Haven't posted in a few days
Oct. 22nd, 2014 07:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepotMy dress is almost done - just need to do the finishing and fastenings. Hopefully that will be something I can do in one sitting. (Oh, and I think I'm probably going to reattach the skirt in the back because of Issues.) Now I'm obsessing about shoes and hair. I've got dye and such coming to blacken my Tissots and I need to move the buttons as well. I've got black plumes to put in my hair but I'm at a total loss as to how I'm going to do that. I know a late teens-early '20s hairstyle that I'll be doing, but I'm not sure how to incorporate the plumes. If I can't, I guess ... I'll sell them? I don't want them around if they're not useful to me. If only I had a black hat - I'd just put them on it. But my only black hat is a cloche.
The other day I was getting all :( over how there are always period-specialists who are better than me at their own time periods, but I brought myself back up by realizing that when it comes to generalists, I'm doing pretty well. Not to brag. But you know how my self-esteem is.
A different day someone on Tumblr posted a link to an article their friend wrote about C.F. Worth, and I kind of ... did a Chanel over it? D: I didn't mean to, I started to just reblog the link with general praise (because it was really well-written) but then I started questioning some of the assumptions the writer made - that's the trouble with citing regularly, when one section has no citations it really makes you start to wonder where they found it and why they didn't cite - and then the assumptions fashion historians make as a body about Worth. There doesn't seem to be really a good, factual analysis out there of what the Parisian fashion industry was like in the 1840s and 1850s, in terms of price and name-recognition/prestige and dressmaker income. A lot of the time the definition of "haute couture" as invented by Worth feels very very vague, almost as though (like the controversy over "behavioral modernity") we define this change by Worth so that Worth can be described as its inventor, and some of it feels like just the fact that a ~man was now involved is the main dividing line between "just small-time, unknown dressmakers" and "TRUMPETS SOUNDING A WHOLE NEW ERA".
Anyway I worry that she now feels like I'm a dick.
The other day I was getting all :( over how there are always period-specialists who are better than me at their own time periods, but I brought myself back up by realizing that when it comes to generalists, I'm doing pretty well. Not to brag. But you know how my self-esteem is.
A different day someone on Tumblr posted a link to an article their friend wrote about C.F. Worth, and I kind of ... did a Chanel over it? D: I didn't mean to, I started to just reblog the link with general praise (because it was really well-written) but then I started questioning some of the assumptions the writer made - that's the trouble with citing regularly, when one section has no citations it really makes you start to wonder where they found it and why they didn't cite - and then the assumptions fashion historians make as a body about Worth. There doesn't seem to be really a good, factual analysis out there of what the Parisian fashion industry was like in the 1840s and 1850s, in terms of price and name-recognition/prestige and dressmaker income. A lot of the time the definition of "haute couture" as invented by Worth feels very very vague, almost as though (like the controversy over "behavioral modernity") we define this change by Worth so that Worth can be described as its inventor, and some of it feels like just the fact that a ~man was now involved is the main dividing line between "just small-time, unknown dressmakers" and "TRUMPETS SOUNDING A WHOLE NEW ERA".
Anyway I worry that she now feels like I'm a dick.
