good fences make good neighbors.

“Ugh, look at that girl. Tattoos everywhere.”

“So what?”

“….Well I think it looks ugly.”

tbh “the Victorians did not go to the trouble of inventing aniline dyes so that we could wear neutrals” mostly covers it?

let’s not forget the tacky patterns, too

oh yeah

oh fuck yeah

also

PUMPKIN WORTH

I have seen mid-century dresses in electric blue.  Barbie pink

Black with photo-realistic brocade oranges.  Royal purple with GIANT POLKA DOTS.

Hey hey did you know lime green and lavender was a favorite color combo in 1895?

This one is not so much tacky as…vibrant

Okay at ~1903 it’s not really Victorian but I love the melting ice cream explosion look of it

This dress has faded but it would have originally been a quite eye-catching shade of violet.

Not that past eras were any less fond of colors even if they weren’t artificial dyes.  I’ve seen canary yellow Regency dresses and an 18th century man’s coat in turquoise velvet printed with leopard spots.  Steampunk isn’t really Victorian so much as it is ‘drapery store vomited on a sexy colorblind school marm’

Et le piece de resistance…

Pair a brightass fushia dress with a top hat and gears you cowards

MORE PUMPKIN ORANGE AND FRINGE YOU COWARDS

The Pragmatic Costumer calls this “The Hot Mess Dress.” It dates from around 1878. They say: “This dress has more trims than my entire collection of detash combined (detash or destash means all the little bits, pieces, and leftovers from crafting something)! On the outside alone I spot: black lace, bi-colored sandy-brown/cornflower-blue ruffles, tawny velvet, cream silk, beaded netting, cream lace, ribbon bows, ribbon rosettes, cornflower-blue buttons, and that fluffy lace collar.  For even more trim-tastic fun and draping pandemonium, here’s a shot of the back:”

The Pragmatic Costumer: “Trims were all the rage in the mid 1870s and 1880s, and this dress is raging harder, faster, and more extravagantly than most.”

And here’s a Worth tea gown from 1895. This really needs to be worn by a mad scientist. Especially one interested in fish.

Imagine being a black, gay drag queen in the 1800s after being born into enslavement AND having the style and cachè to throw soirées that the girls had to come to! That’s why I don’t want to hear this “we’re not our ancestors stuff.” You’re right!

From The Very Black Project Page- William Dorsey Swann was a gay liberation activist. Born into slavery in 1858, he was the first person in the United States to lead a queer resistance group and the first known person to self-identify as a “queen of drag”. Imagine the queenery of this icon.

He was a slave in Hancock, Maryland and was freed by Union soldiers after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. During the 1880s and 1890s, he organized a series of balls in Washington, D.C. He called himself the “queen of drag”. Most of the attendees his gatherings were men who were former slaves, and were gathering to dance in their satin and silk dresses. William was arrested in police raids numerous times,including in the first documented case of arrests for female impersonation in the United States, on April 12, 1888. In 1896, he was falsely convicted and sentenced to 10 months in jail for “keeping a disorderly house” (running a brothel). After his sentencing, he requested a pardon from President Grover Cleveland. This request was denied, but but he was the first American on record who pursued legal and political action to defend the LGBTQ community’s right to gather.

He was known to have been close with Pierce Lafayette and Felix Hall, two men who had also both been slaves and who formed the first known male same-sex relationship between enslaved Americans.

When William stopped organizing and participating in drag events, his brother continued to make costumes for the drag community. Two of his brothers had also been active participants in his drag balls.

Imagine how intelligent and ambitious this man had to be to come up with drag balls in the 1800s! Imagine how many terrible concepts he had to unlearn by himself to be a confident gay black man who does drag in the 1800s! Imagine how courageous he had to be to fight for lgbt people as a former slave in America in the 1800s!

1. Everybody involved hires a bunch of soldiers. (Obviously.)

2. The war ends, and the big players get to thinking “you know, it would be a lot cheaper to just not pay any of those soldiers we hired to fight our war for us.”

3. So they don’t, leaving a whole bunch of large groups of well trained, heavily armed men stranded and broke wherever they happened to be when the war ended.

4. Fast forward ten years, and those same big player are going “where did all these bandits come from, and why are they kicking our asses?”

It’s a common enough trajectory that you can basically predict which periods in history will see a surge of outlawry that ends up getting romanticised in subsequent popular culture by looking for the war a decade earlier.

Pirates follow the same pattern. Though there have been several periods throughout history that have been called “the Age of Piracy”, the one that most directly informs the romantic image of the pirate in modern popular culture is the period from 1715-1725 – i.e., right on the tail of the War of the Spanish Succession, which wound down in 1714. And sure enough, a great many of the pirates who operated during that period were former privateers who’d been cheated of their pay and left to rot when the war ended, or else got their start in the piracy trade as members of an ex-privateer’s crew.

Though Frank James was also known to cultivate a Robin Hood like persona via newspapers, etc, so this may have all been PR.

Protest? Jail.