#the modern edwardian

[fannyrosie]

Blue afternoon

Outfit rundown Jacket: second-hand Mary Magdalene Skirt: second-hand Victorian Maiden Blouse and underskirt: old The Floral Notebook (dead indie brand) Hat: vintage Parasol: Alice and the Pirates Gloves: second-hand Victorian Maiden Shoes: old Hotter Shoes Belt: thrifted Brooches and earrings: vintage

[misscromwellsmonocle]

Portrait of Elisabeth Drexel (1905) by Giovanni Boldini

[ask-dead-boy-detective-agency]

hello edwin

top 3 favorite fiction books go

[sesamenom]

some ideas from an au where maglor just keeps living in britain (/himring?)

especially in the earlier eras he had to put a lot more effort into styling/dyeing his hair to cover his ears & the blueness/Elf Sparkle. he also wore glasses for a while to dim the Treelight Eyes (because even as badly faded as he is, it's still really obvious with how old he is).

[local-limebug]

personally, i am not a truther of the very popular headcanon in the dbda fandom of edwin's parents being neglectful or abusive. of course, if you like that headcanon, that's cool too because it isn't contradicted by canon at all but as a tragedy enjoyer myself, i just feel like you guys are taking the flavour out of it.

st. hilarion's is a school for military kids. therefore, we know edwin's father (or male guardian) was likely military, and in 1916, almost definitely at war. and we know from one of the writers (i think? correct me if i'm wrong) that edwin's mother never hugged him, but that was because of edwardian etiquette, not because she didn't love him. his parents just acted like edwardian parents did.

we know so little about edwin's past and his life before hell, and there are so many possibilities as to why a presumably upper middle class boy's disappearance may be labeled an "act of god" whilst still having a family that loved him, starting with the fact that 5-6 other boys disappeared with him. in my opinion, although his death was very much a hate crime, it makes no sense for the "act of god" stuff to also be homophobia if every other kid in the dorm also disappeared.

like my first and most obvious idea is that he was mourned by his parents but since no one could find anything as to why all these boys just disappeared, all their clothes and belongings still in the dorm, that could have been labeled an "act of god" as a sort of consolation to the parents. that wherever the boys are now, it's a better place. in the deeply christian society back then, it would almost have been a comfort to the parents.

the second idea is that edwin's father died in the war around the same time that he did (or possibly before), and it's possible that edwin's mother simply didn't have the social standing or emotional strength to be able to do much about that. imagine losing your husband and son at once, being left a woman in edwardian england without any immediate male relative.

my other ideas are a bit out there, but maybe edwin's parents weren't even in the picture. like, we truly know nothing about his life, guys. this is why i mentioned "male guardian" in the second paragraph. if his parents were dead, and he was maybe being raised by a male relative in the military, then either one could fit. maybe the guardian died. maybe the guardian didn't care to look too hard for edwin.

even if you headcanon edwin with siblings like i do, these still make sense for the most part. maybe his father died and mother fell ill, or mother died before the war and father during it. sisters wouldn't have had much social standing anyway, and older brothers could have had the war or other siblings or their own families to deal with. younger brothers couldn't do shit, kids were ignored entirely back then. and again, terrible as the "act of god" stuff was, it was likely a hollow comfort for those left behind because they had no answers at all. what could they possibly do to solve edwin's case?

and god, aren't all of those options just so much worse than edwin simply not being liked by his parents? knowing that he once had a home, and a family that loved him, and now he doesn't? that they grieved him but were powerless to find him or rescue him and were likely haunted by his disappearance for the rest of their lives? and he can never go back to them to see them one last time or to say goodbye because by the time he escaped hell, they're all gone?

[fatehbaz]

Whitewash is extremely moral. Suppose there were a decree requiring all rooms in Paris to be given a coat of whitewash. I maintain that that would be a police task of real stature and a manifestation of high morality, the sign of a great people. -- Le Corbusier

A shocking call for compulsory whitening is made at the end of a key modernist manifesto. The pronouncement is associated with the signature whiteness of modern architecture -- an aesthetic regime that was presented as a complete revolution of the built environment in the 1920s and became the unconscious default setting of everyday life. Just look at the predominantly white background of most of the kitchens, offices, living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms around the world [...]. Le Corbusier didn’t simply call for whitewash to be imposed by the police in the name of health. It was meant to act as a form of policing in its own right, a technology of surveillance that would put in motion an ever-expanding culture of self-policing. Whitewash exposes every dimension of life in front of it to judgement. It acts like “a court of assize in permanent session” that will “give a power of judgement to the individual,” and thereby “make each one of us a prudent judge.” [...] A “Law of Ripolin” -- the brand name of the hard impermeable and washable enamel “sanitary paint” invented at the end of the nineteenth century [...] is needed to ensure that all interiors are painted white to target any form of dirt or darkness:

Imagine the results of the Law of Ripolin. Every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wall-papers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white ripolin. His home is made clean. There are no more dirty, dark corners. Everything is shown as it is. Then comes inner cleanness [...]. When you are surrounded with shadows and dark corners you are at home only as far as the hazy edges of the darkness your eyes cannot penetrate. You are not master in your own house. Once you have put ripolin on your walls you will be master of yourself. [...]

---

Whiteness manufactures health, morality, and intelligence. [...] The office of a modern factory that is “clear and rectilinear and painted with white ripolin” is a place of “healthy activity” and “industrious optimism.” [...] Le Corbusier’s routinely authoritarian and often explicitly eugenic and fascist impulses, associations, and actions make him an easy target. But there are endless, quieter, ultimately more controlling and insidious celebrations of whiteness in other hands. Le Corbusier is but a tip of the vast iceberg of whiteness. [...]

The very idea of an interior is the effect of this everyday violence. Architecture is never simply complicit with authority. Authority without architecture might not even be thinkable. [...]

There is no apolitical concept of health; no natural body or brain waiting to be cared for or abandoned by medicine and architecture that is not already an effect of those biopolitical regimes.

It is through the question of sickness that architecture reshapes the human. The idea of a healthy architecture is always about the health of a small group relative to multiple others [...]. Whiteness is coded as a fragility requiring protection through continual acts of preemptive violence. Whiteness is not a thing but a defense and deployment of power over others. [...]

---

Whiteness in Le Corbusier’s The Decorative Art of Today, for example, is simultaneously the most modern thing to do, the very symptom of modernity, and the most ancient of gestures. [...] Le Corbusier’s argument was first published in a late 1923 issue of L’Esprit Nouveau [...]. It was, after all, the extended “Voyage d’Orient” of 1911 (including the Balkans and Greece, but especially Turkey) where Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, the young architect from a small mountain town in Switzerland who would a decade later rename himself “Le Corbusier,” became “besotted with white” and convinced that the future of architecture was white. Whiteness is discovered in the lands of the non-white; of those seen to be closer to deeper human history and therefore to be admired and learned from. In fact, the very point of going to the East was to encounter its “great white walls” as an antidote to the self-absorbed decadence of architecture in the North, as Jeanneret explained [...]. Jeanneret expresses nostalgia for the more intact and mesmerizing whiteness of the great mosques and vernacular houses of Constantinople (Istanbul) [...] [and] “Algiers-the-white.” [...] This pervasive sense of contamination provoked the call for a second, more explicit law to impose whiteness not only onto industrial culture, but also onto its victims: the people of color and places seen as newly “unhealthy” -- requiring, as it were, a dose of “their” own medicine. [...]

---

The “white” architecture of the 1920s drew on countless experiments in whitening buildings in the name of health. This included, precisely, the use of Ripolin that had already become standard in clinics, hospital wards, and sanatoria rooms at the turn of the century.

In 1899, for example, the Touring-Club de France, inspired by one of its [...] cyclist members who was a doctor, started a campaign for an easily disinfected “hygienic room” in hotels that would be Ripolin-lined [...]. Hotel rooms were treated as hotspots for contagion [...]. Given the largely upper-middle-class membership of the club, this anxiety about disease was also class anxiety, fear of the unclean other. The tourist was to be mobile yet isolated by a prophylactic whiteness that would itself travel in advance.

The Touring-Club exhibited such a prototype “white room” with toilette and toilet spaces designed by Gustave Rives at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris -- strategically placed just inside the entrance of the Palais de l’hygiène [...]. The Touring-Club installed a series of such model chambres hygiéniques in automobile shows, congresses on tuberculosis, and international fairs. It was successful in persuading thousands of hotels to install such spaces [...].

Ripolin was used “everywhere,” for example, on the walls of the “hygienic housing” project for workers in Paris by Henri Sauvage and Charles Sarazin in 1903–1904. [...] The project was originally intended to feature a radical all-glass street façade with every window surrounded by webs of floor-to-ceiling hexagonal glass blocks [...] which would have been the most polemical housing structure possible, the most therapeutic role of glass, more extreme even than any sanatorium. The design was produced in immediate response to the new public health law of 1902 and the associated new building regulations. [...]

---

It is always about control of the threatening other of epidemic disease and control of the laboring poor, itself coded as dark, migrant, and contagious, a disease in its own right. And throughout this discourse of control, there is a seemingly “modern” disdain for disease-incubating ornament in favor of smooth white surfaces. [...] What is remarkable in the end is this trans-historical resilience of whiteness [...]. It orchestrates life and death.

---

All text above by: Mark Wigley. “Chronic Whiteness.” e-flux (Sick Architecture series). November 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[lee-sanghyeok]

(240424) 'Earth, Wind & Fire'

[edwinisms]

Oh my I really want Edwin to casually use the word "ejaculate" to mean "shout suddenly" in front of the gang and have to deal with everybody suddenly becoming 11 years old

hdhzgsdjchshd NOOOO he so fucking would what a nightmare……..

the sheer satisfaction crystal would have the moment he figures it out and gets super ultra flustered and she gets the shining opportunity to say, with all the smugness in the world: “well, that was rather embarrassing for you.”

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Evolution of Style.

[dandelionjack]

my favourite historical era to daydream about is that span of a few decades between 1890 and 1914ish. late victorian, fin de siècle, edwardian. there’s just something so exciting about it. the world on the brink of radical change, of catastrophe and decimation but they don’t know that for now, the twentieth century hasn’t been inaugurated as the bloodiest quite yet, all that looms ahead is a boundless bouquet of potential, invention, adventure. a turning point in time. spiritualism and the hereafter are in the air all clashing and collaborating and cooperating with rationality and progress and scientific advancement, technology and faith, mysticism and machines, the arts marching on into modernism and abstraction but not quite yet; there’s a future on your doorstep, the air is full of love and precognition and imagination. get out there in your hot air balloon and watch the world turn on its axis, holding its breath

also the fashion’s pretty cool

[malkaleh]

ooooh so I would love to hear more about Helen Norwich, and about how the English Civil War might have gone in that 'verse!

Helen, I don’t know if I said but she’s Norwich’s niece. Which I want to be clear, he never did anything to her but OH BOY. She was also born not that long after Tom Cromwell escaped him (Helen was born in 1523) after he’d been expecting to be his older brothers heir for so long (his brother had been married twice before Helen’s mother with no children and they had Helen late in their marriage).

Helen is very quiet, very considered and sensible - but she is beautiful which Norwich, after his Annoyed At Her Existence was like ‘…oh yay BARGAINING CHIP’ - it meant he could hold her wardship and then find an appropriate husband for her that could best benefit him.

(Helen was preparing to make the best of this she could - at least Norwich didn’t actually give a fuck about the actual management of the Earldom and she’s fairly sure that any husband he would pick for her wouldn’t either and would be happy for her to stay in the country with their children while he was at court so…she’d have that at least, in between whatever cruelty)*

*I’m fairly sure Norwich wouldn’t suffer like extreme cruelty because Status Thing and Status Thing Only but also he would totally not care if Helen was miserable or not.

She gets the Earldom in her own right in the end and makes it a really lovely place again - I think Welles Hall is actually particularly famous for fine wool(s) but I’m still working that out.

The Civil War in OT3 verse is me going ‘what if I flip things and the Restorationists are pissed about the increasing democracy + their colonial attempts got slapped down HARD’ essentially.

Essentially there’s this but I’ll babble some more!

Baron Hugh Wake (Of Liddell) is based on a real historical family - the first Baron had a daughter married one of the sons of Edward I by his second wife. It is however by his son (in our history both of the first barons sons died but here his oldest lives) John that Baron Hugh is descended.

King Hugh/The Restorationist King essentially begins the rebellion, well I’ll go from my notes:

Started it after his father, son and some of his sons friends were going to be jailed for human rights abuses. Believed that England should be an Empire to be great, should expel all the Jewish people, should become a Christian nation and revert to the ‘natural order of nobility.  

(They attempted to start a colony in what we would call North America. (The Spanish had previously been kicked out of South America in a story that is not mine to tell but does happen). They failed Miserably)).

There are whisperings about the changes Thomas and Mihrimah make and things do happen but they really start in Turhan’s reign. And then it goes on and becomes louder. About how Not White, Not Christian the royal family has become. About how there are Jews and Muslims and…in England. About how there is no imperialism, no ‘glory of empire’ and how people are being penalised for trying to make one by like jail. 

So we get to Henry VIII’s great great (I think that’s enough greats!) grandson Arthur (Jahan) II (I call him Arthur II because of the Tudor Arthurian Fandom Thing). His first child is a daughter and he decrees that she’s going to be the heir regardless of any brothers born afterwards. The royal family takes the final steps to expand representative democracy. Also the eventual restoration king’s son, his sons friends and his father are jailed for a failed attempt to colonise North America. They rebel at all of the above (it is possible that I a biracial jewish etc woman am Having Some Feelings). Arthur is eventually beheaded, there’s a Restoration King for the same time Oliver Cromwell ruled and then..Arthur’s daughter Charlotte Askala is invited back. 

The Restorationist Reign included a lot of awful things happening - like I mentioned the reform schools here

But that was very much the idea - they also did that to the children of nobles etc who weren’t restorationists. It’s pretty heavy history and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately (including Gregory Cromwell’s descendant(s) and how the chest with the Triads letters etc survived). The King Arthur Jahan was beheaded, his wife and daughter sent into exile. (I love them as well). Then Charlotte Askala (his daughter) is asked back because the whole thing falls apart after Hugh’s death (he’d styled himself essentially as protector of the realm for the quote ‘true king’

There’s a whole bunch of other things that will come up in the modern day with this universes version of the Abdication in the 1930s but I will stop now! (Also the other thing to know about Hugh is that he has two children he loves deeply - his son ended up in luxurious exile and never had children but his daughter had three daughters of her own but because Restorationists do not accept inheritance through the female line they are never going to be able to be held up as heirs which is a whole other Fuckery related to the abdication).

[lilly-mcfarlane]

Art Nouveau Coloring Book for Adults (vol 2):

with 50 Notes About Famous Art Nouveau Artists, Architects, and Jewelers

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The Art Nouveau Vol.2 coloring book is a great gift for yourself or your friends and family. And if you love this issue, make sure to check out the first book!

CLICK THE LINK TO CHECK IT OUT 🥳

[offorestsongs]

its so funny when people tell me stuff like "wow youre so good at drawing clothes" or "how do you come up with different outfits for your ocs i could never" because the truth is that there's a very limited pool of aesthetics/styles/elements that i like to draw and i just mix and match them as needed. if i had to draw anything outside of that i would wither away and die

[doctorho]

so....i'm writing this vampire viktor idea into an actual fic and i would love to hear your thoughts on this:

[shkatzchen]

Metal bedframes began appearing in Britain in the early 19th century and were adopted by health conscious Victorians who appreciated how easy they were to clean. I suspect they also appreciated the comparative ventilation of the metal bars as compared to the heavily-curtained four posters of yore, given these were the same people who slept with windows open all year round to keep rooms from running out of clean air.

EA actually made a fairly good attempt at giving us a Victorian/Edwardian bed frame with the Cottage Living bed... they just made the casters a little big and the bedding ugly. I personally find EA's version a bit fussy, so I sought to simplify the whole thing, abandoning the curves and brass beads for cleaner lines, with just the flourishes at the head of the bed. I also removed the casters... so sorry to those needing to move the bed. This makes it a little less period friendly, but your sims will appreciate the increased stability. On the other hand, many of these casters were removed from old Victorian frames in the 1980s, so this bed fits well for a modern Sim who likes their antiques, or simply the look. Indeed, there are still companies selling similar beds today, so this style is truly versatile through the ages.

Requires Cottage Living. Comes in 30 swatches, half with a white frame, half with a black frame.

Download The Iron Frame from SimFileShare here.

Made with S4S.

[statelibraryqueensland]

Details from Christmas card featuring Else and Hulda Lundager, Mt. Morgan.

Original image in high res here: LINK