Aesthetic Chills

“If The X-Files was a 90s anime.”

Astrologers helped design the study

No one did better than random chance, even though they only included people in the study who are experienced with astrology and stated that they expect themselves to do better than random chance

They gave every astrologer a set of 50 things about a person and 5 birth charts to choose from. They weren’t even coming up with the chart themselves!

After taking the test, most thought they nailed it. Zero out of 152 did better than 5 out of 12. None nailed it

Astrologers who rated themselves highly experienced (“world class experts”) did the same or worse as those who said they have limited experience. Both performed the same as random chance

I've started treating myself like I would a dog that's going to chew through the house when it's bored. I walk myself. I seek activities that make my brain feel less like depressed sludge. I ask my body what it needs; I rest, I enjoy rest. I don't see it as a waste or unproductive. I see it as allowing my body to do its job of working better. I lean into appreciating my natural features. I'm a hunk of flesh. I can be ugly. I can decide that ugly is appealing. I can not care. Whatever. I started emphasizing little things that nourish my relationship(s), shelving distractions more, so I can relish the time I have with loved ones. I specifically pursue pleasure--dopamine--not just quick hits from scrolling social media but getting off my ass. Engaging. Cooking myself nice meals and making fucking art, man. Things that make my spirit feel more alive than I have for years. I ask myself what it is I want rather than only doing what I'm supposed to be doing. And it doesn't mean shirk every responsibility, it means recognizing you're one of your fucking responsibilities. It's reordering. I realized I'm going to die happy or unhappy and either way I'm just as dead in a given amount of years, and I choose to die happy and fulfilled.

Everything else can get fucked ad infinitum.

I have a friend who works in education and he told me about how he was working with a small group of HS students to develop a new school sports chant. This was a very daunting task for the group, in large part because many had learning disabilities related to reading and writing, so coming up with a catchy, hard-hitting, probably rhyming, poetry-esque piece of collaborative writing felt like something outside of their skill range. But it wasn't! I knew that, he knew that, and he worked damn hard to convince the kids of that too. Even if the end result was terrible (by someone else's standards), we knew they had it in them to complete the piece and feel super proud of their creation.

Fast-forward a few days and he reports back that yes they have a chant now... but it's 99% AI. It was made by Chat-GPT. Once the kids realized they could just ask the bot to do the hard thing for them - and do it "better" than they (supposedly) ever could - that's the only route they were willing to take. It was either use Chat-GPT or don't do it at all. And I was just so devastated to hear this because Jesus Christ, struggling is important. Of course most 14-18 year olds aren't going to see the merit of that, let alone understand why that process (attempting something new and challenging) is more valuable than the end result (a "good" chant), but as adults we all have a responsibility to coach them through that messy process. Except that's become damn near impossible with an Instantly Do The Thing app in everyone's pocket. Yes, AI is fucking awful because of plagiarism and misinformation and the environmental impact, but it's also keeping people - particularly young people - from developing perseverance. It's not just important that you learn to write your own stuff because of intellectual agency, but because writing is hard and it's crucial that you learn how to persevere through doing hard things.

Write a shitty poem. Write an essay where half the textual 'evidence' doesn't track. Write an awkward as fuck email with an equally embarrassing typo. Every time you do you're not just developing that particular skill, you're also learning that you did something badly and the world didn't end. You can get through things! You can get through challenging things! Not everything in life has to be perfect but you know what? You'll only improve at the challenging stuff if you do a whole lot of it badly first. The ability to say, "I didn't think I could do that but I did it anyway. It's not great, but I did it," is SO IMPORTANT for developing confidence across the board, not just in these specific tasks.

Struggling is part of the process, and I've had a lot of people argue with me that it shouldn't be who fail to see the point. When you replace an composer with an AI music generator, an artist with an AI-generated image, or an author with an AI-generated fanfic, you are missing out on the critical, fundamental experiences humans need to learn and grow. You are robbing yourself of essential skills you need as a person.

So like look at this mid-1400's fit:

to get the effect of that orange gown, you've got

chemise next to the skin like a slip (not visible here) (sometimes you let a bit of this show at the neckline) (the point is not to sweat into your nice clothes and ruin them)

kirtle, or undergown. (your basic dress, acceptable to be seen by other people) this is the puffing bits visible at the elbow, cleavage, and slashed sleeve. It's a whole ass dress in there. Square neckline usually. In the left picture it's probably the mustard yellow layer on the standing figure.

coat, or gown. This is the orange diamond pattern part. It's also the bit of darker color visible in the V of the neckline.

surcoat, or sleeveless overgown. THIS is the yellow tapestry print. In the left picture it's the long printed blue dress on the standing figure

if you want to get really fancy you can add basically a kerchief or netting over the bare neck/shoulders. It can be tucked into the neckline or it can sit on top. That's called a partlet.

the best I can tell you is that they were technically in a mini-ice-age during this era. Still looks hot as balls though.

Coats and surcoats are really more for rich people though, normal folks will be wearing this look:

this is kind of the fashion equivalent of when an AI has been trained to approximate what art looks like without understanding what it's drawing or how physics work. A costume designer has general recollections of about how the dresses looked from art, and a lot of the art they're learning from is also romanticized revival recreations of earlier art, so things are getting pretty confused structurally.

(I have to blame Disney for a lot of the specific trends but to be clear this was already happening before Disney was born.)

You can probably recognize how the gestalt of the bodice evokes what would actually be two layers--a gown laced over an under-gown, maybe with a stomacher in the same color as the gown.

The skirt is the very distant legacy of a trend that starts around here, in the early 1500's:

deliberately slitting the skirt of your gown so that it shows a triangle of the under-gown peaking through.

You know what a farthingale is? it's this thing.

Reeds sewn into the skirt to give it that round bell shape without needing 100000 layers underneath. Unsurprisingly invented in Spain, where it's hot as fuck. This is also the era where the farthingale starts its evolution into the eventual hoop skirt. You see that wide "ballroom" shape in a lot of princess designs. Princess Peach is a classic example.

Farthingale becomes hoop skirt, and using basically the same technology (reeds sewn into the fabric for support) the under-gown/kirtle becomes stiffened and shaped.

Eventually you get to this very pronounced version of the "slashed skirt" shown in the left figure, below. You can see that the red skirt is probably part of a whole dress, because the red sleeves in the same fabric are visible under the outer gown. (you can also see the chemise at the edge of the neckline). They did have detachable sleeves back then, as a standard part of a gown, so the red sleeves could be pinned to the chemise instead of attached to the body of the gown.

>Right figure, you can see this shit is getting elaborate now. I think that's a white under-gown with a yellow gown and a burgundy overgown. The collar around her neck is actually a partlet, not connected to anything else, just tucked in and maybe pinned underneath the neckline. But they're starting to have separate skirts now, so it's also possible she's only wearing a yellow skirt with the overgown on top it.

At this point whalebone is coming into the picture in a BIG way, and that's when you start to get Tudor style boned gown/kirtles tight around the bust really taking off. Also boned sleeves, if you can believe that. The smooth flat conical bodice is the product of a boned kirtle, which will eventually become stays, which will eventually become a corset.

anyway by now we're fully out of the medieval period and into the early modern/renaissance.

One common outfit you see (thanks to Amazon) is this modern take on the kirtle

On the left: Amazon. On the right: a recreation of what people actually wore. You can see how we have the same basic concept with a very different execution. This is what you would call a kirtle.

Another common ren fair look is the outer-wear stays. Always with the un-collared billowy undershirt.

I want to draw attention to the lacing. Stands to reason that costumers now would use contemporary lacing rather than that of previous eras. But check out even the romantic depictions of clothing from the 1870’s below this. No grommets. That’s just pure fabric baby.

Very few renaissance era women ever wore anything exactly like the ren fair corsets. For one thing, cross lacing wasn’t common, and metal grommets were not accessible to normal clothing makers. For another, structured stays (or “bodies”) were underwear, not outerwear. (Apparently something more popular with English peasants than French peasants, who didn’t use them.)

Left: stays (underwear). Right: jumps (outerwear)

Stays are boned. Jumps are not. Stays/bodies were pretty expensive due to the craftsmanship, and a poor person would have budget for a single pair. You can imagine this investment was not as popular with women who did hard physical labor. Jumps got really popular in the mid-1700’s and largely replaced stays in working class fashion.

A brief history lesson: clothes are ephemeral; we lose them as they are worn out, cut down, repurposed, and thrown away. Before modern anthropology and modern record keeping, it was difficult for anyone to know what anyone else looked like in the past or even a country away. Words used to refer to one kind of garment kept being used even as that garment changed in structure and purpose over time. Even after paper became common enough for printing art, it wore out fast and art was lost. References were hard to get.

What we think of as “peasant garb” is actually the product of a game of telephone that travels back from Romantic Revival art, and many of those (urban) artists got their idea of what rural peasants wore from opera costumes. The costumers working at the opera were not going out to the country side to take notes on what farmers actually wore, nor did they want to. Opera is show biz, you want it to be evocative, but not ordinary. Their costumes would have been based on what urban folks were wearing, with extra little touches like a shepherds crook to make it look “rural”.

Below: some mid-to-late 1800’s artistic depictions of peasants wearing improbably nice fabrics/clothes (probably a reflection of opera costumes). The painting of the peasant girl on the right is wearing more-or-less jumps.

You can see how the romantic art depictions of unstructured vests eventually inspired the “medieval revival” styles of the 1960’s/1970’s which lives on in the ren fair. Not only the neckline of the vest, but the style of undershirt with an open neck and billowy sleeves.

Compare (unstructured, laced, outerwear):

Nobody wore that in the 1400’s or 1500’s, but they wore things that looked similar at a glance. When 1960’s artists went back looking for early modern/medieval styles to replicate, they mostly had a hodge podge of this art to reference and extrapolate from.

The fact that a historical laced kirtle with an over skirt looks a lot like stays worn on the outside, probably made this confusing for artists. Undershirts of the 1500’s were collared and high necked, however, with tighter sleeves.(Below, 1500’s kirtle)

Ironically the upper class of the 1500’s does have something similar to “peasant” costume, but the visual effect is achieved with a loose chemise and a U-necked bodice that fastens in the front with hooks.

One last example of 1800’s romanticism, this time depicting a contemporary girl. Looks familiar, right? We’re back at the ren fair, if you take the bonnet off.

It does look similar to what was being worn in the 1800’s. Here’s a cartoon showing a working class woman in the 1870’s.

TLDR; what we think of as “Renaissance” or even “medieval” peasant garb is actually a remix of the working class clothes from the 1800’s, with some confused memories of the kirtle from older art thrown in.

Structured stays? 1500’s. The blousy no-collar undershirt? 1700’s. The cross lacing? 1800’s.

Anyway. This image of peasants has always been costume & fantasy. That’s why I think it’s kind of fun that it reaches a terminus in the anachronism and fantasy of a Renaissance Festival.

And then there’s her signature move: Whirling Candy 🍭 🍬