Vlog: Aesthetic Is Not A Uniform

This month’s vlog is a bit of a ramble but I promise there is a point in there.  I think sometimes we think there is only one way to have an aesthetic and that can be really limiting.  So join me as I look at my own personal experiences and how they influence my interpretation of my aesthetics: cottagecore, steampunk, dark academia, witchcore, and whimsigoth.

submitted by @ever-since-ny 🩵🧡

'' Τhe Swan Maiden " by John Bauer, 1908

View of river and banks; trees leaning over water. Recorded in glass negative ledger: "M/Localities-Sand Hill, July 22, 1899."

Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

This is probably the best Beltane altar I have ever seen🔮

you simply have to swing it. | IG

Ulisse Aldrovandi, Botanical Vine, 1599

Star Sorceress / Kamil Sroka

“what about the ordinary people? why do you only make fancy historical outfits?”

listen

I’m an Ordinary Person 24/7

for approx. 6 hours, once a month (on average), I’d really like to be a countess

Bringing this back from the grave because I have a new observation to make, namely: many people are really bad at judging what was “normal“ in history, given that the closest thing we wear to their normal clothing (especially for daytime) is our current formalwear

This leads to some thing I call Ballgownification: The willingness to believe that literally any dress from before the 1920s or so, regardless of context or cut or style, was a ball gown. But that’s another conversation

Abby Cox talks about this in her video on wearing 18th-century clothing every day when she worked at Colonial Williamsburg – a lot of people assumed her outfit was upper-class when it was actually right on target for workwear of a milliner in the middling class range (obviously a milliner had to keep up with fashion for her business, but still… This is a working woman who has a job to do, and that is what she would wear during the day)

A lot of Victorian day dresses are literally impossible to assign to a specific social class unless they are the absolute most basic “crap job“ work dresses that would’ve been worn to do extreme physical labor, like mucking out animal stalls on a farm, or of course if they’re labeled couture gowns by Worth or something. Most women for large swaths of history had their clothing professionally made, regardless of social class (yes, there were different calibers of dressmaker for different classes) and most of them found ways to incorporate the latest styles and/or their personal taste.

Kim Kardashian wears jeans. Your best friend also wears jeans probably. There are very different jeans up close, but they look extremely similar in many ways. QED

Furthermore, like I said with the ballgown thing, any dress with a long skirt and trim is going to look fancy to us when we only wear long skirts and trim for fancy occasions nowadays. Same goes for suits

So it may be that that person who’s getting lambasted for “never making normal people clothes“ is actually making extremely average clothing and the audience just doesn’t realize it

I once got the comment “Upper class. What about lower class men?” on a photoset of THIS outfit.

In which I am wearing black wool, grey wool, and a very dull yellow silk waistcoat with a simple woven stripe. There’s nothing unusually fancy or upper class about it. This is not a rich fancyman suit. There isn’t even any embroidery! (Which is also not an exclusively upperclass thing).

And this was in an 18th century menswear facebook group, which

Some reenactors seem to have this bizarre inverted snobbery where they think the Best And Most Worthy things to recreate are the most statistically average working class wear. It’s fine and good that they’re studying and sewing that, but why can’t they just enjoy it without acting like they’re better than anyone who likes fancy silk things? It is only a small portion, most reenactors I’ve encountered seem nice! But that small number of assholes who love to criticize Everything is the reason I haven’t shared anything to a facebook group in years.

I’m not even a reenactor, I just like to make things, but yeah sure leave me a long comment exclusively about how horribly inaccurate the violin I borrowed for a photoshoot is while saying nothing about the clothing. in a sewing group. great. thanks. (Sorry, this has gotten a bit off topic from the original post! But they are related annoyances.)

Goodluck Pikachu

“People were just smaller back then”

Nope. Fat people have always been here, aren’t going anywhere, and have always been beautiful and worthy of respect.

okay but if you ever see a male creative who had a string of great work and then everything else he did was dogshit, go to the "personal life" part of his wikipedia and look at his relationships. you'll either find a major tragedy he didn't recover from (completely understandable) or, more likely, there was a woman in his life doing uncredited shit editing his stuff or contributing generally and she's not there anymore.

I told a friend about this phenomenon in literature and he called me weeks later like, I remembered what you said about women doing uncredited work when tim burton came up. he made a string of bangers then everything else just was nowhere near as good. the timeline matches perfectly to when he was with this german visual artist (lena gieseke). he's done some good work in collaboration, but if things were dug into I suspect we would find she did a lot more than people realise.

so yeah whenever you look around like wow women didn't work in history, or, women aren't auteurs, or, there just aren't as many great female writers - societal reasons for that aside, half the time they absolutely did.

Hell yeah

I’m sure someones already said this but I often see Tumblr described as a hellsite. This is fundamentally incorrect.

Tumblr is the faesite. Everybody is super confused and lost, you keep running into random places. Somehow you end up stuck there forever after interacting a couple of times. The people are all strange, everybody simultaneously seems to be from the future and the past as if time is meaningless.

YES

also technology breaks at random, and sometimes you just suddenly feel a thousand years old

"Portrait of Frieda Baars (Sangernebo) with three cats, 1907" Source.

House Beautiful Weekend Homes, 1990

Greider Lakes Trail, June 2021