#julia darling

[pluttskutt]

I love her your honour

[ruthbaderjaneway]

Julia Darling is so underrated.

[yooboobies]

shaped like love, like sunshine, like happiness - a boundle of joy | dedicated for @raplinenthusiasts tiny tan (3/7)

(cr. 0613data}

[rjshope]

Namseok through the years for @raplinenthusiasts ✨

+bonus:

[pluttskutt]

gorgeous stunning beautiful marevlous

[thebramblewood]

Helena seeks out new ways to satisfy her insatiable cravings for blood (none of which are very successful).

Previous / Next

Chapter 3: Sustenance Methods and Sources

Helena, thinking: Ugh! No way that's going to cut it.

Hmm... [to Banjo] C'mere, boy.

Banjo: [whimpering]

Julia: Banjo! Where are you? I'm ready for my morning kisses!

Helena: [muttering under breath] Oh my god. What the fuck is wrong with me?

-

Darling: Yooooo! Helena! Long time no see.

Helena: [awkwardly] Oh, uh, hey, Darling.

Darling: Interesting assortment of items you've got there. What's with all the meat? Aren't you a vegetarian?

Helena: [nervous chuckle] It's for my parents. They've been away on vacation and I wanted to give them a warm welcome home: burgers for Dad and a clean house for Mom.

Darling: Helena, wait up! I can't believe you didn't tell me you were back in town. We've got so much catching up to do!

Helena: Well, I was hoping not to be back for too long, but you know how the job market is these days...

Darling: Yeah, it's been a real rude awakening after relying on my basketball scholarship so long. But I just landed a sweet bartending gig. I can totally score you free drinks!

Helena: Cool. But I'd better get going now.

Darling: What's the rush?

Helena: Sorry. I just can't trust my sister not to burn the place down if I leave her unattended.

Darling: Well, call me if you ever want to hang. I'm assuming you haven't lost my number!

-

Helena, thinking: I can't believe it's come to this.

[immediately gags] NOPE! NOPE! NOPE!

[the-puppet-bracket]

Wally Darling propaganda

Julia propaganda

[metaforadohomeminvisivel]

Peter Pans

[arrows-unofficial-ocs]

For the sexuality ask game: 🏳️‍🌈 + Your Descendants OCs, please??

@dancingsunflowers-ocs 💖

Tim Radcliffe — Demisexual + heteroromantic

Jean Radcliffe — Heterosexual

Nicola Radcliffe — Bisexual

Julia Radcliffe — Lesbian

Ian Radcliffe — Bisexual

Edward Radcliffe — Heterosexual

Harriet Radcliffe — Heterosexual

Molly Poppins — Bisexual

Kalani of Motunui — Bisexual

Caroline Darling — Demisexual

Dizzy Tremaine — Bisexual

Send me “🏳️‍🌈 + a fandom” and I’ll tell you the sexuality of everybody (important)

[pluttskutt]

with and without lines for my own sake

[thebramblewood]

Even when she's fending off hunger pangs, Helena's got a weak spot for the sexy brash alternative girls (bonus points if they're named Lilith).

Previous / Next

Chapter 4: The Art of Dark Meditation

Helena, thinking: You are not hungry. You are not hungry. You are not h-

[stomach grumbles loudly]

I guess it's back to the drawing board.

-

Julia: Whoa. Where ya off to looking like that?

Helena: Ugh, do I look ridiculous? Is my makeup awful?

Julia: No, you actually kinda look like a million bucks. No more migraine?

Helena: It's under control for now.

Julia: Wait! You didn't answer my question.

Helena: Maybe because it's none of your business. Keep out of trouble, kiddo, and don't stay up past your bedtime.

Julia: But-

Helena: Don't make me call a babysitter.

-

Darling: Helena! You managed to track me down. Guess I owe you that free drink now, huh?

Helena: Oh, I really don't need-

Lilith (Pleasant): One more round, Dar?

Darling: Another round of EAPAs coming up! I'll make you the cocktail of your dreams once I'm finished here, H.

Helena: [stealing discreet glances] No worries. I can wait.

[indistinct conversation]

Darling: Helena, you've barely even touched it! Are my mixology skills that hopeless? I've been practicing!

Helena: Sorry. It's great. I'm just a little... distracted.

Darling: [chuckles] Yeah, that's obvious.

Helena: Who is she? I thought I knew everyone in this place.

Darling: She's new in town, I think. Looks like a tough nut to crack but seems nice enough. Good tipper at least. God, what is her name? I think it's...

Lilith: [faintly overheard] Well, I should pack it in or I'll hate myself in the morning.

Helena: Thanks for the drink, but I've got to go.

Darling: What's with you and the hasty exits these days? [sighs resignedly] Well, good luck chasing down your new lady.

[meat-yukki]

[abfabsweetiedarlings]

Ab Fab ended after five series in 2003 and while fans are still praying for a reboot, they’ll soon be able to enjoy the next best thing: Absolutely Fabulous: Inside Out, a documentary spilling the beans about how the show was made. Featuring Saunders, Lumley, Julia Sawalha (Saffy) and a slew of clips, it’s a glorious reminder of how groundbreaking the show really was.

Eddie, Patsy and Saffy were its stars, but so too were the clothes. Six years before Sex and the City catapulted Fendi Baguette bags and Manolos into the mainstream, Ab Fab made designer labels a talking point in a more irreverent way. Rather than existing to gild their wearers, clothes were often the butt of the joke, with Edina’s “It’s Lacroix, sweetie” sending up her obsession with labels in a way that viewers found relatable.

For the costume designer Rebecca Hale it was a dream job. “Jennifer [as the show’s creator] gave you freedom and creative licence. Nowadays you’re more constrained — there are so many points of view.” Although the job wasn’t without its stressesos famously worked close to the wire, frequently editing lines at the 11th hour. “I would often be on a motorcycle coming back from Selfridges when they changed the script, and I’d be running around Selfridges trying to find more shoes. You’d sometimes get the script on Thursday and be shooting Friday. I’d be sitting outside Harvey Nichols waiting for it to open, laughing and thinking, ‘Wow, I can’t believe she’s written that.’ ”

Not only did the script go close to the wire but also sometimes close to the bone. “But satire is what makes comedy so fantastic,” Hale says. “If you compare Ab Fab to something like Emily in Paris, [Emily] is more like a runway show than an observation on society. It’s very two-dimensional. It doesn’t take the piss out of itself.”

At the time gossip mags were the equivalent of Instagram, and Hale remembers looking through Hello! with Saunders for inspiration. “We’d see Katie Price getting out of a car in a Juicy Couture tracksuit and a G-string. What I loved about Jennifer is that we’d be telling stories and [showing] the complexities and insecurities of being a woman. We’d always make everything tight. Trousers would be extra small so there’d be a camel toe. You’d relate to the vulnerability, and show [the audience] that vulnerability is OK. Everything now is so pure and clean. Nobody wants to offend, but there’s got to be a bit of offence in order to observe.”

By the time Hale joined the show in the early Noughties (the earliest series were wardrobed by Sarah Burns), it was firmly established and most designers were keen to lend. “Gaultier and Dolce & Gabbana were always generous. The rest we’d buy at Harvey Nichols and Alexander McQueen. Betty Jackson made all of Patsy’s things, so we paid for it at cost. She was also generous and had a very big say in the way that Patsy looked. It was such a great contradiction to Eddie — very pure in its line and not so messy visually. Patsy was much more messy physically because Joanna’s such a great comedic actress.”

Decades after the final series of Ab Fab aired, Patsy is still a popular fancy-dress costume. What, for Hale, is her most iconic look? “There’s a white Betty Jackson coat that she wears with a black tight-fitting dress underneath — I think it was vintage Yves Saint Laurent. The tones were important — she’d wear cream, white or black, and occasionally red, whereas Edina would wear anything.” Indeed, the latter would be slavishly latching on to the hottest names and trends of the day. “One of my favourite Edina outfits is the Burberry look she wore in the early 2000s. She’s got the check bucket hat, jacket and three-quarter-length trousers.”

If Edina’s looks were outrageous, so too were those of her secretary, Bubble (Jane Horrocks). One of her more memorable outfits is a padded dress printed with Teletubbies, inspired by the popular children’s TV show of the time. “I was a single parent and had just come out of that period when you’re watching Pingu and Teletubbies. My brain was frazzled but I loved the imagery of it.”

By contrast, Saffy’s wardrobe was deliberately wholesome and drab, as befitted a girl who was chastised by Patsy for “dressing like a Christian”. Hale says: “We’d go to a shop and pick the cosiest jumper or the ugliest item of clothing. Anything that looked like it was a walking contraceptive pill, I’d put on her.”

Such was the show’s popularity that famous faces lined up to have cameos, meaning that Hale also had the fun of dressing its numerous celebrity guest stars. “We had a whole room of supermodels once. Elton John turned up in his own fabulous outfit. I remember dressing Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull. Anita turned up with these amazing lilac silk flowers, one for her and one for Jennifer. I put Marianne in a tailored white trouser suit by Bella Freud.” Hale also worked on Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016), which featured a cameo by Kate Moss. “Kate was delightful. We were going through some ideas and she pulled out this dress that Johnny Depp had given her — black sequins, made by a very famous costume maker in Hollywood. Because the scene required her to come out of the River Thames, I copied that dress, remaking it in green sequins so that she emerged looking like a mermaid.”

Hale says that if Saunders ever did decide to do a reboot, she would look at influencers for inspiration, and dress them in labels such as SS Daley, Balenciaga and JW Anderson, adding in vintage pieces by Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney. “Fashion is so eclectic now. I’d have to find something that was extreme. Edina would have to wear a Kim Kardashian bodysuit like she did on Saturday Night Live.”

Hale is interested in the power Kardashian wields. “She’s a fashion icon. Although you haven’t got those fantastic people who really used to cultivate their own looks. Nobody takes risks any more. They’re all too concerned about how they’re perceived. In the Nineties you’d have these very famous fashion people — Anna Wintour, André Leon Talley, Suzy Menkes — each with their own image, and they’d stick to it. Now people just go to a designer and get plonked in it rather than curating their own style. Money kills creativity. You get paid to wear a brand and it takes away your identity. I think that’s sad.”

It’s the antithesis of Hale’s approach to fashion. She got involved with Ab Fab after initially working with Saunders on the comedy series The Comic Strip Presents … in the late 1980s and early 1990s, followed by the sketch show French and Saunders in the early 2000s. “We’d banter with each other about what was going on in our personal lives, and I’d often regale them with stories about my mother,” she says. “She was exuberant, to say the least — a great beauty, a great intellect and something of a fashion icon. On holiday in Greece she’d rise in the morning wearing some kaftan and a turban and ceremoniously walk on to the beach, waving at the Greek fishermen before swimming off in the nude.”

If she sounds uncannily like Edina Monsoon, that’s because she is. “Part of Edina is based on my mother. Her name was Crystal Hale and she was an inspiration to many. She’d take me to school dressed in a cape decorated with great big lions’ heads and a huge fur hat. She was extremely loving but very alternative. Her various stories and antics would be relayed back to Jennifer and Dawn, and they would give each other a sideways glance. So, yes, she was part of the inspiration for Edina.”

Ever since Ab Fab aired, fans have been guessing who Edina was based on, with the most popular theory being Lynne Franks, a well-known fashion PR who shared some of her traits. The name Crystal Hale has never been mentioned. She was the daughter of the novelist and MP AP Herbert, and indeed, some of her parenting sounds like it would put Edina’s to shame. “On one particular day, when I was terrified of [doing] my GCSE, she gave me a type of amphetamine called a purple heart to calm me down. It did the opposite.”

Never mind Edina being based on her mother: was Saffy based on Hale? “She might have been in the way I relayed my stories, but I was equally outrageous in my twenties,” she says, laughing. “My mother encouraged me to be expressive. At school I was into punk fashion and she’d allow me to wear a Vivienne Westwood cobweb-knit angora mohair sweater with no bra underneath, a miniskirt and rubber stockings.”

Hale has just finished working on Kaos, the Netflix black comedy starring Jeff Goldblum and Billie Piper. “I’ve rarely felt as happy reading a script as I did reading [the writer] Charlie Covell’s — it’s the closest to Absolutely Fabulous in terms of being laugh out loud.”

And she’s not surprised by the lasting impact Ab Fab has had. “The relationship between a mother and daughter is a theme that’s never going to die. It’s light-hearted, hilarious and there’s nothing else like it. I think it needs to be reintroduced.” We’d drink (the Bolly) to that.

[flyinghome-againstthewind]

22 and 23?

22. When do you usually write (day of the week or time of day)? Typically on Saturday and Sunday mornings! If things are flowing, sometimes I can write in the evenings during the week, but generally, mornings and afternoons are most productive for me, so like, having a job is really cramping my writing style...

23. Where do you usually write? Okay this goes back to when it was the pandemic and I started writing fic again and I had roommates, so I would always write from my bed. I have one of those foldable lap desks, and now that I live by myself, it still is just habit at this point, although I'll write from my office when I need a change of environment! Besides home, the one coffee shop I liked to write in didn't survive the pandemic and also would have been pretty far after I moved, and I haven't found another local place that has good writing vibes 😫

[send me fic writer asks!]

[hauntedliz]

wally darling has enough kermit vibes that i know julia lepetit would draw him perfectly

[yayadrawsthingz]

Here's the rest of the characters and some sibling bonding.