Quotulatiousness

December 24, 2025

Welcome to Bland World

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia yearns for the return of the weirdo, the eccentric, and the non-conformist to spice up our bland, smooth, grey world:

“People are less weird than they used to be,” claims psychologist Adam Mastroianni. He describes this as “an epidemic of the mundane”.

The strangest thing, he believes, is absence of strangeness. Nobody wants to make waves — or even trickles. Conformity is the flavor of the month, and it tastes the same every month.

We live in a “smoothness society”, explains philosopher Byung-Chul Han. He points to the smooth, rounded contours of the iPhone as a symbol of society’s desire to remove friction. Our phone apps demonstrate the exact same thing. We scroll and swipe with such ease, and anything with complexity, nuance, or resistance is eliminated from consideration.

“The smooth is the signature of the present time”, he claims. Everything from the Brazilian wax job applied to human bodies to the wax coating put on fruits and vegetables aims at the same ideal.

Resistance is futile. Everything must be smooth. Paradise now really is that paved parking lot.

In a world without complexity or resistance, nothing ever changes. Most movies, music, books feel like stagnant rehashes of the same formulas. And that’s intentional.

For the first time in history, fashions don’t change. We don’t change.

Others have noticed this avoidance of anything new or different. Things are designed to blend in, not stand out. Jessica Stillman, writing in Inc., complains about a “blandness epidemic“. Brian Klaas calls it the “surefire mediocre“.

Everywhere you look, the system is serving up more of the same.

It’s not just in our imagination — the “world really is getting grayer“. A researcher recently studied photos of household items going back two centuries. An analysis of the pixels showed a scary collapse in color.

Even the Victorians — often considered as conformists — lived a more color-filled life. We have almost completely abandoned red and yellow and other bright hues in favor a boring black-and-white spectrum.

But what’s most striking is how this descent into grayness has accelerated during the last few years. The most popular color is now charcoal — and at the current rate it will soon account for half of the marketplace.

September 9, 2025

QotD: The horrible 1970s

Filed under: History, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It should be noted, though, that it really was kind of gross to be alive during the ’70s. You can’t unsee all those hairdos, medallions, and Day-Glo typefaces. You just kind of have to put your head down like a shell-shocked veteran and stride your way grimly through a happier age.

Colby Cosh, “Cinema: recently seen”, ColbyCosh.com, 2005-08-19.

June 27, 2025

QotD: The dangers of “doing too much principal component analysis”

Filed under: Economics, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

John: I’ve never read a fashion magazine or watched a runway show, so I just naively assumed that models were stunningly attractive and feminine. But as Mears points out, the models are not actually to most men’s tastes. They tend to have boyish figures and to be unusually tall.1 Is this because the fashion industry is dominated by gay men, who gravitate towards women who look like teen boys? Whatever the origins of it, there is a model “look”, and the industry has slowly optimized for a more and more extreme version of it, like a runaway neural network, or like those tribes with the rings that stretch their necks or the boards that flatten their skulls. There’s actually a somewhat uncanny or even posthuman look to many of the models. The club promoters denigrate women who lack the model look as “civilians”, but freely admit that they’d rather sleep with a “good civilian” than with a model. The model’s function, as you say, is as a locus of mimetic desire. They’re wanted because they’re wanted, in a perfectly tautological self-bootstrapping cycle; and because, in the words of one promoter: “They really pop in da club because they seven feet tall”.

[…]

By the way, the fact that models are beautiful in a highly specific way, and that there exist women who are similarly beautiful but condemned to be “civilians”, is a good reminder of the dangers of doing too much principal component analysis.2 In so many areas of life, we are obsessed with collapsing intrinsically high-dimensional phenomena onto a single uni-dimensional axis. You see this a lot with the status games that leftists play around privilege and oppression — I feel like a rational leftist would say that a disabled white lesbian and a wealthy scion of Haitian oligarchs are just incomparable, each more privileged than the other in some senses and less in other senses. But no, instead there’s an insistence that we find an absolute total ordering of oppression across all identity categories, a single hierarchy that allows us to compare any two individuals and produce a mathematical answer as to which one is more deserving of DEI grants. My hunch is a lot of the internal tensions and bickering within American leftism are actually produced by this insistence, which makes sense because it’s totally zero sum.

But the disease of trying to pin everything to a single number is hardly confined to the left. You see it on the right in the obsession with IQ, as if a single number could capture the breathtaking range of variation of cognitive capabilities across all humanity. I mean for goodness sake, Intel learned the hard way that this doesn’t even work for computers, and human brains are much weirder and more complicated than microprocessors. But the even dumber version of this is the 1-10 scale of female beauty. There’s something so sublime about seeing a beautiful human being, because so much of it is either bound up in subtle interrelationships between different features (this is why plastic surgery often makes people uglier — there’s no such thing as a “perfect nose”, and if you pick one out of a catalog you’ll probably end up with one that doesn’t fit your face), or it’s irretrievably evanescent — a fleeting glance, or the way her hair falls across her face just so, gone the moment after it happens. Taking something so ineffable and putting it on a 1-10 scale only makes sense as a form of psychological warfare. And I get it, amongst the young people relations between the sexes have degenerated to the point of more or less open warfare, but come on, this is pornbrained nonsense.

Speaking of both the DEI olympics and the classification of female beauty, some parts of this book are really charmingly naive, and I snickered a bit at Mears’s mystification at why all of the models are white and blonde. The really funny part is that she says something like: “I expected this legacy of white supremacy to be in retreat given that so many of the big spenders in clubs these days are from Asia and the Middle East”. Is she really not aware that men of other races have an even stronger aesthetic preference for white women than white men do?3

John Psmith and Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST JOINT REVIEW: Very Important People, by Ashley Mears”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-03-04.

    1. In fact, an unusually high proportion of models are intersex individuals with a Y-chromosome and androgen insensitivity syndrome.

    2. Not the only danger of too much principal component analysis!

    3. Gabriel: Kimberly Hoang did an ethnography as a bar girl in several Vietnam bars. At the bar that catered to Vietnamese elites, the other bar girls made her lighten her skin with cosmetics and wear a black minidress, with the target look being tall, pale, and slender K-pop idol. When she moved to another bar catering to white sex tourists, the other bar girls told her to wear bronzer and a slutty version of traditional Asian dress with the target look being exoticized sexiness. See: Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2015. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. University of California Press.

March 21, 2025

The Shocking Dress That Sparked Global Outrage! – W2W 13 – 1947 Q3

Filed under: Europe, France, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 19 Mar 2025

In 1947, Christian Dior stunned the world by introducing his controversial “New Look”. With luxurious dresses and ultra-feminine silhouettes, Dior’s designs ignited fierce debates about gender roles, societal values, and post-war extravagance. While some saw his collection as a welcome return to elegance, others viewed it as an insult during times of austerity. Was Dior celebrating beauty or setting women’s progress back decades?
(more…)

February 7, 2025

Justice for WW2?! – W2W News 1945

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Media, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 6 Feb 2025

Join SPARTACUS and INDY on the War2War 1945 Newscast as we explore a world tumbling from war to war. European colonies face fresh conflicts and groundbreaking polymer innovations spark industrial revolutions. All the while Nazi war criminals are brought to justice at the Nuremberg Trials.
(more…)

October 22, 2024

A Conquering Hat: a History of the Bicorn

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HatHistorian
Published Jul 1, 2022

Emblematic of Napoleon Bonaparte and his age of conquest, the bicorn is a distinctive military hat that became part of the most formal of dress uniforms and remains to this day in certain ceremonial outfits

The bicorn I wear in this video comes from Theatr’Hall in Paris https://www.theatrhall.com. The uniform comes from thejacketshop.co.uk

Title sequence designed by Alexandre Mahler
am.design@live.com

This video was done for entertainment and educational purposes. No copyright infringement of any sort was intended.

August 3, 2024

The Rise, Fall, And Revival Of Art Deco | A Style Is Born W/ @KazRowe

Filed under: Architecture, France, History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Wayfair
Published Jun 15, 2023

Welcome to A Style is Born, hosted by YouTuber, cartoonist, and champion of under-represented history, Kaz Rowe!

Join us as we go down the rabbit hole and uncover the unique histories and origin stories behind your favorite design styles. In this first episode of Season 2, we delve into the history-rich Art Deco movement.

Chapters
Intro – 00:00
History – 00:45
Influences, Elements, & Materials – 04:58
1980s Art Deco Revival Via Memphis Group – 07:46
Conclusion – 09:13
(more…)

June 23, 2024

QotD: Shoes

Filed under: History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Mismatched shoes are also nicely subversive. There is somewhere in the clothing code a notion that holds over from the Elizabethan era that says a person’s shoes must show that they are in the Elizabethan lingo, unconcussable. Shoes, especially the shoes of the male and the young, are meant to show that the wearer is, all apologies, grounded. (High heel shoes take their semotic precisely from the way they break this rule. The wearer, a female, demonstrates her vulnerability, her fragility, her elegance, her powers of evocation by showing herself not at all grounded.)

Grant McCracken, “Cotton, Converse and co-creation”, This Blog Sits at the, 2005-07-27.

December 30, 2023

In defence of … cufflinks?

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Critic, Peter Caddick-Adams makes the case for sartorial splendour over modern-day slovenly dress, and particularly for the cufflink:

“Great British coin cufflinks” by wowcoin is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

… these traditional baubles are fast becoming the clothing language of the old guard. Although fashion is always on the move, we are less stylish than we once were. Perhaps propelled by Mrs Thatcher’s homely handbags, refinement in dress is receding from everyday life. The fact that our current Prime Minister, like his predecessor-but-one, rarely sports cufflinks is a symptom of a greater sartorial malaise.

Links evolved in the 19th century as a means of displaying wealth and class, following the ruffled nonsense of the Elizabethan and Baroque eras and floppy sleeves sported by Beau Brummell and his Regency dandies. After Prince Albert had popularised the watch chain named after him, masculine fashion was bowled over by his son, the frock-coated Prince of Wales, later Edward VII. “Gentlemen, you may smoke,” he proclaimed on ascending the throne in 1901, instantly removing Queen Victoria’s ban on puffing away on the royal estates.

Apart from making a profession out of cigar-smoking, the new king influenced many clothing innovations, including trouser turn-ups (a last-minute tailor’s resort), those monstrous “Windsor” tie-knots, and leaving the bottom button of a waistcoat undone (due to the imperial stomach). The most colourful were His Majesty’s shirt embellishments designed by Fabergé. They immediately prompted Europe’s middle classes to weigh-in with gold, enamelled or monogrammed cuff jewellery, without which the aspiring Edwardian-era male was, frankly, naked.

Not compatible with the rigours of combatting the Bosche in the trenches of the Great War (when the affectation of tucking a muddied or bloodied handkerchief into one’s coat sleeve re-emerged), cuff-links returned with vigour during the Jazz Age. Their reappearance, along with spats (worn around the ankle) was due to the lack of central heating in His Majesty’s realm. All those draughty corridors in smart houses (and lack of instant remedies for colds and flu) necessitated warm ankles, with silk-wrapped necks and wrists protected by elaborate studs and links.

Resurgence was brief, for the aforesaid gentleman’s accessories almost vanished in 1939–45 with the advent of austerity imposed by adversity. Skullduggery by German submarine captains created shortages of fine shirting. The resultant famine of silk and cotton in turn destroyed the double cuff, which hitherto had been bound together so effectively by links. As it was deemed unpatriotic in the many countries at war to advertise luxury, these flourishes fell out of fashion completely.

Winston Churchill compounded this utilitarian mood with his man-of-the-people “siren suits” (predecessor of today’s onesies). They reflected the epoch of clothing short-cuts, such as collar-attached shirts, zip fasteners and trouser belts, replacing collar studs, fly buttons and braces — all, you will note, gifts from our Transatlantic cousins. Although men’s hats were retained for warmth, mainly disappearing in the 1960s because of our extended lives in automobiles, these moves to simpler clothing (even if, in Churchill’s case, adorned with a spotted bow tie) also threatened the permanent demise of the cuff-link. More correctly, they threatened cufflinks, for these are only of value in the plural.

Indeed, “what is the point of cufflinks?”, I hear you ponder. Anthropologists will tell you that man is a curious creature. From the dawn of time, he has had a weakness for asserting individuality, to signify class or leadership, or oft-times as part of a mating ritual. Archaeologists will reference troves of treasured jewellery in excavated graves. Historians cite portraits, engravings, photographs and uniforms, monocles and cravats as proof of this down to modern times. Staying with a barrister friend recently, I was shown his collection of about fifty pairs of cufflinks. Their designs reflected his three lives as a reserve officer, lawyer and freemason.

October 11, 2023

Art Deco in 9 Minutes: Why Is It The Most Popular Architectural Style? 🗽

Filed under: Architecture, France, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Curious Muse
Published 3 Sept 2021

What comes to your mind when you think of the 1920s? For most people, the 1920s conjures up images of jazz, flappers, Old Hollywood, the Great Gatsby, and the Chrysler Building in New York City. It was a time of prosperity, exorbitant spending, and entertainment that gave rise to one of the most popular decorative arts and architecture movements — known as Art Deco.

Characterized by exquisite craftsmanship, lavish decoration, and rich materials, the style has become synonymous with the Roaring Twenties. So, what was the Art Deco movement all about and what differentiates it from other major movements? Finally, despite its popularity today, what makes Art Deco so closely associated with the 1920s?

In this week’s video, we’ll dive into the history of the era and learn about Art Déco, the style that continues to inspire designers and architects around the world!
(more…)

August 30, 2023

QotD: Hairstyles of the late Ancien Régime

Filed under: France, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… you get things like the massive and bizarre hairstyles of the nobility (and to be fair the rich bourgeois, but that’s because they aped the nobility) in France just before the French revolution.

As the industrial revolution and various other shifts (including truly disastrous harvests) robbed those whose income came from hereditary landholding of their ancient riches and prominence, even while the court demanded a complex set of “dancing attendance” for royal favor (A policy started and encouraged by Louis XIV in part to rob the nobility of wealth and prominence, not to mention keeping their minds off rebellion) the nobility felt insecure. The fact that its ranks were being penetrated by people from the bourgeoisie, who married their children or “simply” franked the nobility’s lavish lifestyles, made the nobles feel they were losing control. Even though rank remained a thing of birth, they were in fact, in the real world, losing rank.

The response were fashions so extravagant that they make us go “Wait, what?” and must have given people headaches.

You can see where wigs came from and were fashionable, in a society without running water and/or decent shampoos. It was easier to keep your hair ridiculously short and wear wigs, which is why they’ve been part of human fashion since ever.

But it took the French revolution to come up with wigs on armatures (or hair extensions, ditto) and hairstyles that incorporated ships and, at one point, bird cages with live, singing birds.

To look at drawings or read descriptions is to go “uh, what? who ever thought that was attractive?” and also “Boy their heads must have hurt”.

Yet the competition for the most elaborate and showy hairstyle, no matter how insane, did not stop until those heads fell to Madame Guillotine thereby stilling forever their status anxiety.

Sarah Hoyt, “Is That A Ship On Your Head?”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-09-01.

August 25, 2023

QotD: Passive-aggressive “fashion”

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In places where half the population is the size of a beached whale, people dress in such a way that emphasizes rather than disguises or makes dignified their size. They love tight fits and bright shades — shocking pink and apple green, for example — as if challenging passersby to take notice of them and utter an insult, so that they can then feel aggrieved. In fact, it is they who are aggressive: They know both that one cannot fail to find them grotesque and that one is prevented by social convention and the desire to be polite from demonstrating either by word or facial expression that one finds them grotesque. It must be the same with the photos of themselves that they show. There is no physical exercise that can compare to that of holding one’s tongue.

This is why the doctrine of multiculturalism, far from making people behave better and more sensitively to the feelings of others, allows them to behave worse and less sensitively to the feelings of others. It is almost normal or instinctive human behaviour when in unfamiliar social surroundings to look around and see how other people are behaving, estimate what might offend them, and adjust one’s own conduct accordingly. Of course, one sometimes gets it wrong, but at least one tries. However, if multiculturalism is the demand that we accept the conduct of others, it is at least as much the demand that they accept our conduct, whatever it might be. And therefore there is no need for us to adjust it merely for their comfort.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Suit Yourselfie”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-09-16.

June 7, 2022

QotD: Mens’ fashion in Europe versus the USA

Filed under: Europe, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Men in Europe really like tight clothes. They really like suit jackets that are what Americas would see as a size too small. Even the portly guys have tight jackets and pants. The difference between Americans and Europeans is that the worst sin for a Euro is to be seen as boring, while the worst sin for an American is to be a phony. This shows up in men’s styles. European men look like they spent hours getting ready to go out, while American men want to look like they live in a house with no mirrors or hot water …

The Z Man, “Travelogue: Talinn”, The Z Blog, 2019-04-03.

March 31, 2022

How Did They Pee in Those Dresses? A Superficial History of Underwear

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Bernadette Banner
Published 28 Nov 2020

*[2:19] In the English-written sources I’ve found so far. Unfortunately I can’t presently speak for primary accounts written in other languages.

FURTHER READING:
Portraits of ladies not wearing underwear but that I couldn’t include in the video for Proprietary Reasons, lol
Mid-18th century: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Mid-18th c, “La Jupe Relevée” Francois Boucher https://p6.storage.canalblog.com/68/0…
Full analysis of the 15th century Lengberg Castle finds: https://www.academia.edu/27335143/The…
Extra special thanks to Izabela at Prior Attire for permission to use her demonstration video! She has also just put out a video discussing how Victorians dealt with needing to pee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED-wK…
Abby Cox on 18th Century periods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2Tg…
Karolina Żebrowska on Victorian periods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d_QP…

Footnotes and image credits can be found at: http://www.bernadettebanner.co.uk/how…

Want to get started with hand sewing?
🧵
🕯Check out my Skillshare original course, “Hand Sewing Basics: Working Wonders with Fabric, Needle & Thread”. To sign up for a free trial and take the class, visit https://skl.sh/bernadettebanner1

This channel is made possible through the generous support of Patreon members. To become a patron, visit https://www.patreon.com/bernadettebanner (although videos will remain free for you here regardless).

Beyond YouTube:
IG @bernadettebanner http://www.instagram.com/bernadetteba…
Management contact for business enquiries:
bernadette@helmtalentgroup.com

https://bernadettebanner.co.uk/

November 19, 2021

I Wore 18th-Century Clothing *Every Day for 5 YEARS & This Is What I Learned (Corsets Aren’t Bad!)

Filed under: History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Abby Cox
Published 10 May 2020

I wore 18th-century women’s clothing, all day, 5 days a week, for 5 years of my life. Over those 5 years, I learned *a lot* about my body, fashion in the 1700s — the good and the not so good, and how we can take these lessons and improve modern fashion.

***Trigger Warning: I do talk about body image in this video (as a reflection of my own, long, long journey with my own body & how wearing historical clothing has given me a different perspective on body image) which may or may not be upsetting for some. ***

*Ok, so not “every day” but you get the idea…😉

💌Business Inquiries *ONLY* abbycox@semaphorebrands.com
(This email goes directly to my management and not to me.)

More Videos:

🎉🎉 Answering YOUR FAQs from THIS Video: https://youtu.be/SN3agbKZVP0
“Becoming an 18th-Century MEME LORD” https://youtu.be/a0pRE3uXWu8
“Historical Costumers and Their Hogwarts Houses” https://youtu.be/vxmRsc9Qj8M
Rachel Maksy – “Born in the Wrong Era” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5GAJ…

A lot of these photos of me were taken by the lovely Fred Blystone. You can see more of his photography here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/13664…

Also, @Edwardian Tailor (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSf…)

We like to assume that the people in the past are “stupid” (it’s normal human behavior), and one of the ways that we, as a modern society, do this is by judging the past for their fashion trends and practices. We’ve been taught to demonize corsetry (or in this case, stays) for being restrictive and a tool of oppression towards women, and take pride in our culture of diet and exercise, without considering the issues that can be found in our body-obsessed culture. We praise jeans and a t-shirt, as being “comfortable” but the insecurities that so many of us have about our bodies are put on display in our 21st-century uniforms. We take for granted our modern homes, and how that has made us lazy in dressing for the seasons, resulting (in part) the loss of various types of textiles and weaving technology. I learned a lot over those 5 years, including how to indulge in an Indian Buffet while wearing my 18th-century stays, and I’m excited to share my insights with you. Also, can we just discuss how stupid modern underwear is?? 😉

Images Used:

*Summer Dresses, 1783, Object Number – J,5.139, Asset Number – 79588001 © The Trustees of the British Museum. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collect…

*Sheer Cottton Mull Italian Gown, 1780s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 17.107.6a, b, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect…

*Kofta, 1760s-90s, Nordiska Museet, NM.0186311, https://digitaltmuseum.se/01102369100…

*Women 1790-1799, Plate 052, Fashion Plate from August 1796, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Library Costume Institute Fashion Plate Collection, https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/dig…

*Robe a l’anglais c. 1780, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1982.291a, b, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect…

*Attributed to Isaac Cruikshank, Cestina Warehouse or Belly Piece Shop
April 16, 1793, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 59.533.475 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect…

*Stays, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2009.300.3330a–d
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect…

*The Bum Shop, Attributed to R. Rushworth (British, active 1785–86), July 11 1785, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970.541.12, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect…

*Chemise, 1780-1800s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005.368 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect…

*Corset, 1880s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009.300.3497a–c
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect…

——-

Music from Epidemic Sound:

“Gold Among the Sand”- Trevor Kowalski
“To Clarity” – Airae
“The Path to Innovation” – Airae
“Caffeinated and Motivated” – Airae
“Alice is on her Way” – Airae
“Cafe Laurent” – Medite
“In a Jiffy” – Moins Le Quartet
“Moonlight Night” – Gabriel Lucas

———

Instagrams: https://www.instagram.com/abbyelyn

From the comments:

Abby Cox
1 year ago (edited)

Hey Everyone! 👋🏻

Thank you all so much for taking the time to watch this video about my experience! I’ve noticed a lot of the same questions in the comments, so I want to take a minute to answer them here –
🎉UPDATE (Sept 27, 2020) – I’ve answered your questions about menstruation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2TgwjjhOE
🎉UPDATE (June 7, 2020) – I’ve taken the most commonly asked questions from the comments and have done a video to answer them! You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/SN3agbKZVP0

– My stays (18th-century term for a corset) are from https://redthreaded.com/ – they’re a fantastic historical corset company that I adore. (and for the couple of you trying to call me out – my 100% hand-sewn, me-made, reproduction stays are so worn out that they’re in retirement, and just because I can make stays by hand doesn’t mean I have the time. I’d also rather support a small business that I believe in.❤️Finally, the gown I’m wearing in this video was cut to go over those stays, but if you’d like to see my hand-sewn reproduction stays in action you can buy the book I co-wrote here: https://www.american-duchess.com/book/american-duchess-guide) ☺️

– While I haven’t gone down the menstruation research rabbit hole (cause it is its own subject of study) I am going to do my best with limited access to primary source documentation (which is what I really need to be able to answer this question) to produce a video about what 18th-century women would do. I don’t know when this will be, but I will do my absolute best to answer this question, and if I can do some experimental archeology in the process, I will. 😎 (ravenclaws gotta ravenclaw…)

– Thigh chafing – so I think that varies from person to person. I never really had a lot of issues with it (and my narrow hips mean that I will never have a thigh gap) because my linen shift would always kind of end up between my leg and absorb the sweat. However, I know a lot of costumers who will wear split-crotched drawers because they find it more comfortable, even though drawers weren’t a thing in the 18th-century.

Ok! I hope this helps answer some of your questions! Thank you all so much for watching and engaging in this video. I really can’t tell you all how much I appreciate it! ❤️

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