#historical binder

[dresshistorynerd]

Hi, while looking through extant garments in a museum collection for reference for a school project, I found several garments of different designs that were all labelled as "binder" without any other context or explanation. Obviously my first thought was the kind of binder I use, especially for the first one that looks elasticated, but I have to assume they're for something else like gynecomastia or compression..? Do you know happen to know anything about them?

This is interesting!

They could actually be the types of binders you use. I immediately thought of 19th century male impersonators - female (?) actors who specialized in male roles in Vaudeville and other similar forms of theater, in which drag was integral part of, and would also have their own one man impersonation comedy and music shows and male stage personas. Basically they were drag kings. (Similarly female impersonators, basically drag queens, were also quite popular.) They were known to bind their chest, and other actors, who didn't necessarily do the impersonation shows, but played male roles on stage, would also often bind their chest for their performance. Here's for example two successful male impersonators, British Vesta Tilley (first picture) and American Ella Westner (second picture).

Queer women and trans masc people, who dressed in masculine clothing, (which was pretty common) also sometimes bound their chests, but unsurprisingly that was not exactly celebrated like drag performances were, so there weren't binders made for queer people specifically. I'm guessing they either made their own binders or used binders made for actors. Often those actors were the same people as those queer people, since drag performance was one of the few socially acceptable ways to fuck around with gender. Not all of them were queer, Vesta Tilley looks excellently queer in her drag, but outside stage she was respectable member of high society and very supportive of her husband who became conservative member of parliament (after she had retired). And I think we can easily imagine what kind of political opinions about queer people she was supporting when he was conservative in the context of 1923 Britain. But many of them were known to be queer, like Ella Westner, who eloped to Paris with a very interesting woman, Josie Mansfield (pictured in the last photo above), who was mistress to an infamous scammer and the man who murdered him. Westner was also buried in men's clothing by their own request.

I couldn't find pictures though what did the binders used for chest binding looked like, so I decided to look into what kind of other binders were used in the era. I think the first binder or perhaps both of them could be baby/infant binders (first two pictures below). Apparently people in Victorian era (and in 18th century) believed that chilled abdomen could cause cholera and I guess other bowel issues, so they treated cholera and tried to prevent it by wearing binders and belts (last picture), which could be also made from flannel or wool knit for extra warmth. And babies are quite vulnerable to bowel issues and cholera, so they made binders for babies too. I've seen many different types for these (for both baby and adult use) with some of them like cloth wraps, and some of them kinda corset looking though not corset shaped. If the binders you found were indeed for abdomen warming purposes, I'm sure they are for babies, since those for adults would be so low there definitely wouldn't be shoulder straps like that. The proportions on the first binder especially seem to me fitting for a baby, like the straps feel a bit too wide for adult scale. The second one is harder to guess, it could be a baby binder, but it seems to have boning in the middle, which would make maybe more sense in a chest binder?

But yeah Victorian medicine continues to be... interesting.

[cesarorka]

Every time I see biblical accurate Hamilton I get confused. What do you mean Alexander Hamilton isn't Lin Manuel Miranda irl???? Washington and Aaron Burr are both black and bald men what do you mean they had hair????? Thomas Jefferson used a Hatsune Miku binder even tho she didn't existed yet, is in the history books, check it out!!!!!!!

[schnitzelsemmerl]

my cursed collection of amrev/hamilton art- 😼😼

ill be adding more! all pictures are mine unless stated otherwise.

[uncanny-tranny]

When I talk about ground-breaking trans history, I'm talking about this:

[eightate88]

I absolutely love stranger things ships where one or both of the characters are tranemasc in the fics, it makes my little trans heart soar but I need you guys to know

binders, the binders you're thinking of, did not exist in the 80s. not the design or the material youre thinking, people were binding in any way they could for thousands of years, trans or not but not with binders. the design that you see around here nowadays are only 15 maybe 14 years old and weren't widely available in stores like walmart or target untill like 2017, you could get them online almost exclusively or if you were lucky a specialize shop that would sell you one at very expensive prices. you couldn't BUY a binder when I was a young teen, not anywhere physically, these boys couldn't go out and buy one in the 80s.

in the 80s you wore ace bandages, made your own thing, (usually out of a girdle or something like that), or sports tape if you were more educated in things like that (some instances any tape, even duct tape) and all of them were unsafe in one way or another, you wore these things and there would always be pain in some way eventually. they also weren't rlly called binders.

if you're into historical accuracy put these dudes in PAIN, which in my opinion makes for a much more interesting storytelling. the angst surrounding their health alone.

[devorafetos]

The hospital left me with sequels (an obsession with drawing silly hamilton Thomas Jeffersons next to more detailed historical Alexanders)

[themagicalghost]

Is this potential reference name what I think it might be

[postcard-from-the-past]

Bertha Binder on a vintage postcard

[chronichlesofnillory]

Info for you vs for other people

I really think that most of the information that gets put out for grimoires/Book of Shadows stuff is actually just "sharable info". It really is just infographic compilations of things taken out of context.

TBH now that I'm out of any witch-magic-occult community for the first time in my 2.5 year journey I'm starting to realize that most of the info out there isn't actually there to be used in your practice, it's there just to be shared so you have something to say/contribute.

I think back to the person in the discord I was in who had these beautiful and information packed grimoires and when she would type them out and try to put resources it would always be like "copied from x super popular book where everyone get their herbal correspondences from and is 100% wiccan" even though they themselves were very adamantly against being wiccan. They had something like 10+ years of experience but their grimoire pages didn't have anything specific to their practice really. No weird cryptic scrawlings in the margins about the outcomes of certain spells or anything. I always loved seeing the pictures of the pages themselves because they looked like something off pinterest, but I never found myself going back to read any of it or copy it for later. There was nothing there I hadn't seen somewhere else on some other infographic page or listicle for what to put in your BoS.

I compare that to the personal grimoires I've seen of traditional witches who have studied grimoires and maybe even have writings on historical grimoires, and those babies are messy as hell. Some are even spread across so many tiny notebooks that can barely close and I'm always just like "okay that looks exactly like the pages of the recipes I use for cooking every night. Or the lists I use so I don't forget something."

There's just such a difference between the stuff that gets shared a lot online through social media and places like discord/reddit, and the stuff I can tell people use all the time. IDK why it took me this long to realize how much of the stuff I've been exposed to is just there to fill up a page so you feel like you know something and aren't just trying to figure it out as you go along.

It honestly goes beyond aesthetic too because I think those messy little binders are pretty aesthetic in their own way.

Just think about how many infographics, listicles and basic grimoire/BoS prompts are littering any space with magic stuff. How you can buy pages from people off etsy and it's just a normal ass thing. Like what's the point of me knowing all about dragons blood resin if I'm never going to use it? What's the point of me meticulously copying all the wheel of the year stuff if that is antithetical to my practice that is based on what is happening around me? But these are the 101 type things that get thrown out in literally every space I've been in and that's weird.

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

I know this is an extreamly petty hill to die on, please read the whole post before you argue with me. OFMD is not like Hamilton at all and Ill fight anybody who says it.

Disclaimer: It is fine to not like either of these shows because of the historical figure's they are about I'm not saying that please don't take me out of context

The main difference is that Hamilton does a lot of work being historically accurate or whatever and gives the illusion of that where as OFMD doesn't give a single fuck about being historically accurate it only gives a fuck about being a romcom. Hamilton says "lets learn about the founding fathers with rap music, this is more or less what happened." OFMD says "who cares what these guys were actually like? They're dead. You wanna watch funny dilf theater gays kiss? One of them's dressed like a biker." they're opposite approaches to historical story telling.

I also do tend to think that they're different because one is about founding fathers and the other is about pirates. Pirates are criminals who didn't document their lives very thoroughly and had exaggerated stories told about them even when they were alive. That's not to say that their crimes don't matter but it is to say that the cultural figure of Blackbeard is already pretty fictionalized. Additionally the founding fathers have all of this political baggage that comes with them because the far right in the US likes to venerate them as infallible gods and the school system's history curriculum plays into that. Nobody says Caribbean pirates during the golden age of piracy were good actually. People might hold up Black Ceasar or Anne Bonny and Mary Read as historical examples of powerful black people/women/queer people but nobody relevant tries to pretend that they're good people. Pirates don't have that political baggage

Like I'm critical of the choice to tell sympathetic stories about historical slave owners, and even if I had been struck by the same inspiration that David Jenkins or Lin Manuel Miranda were I would not have made either show because of the fact that it's about that guy. But if you are going to do it there are different methods of doing it and saying they're all the same feels like bad media analysis to me.

Disclaimer: I'm not accusing anyone who doesn't want to watch ofmd or Hamilton because of it of bad media analysis. I think it's a perfectly valid reason to not want to watch something. My gripe is with people who say these two bits of media are the same.

[nagitosstolenhand]

Hey hey guess what-

Guess who just spent 2+ hours researching chest binders for a google doc for my mom who’ll probably just brush it off but I won’t k ow until the morning when I send it to her ( ・∇・)

I. It’s me, ‘twas I who was the fool

But wish me luck! Really hoping she actually hears me out （＾Ｏ＾☆♪

whoa dude good job. hope that works out 👍/gen

[musicalyeetreblr]

I had a meme idea

Gumi binder Richard

[broke-on-books]

I think the universe just hates me personally (can't find my scooby doo comics)

[saviourkingslut]

whoever advertised scrivener to me i am bowing like a peasant in front of his liege lord this shit is life-changing bro i am saying once again this will save my dissertation writing process i just know it. fairly certain it was @sevarix-blogs king you saved a guy's life for real

[aardbrein]

Leather stays as a binder

Slaying😎😎😎

[nemrez]

Alright, alright, we all know Kevin’s a HUGE history geek and probably tells them about events and people he likes

But Andrew referencing Joan of Arc

Agh I love them