ah yes they call me “No Queue” Jones because I post everything I reblog at once with no breaks in between and then vanish into the night for extended periods of inactivity
In pop culture, slackers are portrayed as playing guitar, but learning to play any instrument requires a lot of commitment and attention, the opposite of what a slacker stands for.
*psst* It’s the fact that capitalism doesn’t value artistic ability if it can’t turn a profit. Capitalism sees all the amateur buskers and starving artists and assumes that, since they’re barely getting by, they must not be putting in enough effort.
Last month, I helped my friend with her new historical shoes shop “anacronicos, vestir en pasado”. I took part in a professional photo shoot and this is it. I never did this before, It was a dream come true!.
Last month, I attended the 2018 CSA Mid-Atlantic/Southeastern Biregional Symposium in Shippensburg, PA. It was quite a trip! I was so happy to meet up with so many fashion history scholars, and particularly to meet Ann Wass (of Riversdale House Museum), Mackenzie Anderson Sholtz (of Fig Leaf Patterns), and Lydia Edwards (author of How to Read a Dress). You can see all of my photos of the exhibition at the Shippensburg Fashion Archives and Museum on Instagram! I delivered a paper of my own, which I hope to turn into a podcast episode/blog post soon, but what really thrilled me was the presentation Mackenzie gave, “A Transitional Corset and its Companion Gown c.1804 from the Collection of the DAR Museum”.
At first, I was interested because it was based on actual garments and their construction, and because Mackenzie is an authority on that kind of thing, and because you know that transitional period is kind of my Thing, but when I was watching it, I realized that I recognized these stays – although not this particular version.
In 2011, I visited Historic Cherry Hill, a home once owned by the Van Rensselaers in Albany, NY, to do research for my qualifying paper (thesis). I came across this pair of very plain stays that have confused me ever since.
The shapes of all the pattern pieces are so quintessentially eighteenth century, but the overall shape of the stays is basically a tube. Even when I scaled it up and enlarged it to fit me, trying to get it to not be a tube was a struggle – and they were so short in front, even though the back fit. The boning was also weird, not just the normal half-boning of Diderot-style stays but completely vertical in the front.
In the end, I never found them satisfactory. They didn’t come up to the proper height at the bust, and when I tugged them up they left my stomach completely unmanaged. They just didn’t give me the right shape. Who knows what’s wrong with them, I thought, and set them aside. Well, Mackenzie’s contention is that during that late 1790s-early 1800s transition period, many women wore stays that hugged the ribcage, pushed up the underbustline, and created tension with the shift to provide a certain amount of support for the bust without either the actual cups of 1810s-style corsetry or the conical shape of 1780s stays. (The bodice linings that pin at center front, which are so common during this time, then provide another light layer of support and coverage. People have been speculating for some time that these linings were used as the only bust support, which I never fully bought – but being supportive in conjunction with something else does make sense.) You can recognize them by how low-cut they are in the front, and that vertical boning.
As I was watching the presentation, it hit me that this is what I made back in 2012! Unknowingly, I had reproduced a set of transitional stays and tried to use them for a purpose they weren’t designed for, which is why they failed so badly at it. I could have used these for my thesis project instead of trying to engineer my own version of the famous V&A short corset. I tried on my version of the stays with the rest of the 1790s outfit I made for the project, and was delighted to find that they worked perfectly.
(I included a picture of me and the stays and my chemise and my boobs without the dress in my blog post, but it just feels weird to plaster that up here, so you can click the link if you want to see how that looks.)
This silhouette is quite in line with what we see during the transitional Neoclassical era. We should really be thinking more about this middle option between full stays/a corset with cups and the fabled “women just didn’t wear any foundations between the 18th century and the Victorian era!” viewpoint.
Spitfire Alice A Gra 
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