary of write-ups pulling all of their references from film and television. There's nothing wrong with using those for inspiration if you aren't too concerned with historicity, but there are some pretty comprehensive and well-researched things out there with more of an eye on actual fashion history too:

--Gentleman's Gazette - What Men Really Wore in the 1920s

--The Fashionisto - 1920s Men's Fashion

-----------------

Digital Collections -

There are numerous digital historic image collections stemming from universities, museums, libraries, and the government that are free to peruse too.

--The Metropolitan Museum has a searchable catalog of exhibits that includes fashion and photos

--Here's some things from the New York Public Library

-----------------

Photos at Large -

If you aren't sure where to start, image searching for any of Hollywood's early celebrities will typically turn up a bevy of production stills and promotional photography featuring a variety of fashions. Here's a random Getty images search for Harold Lloyd. A lot of standard 3 piece suits, but a lot of stuff with added character too.

Photography was generally quite accessible by the 1920s, though, and you can find a lot of authentic photos of people from all walks of life, out in the wild wearing all sorts of clothes.

This is by no means the limit to the resources available, but hopefully it'll provide some leaping-off points for designing looks for your characters!

[waterloggedsoliloquy]

okay. here's the scene. sicely is forced along at a fancy party bc THRAWN is forced along at a fancy party for high command and political leaders in the outer rim. pryce got her own ticket bc shes the governor of lothal and her plus one is Publicity Boytoy #4, a human man whose name she will forget by the end of the evening but it is still likely enough that he'll annoy her to a high enough degree for her to want to have sex with him (i do not believe pryce is capable of non-caliginous attraction). even if she could she wouldn't want to go alongside thrawn again because his capability to infuriate and exhaust her beggars belief. and thrawn hates her with an icy seething passion. and due to the aforementioned caliginous-exclusive romance one might think this would mean pryce would be attracted to thrawn and you would be right. but it's really not worth pursuing that at all, because thrawn has the romantic capacity of one of those self-guided museum tour casettes with the anodyne voices, or maybe a picture on r/malelivingspaces where a bunch of Ayn Rand books are displayed prominently on a shelf in a clearly-inherited house. and also he annoys her with his constant questions and generally helpless demeanor in any context where he does not have complete control and authority. so going with her is out. and eli cant come because he's off in the unknown regions listening to a holodrama in Cheunh and getting happy he understands 85% of it (he is missing a decent amount of cultural context due to grammatical cases and familial-standing based honorifics and sentence structure). faro has her own ticket too because her uncle is a patron and benefactor for many Outer Rim charities and gentlemen's clubs, and he dotes on her. so she cant be thrawns plus one nor can he be hers because she's going to spend the entire time at this thinly-veiled diplomatic insider trading scam of an event having her first normal conversation in a year with family, and if thrawn goes with her he will be introduced to that family (nightmare scenario. never again). so thrawns option is his only other friend, a 16 year old he more or less kidnapped and has entered an uneasy truce with. is this pathetic? profoundly. the depths of thrawn's patheticness and overall dysfunction is some kind of ocean trench or hole in which i seem to be the only bastard blazing bravely downward.

SICELY: I don't want to go. THRAWN: It is not optional. SICELY: Why the hell not? THRAWN: You are a cultural attaché and a diplomatic representative of your people. There will be many ambassadors there. It is a learning experience. SICELY: Can you put it in writing that I hate thiS, I hate partieS, I will go kicking and Screaming, I hate you, and if you make me wear a Stupid fancy outfit I will Screech like a branded banSheeSteed?

Thrawn wordlessly opens up his datapad, types it all out, attributes the quote to Sicely, and turns it around to show them.

SICELY: Thank you. 

Sicely agrees to go to the party and even gets convinced to put on a nice outfit (given as they dislike being unable to wear anything than an officer's uniform, Faro frames it as a break from monotony and Sicely says it must be difficult being right all the time. Faro concurs). Thrawn, being only able to analyze fashion within the context of it being an artistic statement, is the kind of guy to wear white to a wedding. It takes the combined effort of nearly every woman in his bridge crew (which is most of them, Thrawn hates working with men) to convince him to not just wear his standard uniform and gives him a catalogue full of options.

Anyways. The commute to the party is mostly painless after this point and the party itself is mostly the same as usual, Sicely haunting the air by Thrawn's elbow like some sort of wraith comprised entirely out of teenage spite, Thrawn trying to hard to remember the difference between his polite eye contact face and menacing inquisitive eye contact face that he keeps missing what people say to him. there's music playing. ronan is there, being insufferable. tarkin is there, being insufferable and terrifying. if krennic is also here there will inevitably be A Scene. eventually sicely gets bored of trying to subtly help Thrawn save face when talking to people (he just called a woman's outfit "appropriate for the ocassion" and even Sicely is aware that that's ruder than when they said she looks draped in tinsel) so they wander off, like a husky whose owner dropped the leash, or a balloon halfway filled with helium and halfway filled with a suicide's ghost. everyone at this party looks garish and varying degrees of miserable to talk to, which does in part remind sicely of home, but the kind of diplomatic misery present here is an altogether different breed one could expect from highblooded children, and most of the parties sicely went to as a kid were shindigs, hootenannies, barn-burners, and halloween parties where everyone drank age-appropriate drinks which were not illegal. so one can imagine they feel a bit lonely.

and then finally they hear it: one adolescent voice ringing out above the rest. there is one other teenager at this party. sicely makes a beeline for it. it's a brown-haired human girl dressed in all white, and shes chewing out some senator with as much vitriol as can be acceptable in such a setting as this. this rather quickly scares off said senator, and sicely (holding their mocktail) steps in before someone else can command her attention. the first thing she sees is, of course, their stupid cactus antlers. the second thing she sees is the chimaera insignia on their stupid suit.

SICELY: Um. Hi-- LEIA: You're a bit young to be a Navyman terrorizing the Outer Rim, aren't you? LEIA: Or are you simply a fan of the works of the Seventh Fleet? LEIA: I don't know how you people find the gall to come here and rub elbows with senators and charity organizers outright working to undo the very damage of the atrocities you and the rest of the Navy cause.

Sicely can't help it. They grin.

LEIA: You ought to be ashamed of yourself if you think this is funny. LEIA: Surely your people are among the ones being subjugated by Tarkin's great work? SICELY: Oh, nah-- my people are off Subjugglating elSewhere. LEIA: Oh! Lovely to know there's scum anywhere you go in the galaxy. SICELY: Can you yell at me some more?

It's only when they find out that she's a princess that Sicely realizes they have one goal in life: become dashing butch knight. pull Princess Leia.

[cy-lindric]

hi! i hope you're doing well!

i really loved your 17th century outfit, and i was wondering: what would you call the blue jacket? like the name of that garment as a component of historical fashion? i want to make something similar in a textiles class, but im having trouble looking for patterns without the garment's name 😅 if you made the garment yourself, do you have any pointers as to where i could find a good pattern (for historical accuracy)?

thank you for your time even if you dont end up answering!

ps i love your art soso much, esp sundown <33

Hello ! This type of split buttoned up cape is called a casaque/cassock (I know that word describes a lot of different types of garments, especially religious habits and some types of eastern european clothing, but in the context of 17th century western fashion afaik that's how it's called).

I actually used a pre-made pattern for that one because I was running out of time, it's from Reconstructing History , you can find it as paper and pdf. I do enjoy the cut of most of their patterns whenever I don't feel like drafting something entirely or I need a starting base.

Originally, my main reference was this piece from the Germanische National Museum. The catalogue has a lot of views including a top view that was very useful. In the end, I liked the "winged" version from the pattern (wings being the shoulder pieces often also found on doublets of that era), so I went with that.

Posting this publicly in case anyone's curious ! Hope that helps !