#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

[a-candle-for-sherlock]

This is Fedir Krychevsky. I was browsing his WikiArt page, as one does. Initially drawn in by the delicate mood of the Edwardian self portrait above, I was surprised to find how much I liked his paintings of women. The colors, the directness of her expression, the light on her face and in her eyes:

The way these women gather around the central figure, giving her a close, warm background of support while she shines clear:

The way the youngest and the middle aged look ahead, while the oldest looks off at something beyond or behind:

How she is posed in classic profile, but her wreath is extravagant, not restrained, Bacchanalian or fae:

And then I was charmed again by this second self portrait, shy in expression yet bold in pose, with a very good coat.

[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).

[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. [...]

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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'

[wouldasquareroll]

Hello hii calling all people with niche history related interests PLEASE share PLEASE tell me about them as much as you’d like to and share your fave resources for your history knowledge, thank you.

i crave knowledge

[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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For beginners, the book offers helpful tips and color test pages while fans of coloring will appreciate the art.

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You can color using pencils, markers, or any other materials. Premium quality paper will help you achieve impressive results. All you need is to bring your creativity.

But this book doesn’t just help you relax. From this issue, you will learn a little about 50 famous Art Nouveau artists. There’s a new name on every page.

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 🥳

[fatehbaz]

“The freedom to piss on the cement of Empire [...].”

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The dry semi-desert that is South Africa’s Karoo began as an ice cap on the supercontinent Pangea [...]. The Karoo ice cap was kilometers deep and peaked between 359 and 299 million years ago. [...] Another hundred million years after Pangea split [...], the Karoo became home and then graveyard to dinosaurs of the Jurassic Era [...]. [Then] volcanic extrusions and kimberlite pipes threw skywards the purest form of carbon: diamonds. [...]

The discovery of diamond-bearing rock in the northern Karoo in 1869 propelled the Empire into inventing new aspects of the technosphere, in which metal mining structures, wooden beams, steam engines, long guns, and the muscles and bones and guts of migrant laborers were employed to reconnect the volcanic residues of the Late Cretaceous with the economic and political landscapes of South Africa and Britain. At the time, 90 percent of the world's industrial diamonds on the market came from the region, giving [...] [the British Empire] mastery over geological matter [...]. Profits from the sale of Late Cretaceous diamonds from ninety-one million years ago fed the formation of cities, corporations, and institutions in England and her Cape. [...] [T]he entrepreneur Cecil John Rhodes amassed a personal fortune from the diamond rush, taking control [...] [of] the Big Hole of Kimberley, where the largest kimberlite volcanic pipe extrudes. Appointed prime minister of the Cape Colony in 1890, Rhodes set about establishing a legal infrastructure that favored mining and a social infrastructure that established race-based disenfranchisement, creating a class of black laborers [...]. Black South African land rights were stripped in 1913; black economic activity became largely confined to physical labor, much of which was in the mines.

In the 1900s, the Carboniferous Era from around three hundred million years ago entered South African politics via South African’s coal-fired power stations. In the 1960s, the newly independent Republic of South Africa, [...] [controlled by] an embittered [white] minority, sought [...] to pursue formal policies of race-based segregation [apartheid], and [in order to fund its projects, then] commissioned geological surveys for coal, oil, and uranium. [...]

---

“Colonization=‘thingification’” wrote the postcolonial philosopher Aime Cesaire.

For Cecil John Rhodes, nature was a spectacle that could be kept in a zoo; the university was a project to be “funded from the stomachs of k*firs”; migrant laborers in the diamond mines were required to wait two weeks before leaving, while the contents of their colons were collected and painstakingly searched for ingested gems. Under colonial regimes of extraction of labor and minerals, Africa became a laboratory for the necropolitical: relations of life for relationships of ownership and death. [...] 

His estate set up the University of Cape Town and his statue was erected in 1934: a two-ton bronze effigy of the man set on a concrete plinth in a pose that calls to mind Rodin’s The Thinker. In the view of the statue’s gaze there was Rhodes Highway, Rhodes Drive, Rhodes High School; to the statue's right was Rhodes Memorial, and to its left his zoo; on the far side of the old Cape Colony would be built Rhodes University.

Memorialized thus as the archetypal Reasonable Man, the aura of his realism must have been surreal to those who had suffered under his rule. [...] [I]n 2015, academics, students [...] in and alongside the University of Cape Town found themselves confronting a performance of the execrable on March 9, 2015, when [a] student [...] threw excrement - nightsoil from a shack settlement - over Rhodes’s statue to call for the university’s decolonization. Rhodes’s statue was removed on a flat-bed truck exactly one month later [...].

---

Geologies of morals and morals of geology: the Karoo Ice Age, frozen and global, and Rhodes’s Karoo Age, an era of extractive economy that sacrificed life and created sacrifice zones. One lasted a hundred million years, the other a hundred and fifty. Both changed the relations between geology and life. [...]

Amid the Rhodes statue’s formal removal on April 9, 2015, a construction worker - a deconstruction worker, really - took a moment to piss [...] on the stairs leading up to Rhodes. It was his own moment in a month-long protest [...]. A moment to seize the possibility of vulgarity that breaks the lines of authority, the fountain of piss flagrantly rejoins the flow of water through all bodies and all spheres. The freedom to piss on the cement of Empire asserts that the body of the construction worker and the body of the shack-dweller inhabit the same earth as the Empire, and that cement, ultimately, is a political subject. As is diamond-bearing kimberlite, and gas-bearing shale. [...]

Colonization made predatory claims on the earth’s geological flows and processes without regard to the reciprocities through which they were formed in the earth’s spheres.

---

All text above by: Lesley Green. “The Changing of the Gods of Reason: Cecil John Rhodes, Karoo Fracking, and the Decolonizing of the Anthropocene.” e-flux Journal Issue #65. May 2015. At: e-flux dot com slash journal/65/336591/the-changing-of-the-gods-of-reason-cecil-john-rhodes-karoo-fracking-and-the-decolonizing-of-the-anthropocene/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first line/heading in this post added by me, quoting Green. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[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.

[doctorho]

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