#and yet nowadays most Americans associate them exclusively with white Southern Belles(TM)

[marzipanandminutiae]

thinking about the museum guests who get surprised by our photo of an Irish-Canadian immigrant maid on her wedding day, because she’s dressed indistinguishably from a wealthy woman of the same era (to modern eyes, at least)

and the thirtysomething Black femme sapphic couple I talked to at another museum who had never seen extant images of Black women in fashionable Victorian clothing until that week, and were absolutely delighted by them

thinking about how empowering it can be for historically oppressed people to learn that, no, beauty and elegance and artistic expression within this specific cultural framework were not the exclusive purview of wealthy whites until like 1920

(thinking about who it serves to erase those images and that knowledge from the public consciousness)

#dress history #history #art history #historical fashion #my favorite example is the hoop skirt #because guys those were UBIQUITOUS #cheap to make and cheap to buy #Queen Victoria wore them. Irish immigrant servants wore them. factory workers had to be expressly banned from wearing them #for safety reasons but still- that indicates that they WERE following the fashion #there are even accounts of enslaved women wearing them to church and such #and yet nowadays most Americans associate them exclusively with white Southern Belles(TM) #I've even been asked at events (while wearing 1860s) if northern women in general really wore hoops too