Latina Living History

Afternoon Dress, ca. 1924

Nemser

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

What's next? A gay Frederick the Great? A fat Henry VIII? An asian Genghis Khan?

I've never heard anyone going on at length about how Universally ImpracticalTM the garb of a Scotsman or an ancient Roman politician are

for most skirt-wearing eras, the only thing women were REQUIRED to wear by social convention, and the potential risks of disobeying the same, was...a skirt. an opaque skirt. or a skirt with something underneath to make it opaque. Wear Skirt; Don't Show Leg. that's the bare minimum

in many periods of western history, it was just Skirt + Petticoat. two layers. and even when there were more layers in fashion, practicality could vary wildly

in the 1840s and early 1850s, for instance, increasingly wide skirts were en vogue. women often wore many layers of petticoats underneath to create this shape, something many complained made their skirts as a unit uncomfortably heavy. one of Amelia Bloomer's main grievances, in creating her controversial "bloomer costume," was the weight of excessive petticoats. so when the cage crinoline/hoop skirt came in in the late 1850s, something often seen as the height of impractical oppression by modern pop history, women who liked the wide-skirted look were...

...delighted. and, by their own testimony, liberated

seriously. it was seen as a freeing garment because it was lighter and easier to move in. also a democratizing garment, since the cheap nature of its production made it cheap to purchase and women up and down the social ladder could embrace the fashion, but that's another conversation

can you climb over a fence in a hoop skirt? would I recommend riding a horse in a hoop skirt? was it wise for most factory workers to attempt their jobs in hoop skirts, though they sometimes tried? no.

will you probably be fine living many types of urban, suburban, or even country life in one, and not just upper-class lives either? yes

@fatphobiabusters

@fuckyeahfatpositive

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* The entirety of gendered history has happened differently, so in this world, they already invented the sports bra, it’s primarily linen, and they have maybe also already figured out how to vulcanize rubber fifty years early for elastics. In our world, the first sports bra will be invented in 1977 by sewing two jockstraps. Incidentally, I don’t think the Roman strophium looks supportive enough to count as a sports bra, though it is a bralike garment.

I once made a medieval support garment that is very much like a sports bra. (Video about it here: https://youtu.be/z-SccVaG4w4?si=lx7g_t6bQeqUThbN)

In the early 19th century, before elastic, they used teeny metal springs!

There are already examples of corsetry/stays in the time period using these springs for bust support.

I am a woman of large bust, and found the plain linen medieval support shift to be quite supportive enough for vigorous activity. I've also done manual labor in a variety of corsetry, including regency corsets. The most restrictive part of a corset from the Aubreyad era is actually the wooden busk down the front; do away with that and you can easily have a comfortable, supportive garment of one or more layers with lacing for adjustable sizing, using the springs for stretch if you want (but it wouldn't be necessary).

octavia paulina was a six year old girl whose sarcophagus was found in her family’s tomb at via triumphalis in rome, dated roughly around the third century a.d. her parents mourned her mors immatura, her premature death, by having the wall behind her sarcophagus painted with the image of a giant meadow with children and a chariot pulled by doves accompanied by hermes leading an unconscious girl into afterlife. (to my knowledge, the doves and the fact that they were led by hermes was a symbol for hope.)

the sarcophagus itself shows athletic competitions between girls and boys alike, and in the most important one on the front, octavia paulina appears as the winner (a palm branch in her hand, which is meant to symbolize her strength and honor, her virtus). her opponent is sitting on the floor, upset. what really stands out is that octavia paulina’s parents ordered a common sarcophagus that was usually used to bury boys with athletic interests or futures but then proceeded to have it remodeled — smaller heads and genitalia cut off etc — to include girls in the relief.

i just get very soft when i think about parents ordering a sarcophagus for their little daughter who think it’s perfect for her and who remodel it to make it even more accurate for her. the thought of parents more than 1.700 years ago thinking their six year old daughter deserves a sarcophagus that fits her personality (rather than what was expected of her as a young girl of the time) despite none being available and then ordering for it to be altered makes me wanna scream because it’s such a human and caring thing to do. maybe octavia paulina even had a say in this because it took weeks to months to make a sarcophagus this detailed.

The young man, Carvilio Gemello, was around 18 when he died, likely as a consequence of a bone fracture in his leg. The woman, Aebutia, was around forty forty-five when she died and was buried wearing this ring (now housed in the Palestrina Archeological museum)

Behind the quartz window we can still see the face of Carvilio Gemello engraved in a golden miniature that his mother commissioned. 

His sister: Bertram, did you wander into a fairy circle again

medieval peasant who has arrived back home after visiting the 21st century: speaking of bread, it cost less to buy a soft white loaf than it did to buy a coarse brown loaf. Brown bread was like a status symbol for them.

His sister: Bertram that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard