Abby Spinach

What about Luke? I still imagine him as an Special Agent from the 80s and this would absolutely be his fit. Of course all black 😎 This is really my all time favourite AU 🤩 still thinking about writing a fanfiction myself 🤔😅

I fell down the rabbit hole of trying to find old Eaton's catalogs, but we're going to make do with Sears, because Internet Archive has a scan of the 1922 spring catalog.

One of the reasons I like to pin 1922 on the fanciful "whenever" of The Blue Castle is that waists started to descend toward the hips, and the silhouette was pretty straight up and down. While most dresses are shown with sashes, a girdle of red beads isn't impossible. (It's also a good year for squishy hats.)

Placement of the waist is critical. Back in the early 1910s, there was a shift from the Edwardian S-curve to a more straight silhouette, too. But that one was Regency-inspired, so waists started high. By 1913, they'd dropped to the natural waist line, as this Ladies Home Journal spread shows. This is almost the last gasp of that straight-ish silhouette.

By 1915, skirts are wide and fluffy, as this page from The Delineator shows.

Now, if we want a fairytale reality in which WWI didn't happen, I'd love to put Olive in the fluffy fashions above, but Valancy in the straighter styles of 1918, also from The Delineator. The lower, looser belts could count as a hip-level girdle.

Waists retreat to the natural waist and skirts become a little more gathered in 1921, per the Eaton's catalog.

Then waists get softer and lower again for 1922 (back to Sears).

By winter 1923, waistlines have fallen below the hip bone (Eaton's), so Valancy's beaded belt would no longer be daring.

I just love this, because while Valancy always felt she was too insignificant to attract attention, Cissy really saw Valancy.

I also would like to point out that Cissy says:

I knew you couldn’t

And neither Abel nor Cissy are wrong. Valancy both could have and couldn’t possibly have all at the same time.

Post-A Civil Campaign, it feels like the character of Ekaterin just disappears into the background as Miles’ spouse and partner. She’s talented, competent, highly-regarded, beloved…and has very little personality or active role left. It feels strange to me, because it seems like one of the things hinted at in A Civil Campaign is that Ekaterin is learning exactly who she is and exactly where her boundaries are. And then it never really seems to come into play again, which seems like a missed opportunity. From a writer’s perspective, it makes sense because having Ekaterin’s perspective continuously in tension with Miles’ would have forced the subsequent books into having two protagonists all the time.l, but the way Ekaterin disappears still bugs me.

Here’s the passage from A Civil Campaign that got me thinking about this. The context is that Kareen is sick of being treated like her opinions are childish:

“There's something to that in both directions," said Ekaterin mildly. "Nothing is more guaranteed to make one start acting like a child than to be treated like one. It's so infuriating. It took me the longest time to figure out how to stop falling into that trap." "Yes, exactly," said Kareen eagerly. "You understand! So—how did you make them stop?" "You can't make them—whoever your particular them is—do anything, really," said Ekaterin slowly. "Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste . . . years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just . . . take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that, and walk away. But that's hard.” Ekaterin looked up from her lap where her hands had been absently rubbing at the yard dirt smeared on them, and remembered to smile. Kareen felt an odd chill. It wasn't just her reserve that made Ekaterin daunting, sometimes. The woman went down and down, like a well to the middle of the world. Kareen bet even Miles couldn't shift her around at his will and whim.