#historical structure

[souplover-69]

“This house was completed in 1903 taking 5 years to build. The boards are of yellow poplar; they were sawn and dried on site. The doors, windows, etc. were bought in Waynesville.

A halltree with attached chair sat on the left of this hall. Hiram and Elizabeth Caldwell had 5 children; 1 girl and 4 boys [1 boy died young].”

[iamcharlieg]

Rustic Exterior New York Large brown two-story wood exterior house image in the mountain style

[zinaaatjuh]

Outdoor Kitchen - Outdoor Kitchen An illustration of a sizable backyard concrete patio kitchen design with a roof extension in the mountain style

[hayeskarlie]

Example of a mountain style brown two-story wood gable roof design An illustration of a two-story, brown wood gable roof in the mountain style

[xgosiax]

Rustic Exterior (New York)

[marzipanandminutiae]

ignore the water spots on the mirror I REMADE MY NATURAL FORM PETTICOAT

HELL YES

NATURAL FORM GOWNS AHOY

[cpleblow]

eiffel

©cpleblow photography (2023)

galaxy s22 16:9

[retrotales]

"The construction of the Eiffel Tower"

1889

[heartyearning]

sick and tired of seeing people use zip ties for boning. listen to me i am a costume designer stop using plastic which does not hold your shape (the whole point of boning) you do not need to buy proper coiled boning or anything: go to a hardware store and find flat metal tension spring (google tells me that's what it's called, unfortunately i also don't know what its used for in hardware store related things so i cant describe it if that isnt the correct translation, soz) you can get a roll of 15m x 4mm tension spring for about 15 euros where i live and then you just have to cut it with metal shears (you can use a regular cutting pliers probably but if you have metal shears you will be happier) then either file down the edges a bit if you're genuinely gonna wear it a lot, or you just wind some tape around the edges to make sure putting them in the channels isn't gonna rip your fabric and anyway now you have an actually functional boned garment. go to a hardware store and show them this pic btw:

^ this is what you want. also bc this is 4mm wide around stress points like closures you want to make 2 channels right alongside each other and put in 2 pieces of tension spring for stability

[moon-mirage]

"Till this moment I never knew myself."

[yorksnapshots]

in New Calton Burial Ground, Edinburgh, Scotland.

[souplover-69]

hiram caldwell house, cataloochee valley built 1903

[dresshistorynerd]

I think we can all agree that this is dumb, right? Though the title is highly misleading and the quote marks around "ban" do a lot of work here. These companies just no longer requires actresses to wear structural garments. Still a dumb and bad solution to the problem of badly made costumes.

Couple of my issues with the article:

The purpose of the corset or any other similar structural garment wasn't to reduce waist, but to provide support and shape the silhouette. In the article someone from Netflix commented that they shouldn't promote that women should make their waists smaller, apparently it's "bad optics". And from Neflix the main series where corsets are no longer required is Bridgerton, because one of the main actors had bad time with her stays. But if you take just one quick look at the Regency silhouette you will see the waist is far from reduced. Literally there is no waist. Completely covered. They have been doing something terribly wrong if they have made Regency stays that pinch down the waist. Some actors also seem to think the waist is supposed to be reduced all the time. I remember that one actor in HBO's The Gilded Age complained about the corset, but then in the same breath admitted that she had asked the costumers to make it purposefully a little too small so she could be tight-laced all the time (a practice some fashionable rich Victorian women did for high society events, and definitely not all the time). But beyond the inaccuracies in the article, there is an issue here. Structural garments supported the bust yes, but also in many periods they supported the weight of the dress. In 17th and 18th centuries and Victorian Era the skirts of rich women especially had a lot of heavy fabric which would be hard to deal with and move around with, if all the weight is only on the waist. But with a structural garment it distributes the weight to the whole torso, especially on the hips.

A structural garment needs to be fitted well and worn with with a shift underneath. It absolutely can be uncomfortable, create bruising and restrict breathing, if it's not well fitted. If you have ever used too small jeans that contain no spandex at all, you know how nasty the effects can be on the skin. Especially TV sets often have very little time for creating costumes and they might have just one fitting or at tops two or in worst case scenario none at all, which very easily leads to ill fitting costumes. That is a huge issue with structural garments. I've been making transitional short stays for myself and I have never made a garment like that so I'm still struggling fit it well (it's unfinished), and I can say it's not comfortable when it doesn't fit well. I haven't watched Bridgerton but I have seen couple of screencaps of different scenes with characters wearing stays and no shift to be seen anywhere. I really do hope they actually are wearing shifts when they have the full outfits on and just didn't wear them in these scenes for aesthetics or something. Because, yes, that will absolutely give you bruising, if you wear any type of fitted and structured garment against your skin without any fabric between it and the skin, against which the structural garment can slide against. It would be irresponsible to put your actors in such garments without shifts. I don't blame the actors for complaining about the "corsets", since I can believe they are uncomfortable if they are not well fitted or god forbid if they aren't wearing shifts.

I don't know how many times this needs to be said: corsets are not torture devices. While I don't blame the actors for complaining, reading comments like this kills one brain cell every time: "Women existed in that for such a long time, which does give you a lot of sympathy for that time period and what they were going through. For the first month, I couldn’t breathe." I'm sorry, but women literally did physical labour in corsets. They climbed mountains in corsets. (I have a whole post related to this.) Do these people really think so little of women in the past that, if corsets really were torture devices, they would have just endured them quietly for centuries? Of course the most fashionable clothing in a lot of the periods were uncomfortable and hard to move in, even restrictive, but those were the court gowns and ball gowns the young fashionable elite wore for the special evening occasions to show off to the high society. But does that really differ from today? If you look at the MET galas and stuff, do these actors really claim the outfits are comfortable? The everyday clothing and the clothing of the working class was fairly comfortable, and yes, they all wore corsets.

Yes, you can make properly fitted, comfortable supportive garments for costumes in any production. The proof is in opera. Opera singers wear corsets in a lot of productions. I have read many accounts by opera singers who talk about how their corsets are well fitted and actually makes singing easier, because you can "lean" on the corset (I don't know anything about singing, but that's what I have seen them say). Also they tend to wear those large and heavy period dresses and as alluded earlier moving on them on stage without corset would be very hard. Singing also would be harder as the singers could easily become breathless from moving the heavy dress without using the muscles on the whole body. Operas have much smaller budget than these big tv and movie productions, so there's really zero excuses for making badly fitting corsets.

So yes, it's dumb, it's inaccurate and kinda infuriating. But it's also actually pretty sinister. The issue isn't actors wearing corsets for many hours, that's what people have done for ages and still do in re-enactments, opera etc. The issue is that there's too little time for fitting and sewing the corsets in modern tv and movie production. And this is part of a much broader issue. Costume designers and makes are unionized in Hollywood and for a while now Hollywood studios have tried to cut the amount of unionized behind the scenes labour they employ.

Making profit from a movie or a tv show is not good enough anymore. Now productions that don't "perform as expected" are seen as flops. The production companies make predictions of profit and green light projects they have calculated to make most profit, and if they don't make that high profit, it's a flop and it won't get the planned sequel or the next season. To achieve those high profits they also do everything they can to lower the production costs, and one way is by employing as little unionized labour, to whom you have to pay fair wages, as possible. So costume departments are then very often understaffed and they have way too little time to produce the costumes in proper quality. This can be seen very blatantly in the clear drop in quality of movie costuming during the past couple of decades. So the reducing of structural garments in costumes seems like yet another attempt to reduce unionized labour disguised as feminism.

Obviously the good and smart solution to the problem of uncomfortable structural garments is to hire enough costumers for long enough time so they can have multiple fittings and make them better.

[mountrainiernps]

Mount Rainier National Park Archives photo of the Chinook Entrance Arch under construction in 1936.

If you’ve entered or exited the east side of the park via SR410, you may remember going under the historic Chinook Entrance Arch. First built in 1936, the “arch” is a pedestrian overpass for the Pacific Crest Trail.

NPS Photo of the arch in 1952.

It is 90 feet long and the deck of the bridge rests on two cedar logs, each 36 inches in diameter, with two more 30-inch-diameter logs serving as guard walls, all set into stone abutments that use stones gathered from the roadsides. The deteriorating original logs were replaced in 2012 with near-identical logs, using traditional carving methods to match the original rustic style (watch a video of the bridge replacement process). The Chinook Entrance Arch is part of the Mount Rainier Historic Landmark District.

NPS Photo of the arch in 2012 when the logs were being replaced.

Have you driven under or hiked over the Chinook Entrance Arch in the summer?  

[brickme]

The covers of the new edition of T.P. Bon being released next month are just so, so, so cute; I love the colors and the simple design and of course I love the characters, particularly vol 2 with Ream and Buyoyon in pink. Normally I'd just pick them up along with other things I'm getting from Japan, but they're also promising ANOTHER deluxe edition release in July so I won't be able to decide which edition to pick up until then =_= I haven't even gotten my hands on the sf short stories deluxe editions yet, all ten volumes are on a ship somewhere in the South China Sea probably.

Bon is getting a Netflix anime treatment sometime this year (hence the new manga releases). It's a sci-fi series about teen time travel agents saving the lives of ordinary people throughout history. I don't normally watch anime but I'll probably check it out; if it's anything like the manga it'll be a solid series with really good historical research, fun time travel shenanigans, and a lot of moral quandaries about human lives. Maybe if this does well for Netflix they'll do Mojako next...

[martyharrison]

Yale University