it's awfully hard to say no to her highness, isn't it?

A Christian Dior Lace Couture Gown

c. 1950

Evening dress, 1957 by Norman Hartnell

This dress was worn by Queen Elizabeth on her state visit to Canada in 1957 and is made of silk.

👑Long Live the King! 👑

so, ways to get around this:

turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us

don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace

a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)

instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian

including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too

including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue

for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend

when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!

if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples

the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates

costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)

v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece

lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces

nypl digital collection for photographs

national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art

national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific

stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource

wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain

auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

TIFFANY STUDIOS 'Lotus' Table Lamp

There is very little intrinsic institutional power in queenship. The power a consort, dowager, or queen mother has depends mostly on how much the reigning sovereign (usually a man) is willing to grant her. Needing a queen to serve as regent is exceptionally rare, and the regent is more often a male relative.

Queen regnant: woman who rules in her own right, not on behalf of someone else.

Regent: Someone who temporarily assumes the powers of the monarch on account of the monarch being too young or too incapacitated to govern.

Queen consort: Woman who is married to the monarch.

Dowager queen: Woman who was married to the monarch. The monarch is dead, and she is owed support as his widow.

the character everyone gets wrong

ooh. this is niche but hugo toras from suzerain's rizia dlc. the reddit side of fandom thinks he's the greatest, the goat, a better lucian, etc. the shipping side of fandom here on tumblr thinks he's a hot old man who'd be perfect if not for how he favors his fascist son (not sorry to the writers but i'm not adopting the in game "totalism" replacement they swapped fascism out for four years after release) and that his politics can be fixed with sex.

meanwhile hugo in canon is Your Conservative Racist Uncle, Royalty Edition, who has exactly the same politics as his son rico but he's more polite about it. rico has his political views, tbh. he's very good at his job as romus' grand vizier--and very loyal to romus as his brother's son and heir--but he's not shy about his bigotry, and his loyalty isn't without caveats, as a reformist romus frequently learns all too late.

number of fandom-related words you've filtered

146 filtered tags and 44 filtered in post content. added scarlet hollow spoilers to the list this afternoon as well.

the unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them

shaking suzerain and rizia vigorously in your direction. there are so many amazing characters that hardly anyone on here has heard of because the game is so niche that the fandom is practically nonexistent. but by suz fandom standards of unpopularity, i'd have to go with vina toras, with axel reinhart and manus sazon as extremely close runners up.

over on the subreddit people dismiss vina as being simultaneously as a naive idiot and a manipulative schemer, a terrible successor to romus who should be replaced by an infant son who's so young his greatest skill is making spit bubbles, a terrible, disobedient daughter who hates their romus for no reason at all. the best case scenario in fandom is that people just don't think about her on account of being a secondary character and a woman whose overarching plot in the game is Who Is She Going To Marry.

but what she actually is in canon is an intelligent, headstrong young woman who grows from a sheltered eighteen year old to a brilliant and accomplished diplomat loved by the public who's more than ready to step into romus' shoes if he abdicates at the end. the naivety she's accused of is wanting better living standards and rights for rizians and immigrants and for not being enthusiastic about war with pales during war romus runs. the manipulative scheming is nothing more than her lifelong desire to be a better queen than her great grandmother. her "disobedience" is a refusal to marry axel should a conservative romus sideline her from the council and dismiss her opinions and input at every opportunity. she is, in short, an excellent character whose greatest sin is not being in complete lockstep with romus and daring to politely voice her disagreements.

i love her so much...she's my The Character of all time...