The 1870s Victorian

Camera Work: Portrait of Mrs. C., J. Craig Annan, 1907, Cleveland Museum of Art: Photography

Medium: photogravure

Vogue Russia October 1998, Forest Tale

SHE’S SO INDEPENDENT AND STRONG AND HANDY AND BEAUTIFUL AND INTELLIGENT AND I FUCKING LOVE HER

But her backstory makes me love her EVEN more

李子柒 (Li Ziqi) was born in Sichuan in the countryside to a poor family. Her mom left the family when she was very young, and she was abused by her stepmom when her dad wasn’t around. After her father passed away, she ended up orphaned and living with her grandparents

She dropped out of middle school and moved to the city to look for work because her family was in such poverty. There, she worked as a waitress and a DJ for 8yr, making barely enough to get by — at one point, before she had found steady work, she was homeless and was forced to seek shelter under a bridge

Her grandfather was a professional chef, and after he passed away, she decided to try her hand at the culinary arts and to share her cooking skills on social media — she started making YouTube videos (entirely independently!!)

She initially received an incredible amount of backlash… people left hurtful comments and really just shat on her for no good reason

But she persevered and continued making videos, and now, she has 3.8 million followers (as of May 4th, 2019) and gets the bulk of her income from her YouTube channel

She isn’t completely alone in making her videos anymore (she has a cameraman and an assistant), but she still does the majority of the work — the actual cooking/farming/handiwork being filmed, arranging the scenes, and video editing

She is an absolute BADASS and carries on so many Chinese traditions that are being forgotten

Most of her videos are of her cooking, but she shows you more than just the cooking process — you see her pulling vegetables and herbs and mushrooms out of the fucking ground and slicing fruits and flowers and shit off of trees with a machete in the beginning of the video, and by the end, it’s a finished, beautiful, mouth-watering dish

She also does way more than work with food — there’s a video of her building her clay oven (which you see her cooking with in a lot of videos) from SCRATCH just with some bricks and a mud mixture she made herself

There’s also a video of her making paper from scratch and then using it for calligraphy, and LET ME TELL YOU, LI ZIQI IS AS ARTISTICALLY GIFTED AS SHE IS CULINARILY

Planetarium Table Clock, Paris, 1770 [2857 x 4000]

What is a zibellino?  A zibellino (pl. zibellini) was a full-body pelt worn as a fashion accessory by stylish ladies in the 1500s, most commonly in Northern Italy.  They used sable or marten pelts most often, but ermine, mink, and even lynx were also used.  Zibellini frequently had gold or silver heads and feet, and there is also mention of artisans using jet or crystal instead of metal!  Regardless of the material used, they were usually encrusted with jewels and sometimes enamelwork.  Sometimes zibellini are called “flea furs” on the mistaken assumption that ladies wore these furs to attract the fleas away from themselves and onto the furs…this is a myth, as no flea would leave a nice, warm, food-filled body for an empty pelt!  Besides, if you were a rich lady, would you want to advertise your personal cleanliness issues to the masses?  No, zibellini were worn for high fashion, not personal hygiene.

The traditional costume historian’s term for this accessory, flea-fur, is from the German Flohpelz, coined by Wendelin Boeheim in 1894, who was the first to suggest that the furs were intended to attract fleas away from the body of the wearer. There is no historical evidence to support this claim. Italians simply called these accessories “zibellini”, their word for sables and speakers of other languages called them “martens”, “sables” or “ermines” in their native tongues. 

The earliest surviving mention of a marten pelt to be worn as neck ornament occurs in an inventory of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, dated 1467, but the fashion was widespread in Northern Italy by the 1490s. The style spread slowly to the north and west. Mary, Queen of Scots, brought fur pieces on her return to Scotland from France in 1561; one of her zibellini had a head of jet. Elizabeth I of England received a “Sable Skynne the hed and fourre featte of gold fully furnished with Dyamondes and Rubyes” as a New Year’s Gift from the Earl of Leicester in 1585. The fashion for carrying zibellini died out in the first years of the 17th century, although fox, mink and other pelts were worn in similar fashion in the 19th and 20th century. You can still buy zibellini today.

Portrait of Henri van de Velde  -   Léon-Eugène-Auguste Abry , 1887

Belgian, 1857-1905

sher’s list of favourite movies [3/70] • the phantom of the opera (2004)