Breakfast Links: Week of October 7, 2013

Served up fresh! Our weekly roundup of favorite links to other blogs, web sites, articles, and images, gathered from around the Twitterverse.
• Museum unearths rare Charles Dickens newspaper.
• In 1816, an escaped lioness attacked a Royal Mail mail coach traveling from Exeter to London.
• 1890s Kodak moments: photographs taken with Kodak's first commercial cameras are now 125 years old.
• The chocolate chip cookie celebrates its 75th birthday in Wakefield, Massachusetts.
• Put up your dukes: a day in the life in pictures of a bare-knuckle boxer.
• Made by his crew in his memory: the miniature coffin of Captain Cook, 1779.
• Bookmobiles from a simple horse-drawn cart of the 19th c. to the four-wheelers of the 20th century.
• Can drinking tea turn you into a whore?
• Perfect for a Regency menu: 18th c. recipes for collaring meat.
• Illustrations from The Tour of Dr. Syntax through the Pleasures & Miseries of London, 1820.
• "Career Girl": picture portrait of a young woman in 1948 New York via Life magazine.
• Autumn Landscape by Tiffany Studios, c.1923 is a stunning "painting" in stained glass.
• English embroidery: the forgotten wonder of the medieval world.
• In 1869 a servant girl in NYC's United States Hotel gets even with the haughty "upper servants" - she poisons them.
• Kings in the Tower of London.
• The story behind artist & art historian William Dunlop's quite poor portrait of George Washington.
• Did women make the majority of the oldest cave paintings? New analysis says yes.
• Between method and execution: the Bolsheviks found it hard to kill the Romanov daughters because they had sewn their diamonds into their corsets.
• A brief history of the ruff.
• The Dancing Cavalier: the dual lives of Civil War General Edward Ferrero.
• Lost letters in the 18th century.
• Royal luxury: the newly reconstructed 15th c. Queen's Bathroom in Leeds Castle.
• The grandson of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson attempts to bring Sissinghurst to the 21st. century.
• Elizabeth Jackson, creator of early 19th c. knitting books.
• From a baby gas mask to the UV-ray baby branding prod: eleven terrifying childcare inventions from the early 20th century.
• The witches of Halloweens past: a brief history of witch costumes.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.

Friday Video: From Clothing to Character

Isabella reporting,

There are plenty of people reading this blog who believe it's a fashion history blog. It's a natural mistake, of course. Glancing at the list of label topics, I see that we've tagged 366 of our blog posts with the term "historic dress", and 287 with "fashion", which does appear to be fairly compelling evidence.

But the truth is that as much as Loretta and I like clothes and fashion (which we do, we do), we also like clothing for what it says about our characters. How a person (okay, a character) dresses is often the first indication a reader has about that character's wealth and status. But clothes also broadcast many other things, such as occupation, nationality, and age. Does he fuss over the precise folds of his cravat, demonstrating a need for control? Does wearing a corset beneath her dress make her feel confident and secure, or confined? Does he wear loud colors to match his loud voice, or does she dress provocatively to attract men? Even a character who claims not to care at all about clothes is making a major statement about himself. It's inescapable when building a character: clothes really do matter.

All of which is why I enjoyed this recent TEDx Pacific Palisades talk by Hollywood costume designer Kristin Burke. Turns out that dressing actors and actresses for television and film is pretty much the same as dressing our heroes and heroines. It's all part of the same business of story-telling. "The language of clothing is specific, persuasive, and totally silent," Kristin notes. "Most of the time we don't even realize that we are being influenced by it while it's right in front of our face." Exactly!

Kristin has designed costumes for over forty feature films in addition to music videos, commercials, and television series. You can read more on her blog Frocktalk, which she describes as the web's only costume-based movie review site.

Her design work is also currently featured in my greatest guilty-pleasure of the fall, Sleepy Hollow. Sleepy Hollow is a rollicking, scary, and occasionally quite funny time-travel reboot of Washington Irving's story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. Once I was able to turn off my history-nerd-switch (There were no witch-burnings in New York in 1780! That's not the reason for the Boston Tea Party! Ichabod Crane isn't supposed to be a handsome Oxford-educated English spy from the American Revolution!!) and accept that the writers were cheerfully going to jumble history and plunder scary woo-woo stuff from all kinds of improbable sources (Paradise Lost, the Old Testament, Iroquois legends), I've gotten totally hooked. Unlike most series where things blow up, this one has imaginative writing and great characters, including a wonderful, strong female protagonist, plus a romance between lovers separated by time.

The muted palette of Kristin's costumes contribute to the unsettled, forbidding tone of the show, and help create an average small town where a lot of inexplicably bad things are happening. Her separated lovers are dressed in black and dark grey, colors of sadness. To top it off are the excellent nightmare-inducing demons -- not to mention that really scary Headless Horseman. Just in time for Halloween!

1954's Car of the Future

Loretta reports:

I’m not much of a car nut, (or am I?  see here, here, and here) but a trip to the Heritage Museums & Gardens in Sandwich, MA, on Cape Cod, brought out my inner motorhead.

Or maybe it has less to do with auto lust than an appreciation of beautiful design.

One part of the exhibition Driving Our Dreams: Imagination in Motion, features postwar car design concepts, the result of American men's exposure to Italian design during and after WWII.  Former GIs were looking for the exciting sorts of vehicles they had seen abroad.

I hope to show several examples in the near future, but here was one of my favorites.  This beautiful 1954 Plymouth Explorer was designed to shed “Chrysler’s stodgy 1940s image.”  According to the explanatory note, the Italian design house “Ghia built cars more creatively and less expensively than the American companies.”  Thanks to Italian flair, Chrysler became the leader in cool auto style.

Blinded by Brilliant Buttons, 1777

Isabella reporting,

It's no secret that I have a weakness for caricatures that poke fun at fashion – and 18th c. fashion was the perfect target for the wickedly on-the-mark Georgian artists.

The long coats worn by gentlemen in the 1770s depended on fancy buttons for maximum sartorial impact. These buttons ran the decorative gamut. They could be covered with fabric and embroidered, elaborately wrapped with metallic thread, carved from horn, ivory, or mother-of-pearl, studded with cut stones, or fashioned from polished and engraved metal like pewter, brass, silver, and steel.

What these buttons didn't necessarily do was fasten the coat. The coat was often left open to display the waistcoat beneath, or closed with hidden hooks that fastened only the fronts of the coat edge to edge across the upper chest, leaving the buttons and their embroidered buttonholes with nothing more to do than look gorgeous. Stylish buttons became increasingly large, with some as big as two inches in diameter. With as many as a dozen of these buttons running down the front of a coat, the effect must have been impressive indeed.

Or, as this print shows, brilliantly blinding. (Click on the image to enlarge it to see the details.) Greeting a lady while walking in the park, this dandified gentleman has made the mistake of standing in the sunlight, making his polished steel buttons catch the sun and reflect back into the poor lady's face. They almost look like a comic book superhero's special laser-weapons. As the caption notes in elegant French, he's delivering the ultimate Coup de Bouton.

The lady recoils, and can only attempt to defend herself with flailing hands and fan. Not that the lady herself is innocent of Crimes of Fashion, however, not with her enormous wig and nodding plumes, gathered skirts over hoops, and a sizable nosegay of flowers tucked between her breasts. Perhaps they do deserve one another after all....

Above: Steel buttons: Coup de Bouton, etching by William Humphrey, c. 1777. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Fashions for October 1819

View online here

Loretta reports:

Toward the end of the official Regency decade, waistlines climb quite high, while the bottom of the skirt carries increasing amounts of decoration, making a sort of upside-down cone effect. I especially enjoyed the note about the bias cut being employed to "display the bust very advantageously."

View online here

Read online here

Read online here

Today's fashion plates and descriptions are brought to you by Ackermann's Repository, October 1819.