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pet peeve is when you look up fashion references from a specific era and you keep getting modern day '[era]-inspired' fashion like NO i want authenticity damn it. i can see your 2020 photo quality and your 2020 hair and your 2020 makeup. youre not fooling me.

bincliff

hello i'm a historical fashion researcher and i have a lot of experience looking up things! this is a very widely experienced irritation and you're definitely not alone in this, but i am here to share everything i know!

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!

anyway, i hope this has been a good place to start for anyone interested! there are probably some i've missed because there are so many museums across the world and i don't know about all of them or can't remember them. but these are the ones i've used the most! (my specialisation/jobs i've had to research for have only really been in western fashion, so my resources reflect that)

haemey

Wikipedia has a list of fashion museums. Unfortunately, the page itself is only available in German, but the introductory paragraph is very short and after that, it's organised by country, and then it's a simple list. If you click on a museum's article, the website is usually linked in the overview table.

utopians

the avatar movies are crazy bc "what if colonizers literally inhabited and puppeteered the bodies of indigenous peoples in order to exploit their homeland" sounds like the premise of some sort of anticolonial horror film, like specifically the kind of thing that would be commenting on self-indigenization among white settlers, but because it's James Cameron his whole takeaway from that premise is "it would be preddy cool"

utopians

actually sorry. the takeaway is also "the white settler possessing an indigenous body would actually be extremely good, perhaps even The Best, at being indigenous, and he would become their Leader"

littlemissrhizome

The takeaway is that James Cameron hired a multi disciplinary team to create the most "alien" culture possible and after years of design what they ended up with just looked like the indigenous population that their Anglo American creators had waged a genocide against decades before. Something unpleasant in the Canadian mind stirred and twisted and managed to summon the ghosts of their own shadow haunted world.

The takeaway is that James Cameron leaned into it. The music they wrote was too foreign sounding, so they substituted "world music" for the Navi - a movie short hand for indigenous sounding. The alien bodies weren't attractive enough to the western male gaze, so Cameron gave them mammalian breasts. This whole narrative about dozens of experts across dozens of fields building the culture of the Navi, while true, is just a distraction from the fact that Cameron designed Pandora and its cute cat eyed blue aliens already.

The takeaway is that dozens of ethnologists, musicologists, archeologists, historians and speculative fiction artists mostly just built baubles and artifacts to be displayed in supplementary materials. A well designed string instrument in the, "World of Pandora," book. A materially sound weaving displayed at the "World of Pandora," theme park. The same colonizer historian who reconstructs Hopi pottery for the Smithsonian, constructs Navi pottery for Disney's Animal Kingdom.

Perhaps you're old enough to remember when the world first met James Cameron's Avatar and the globe was cleaved into two groups; one totally enchanted by this alien paradise, and one that went, "oh so it's Dances With Wolves. Just beat for beat. No it's not Pocahontas, it just looks like Pocahontas because Pocahontas was cribbing the same styles and materials from Dances With Wolves. Come on, Kevin Cosner won the Oscar for Best Picture for this movie it's not an obscure film."

The takeaway is that Avatar is also the dream of white maroonage. The history of colonization is also the history of defection. From James Cameron to Kevin Costner, from the Avatar Fans back to the first Europeans to walk the shores of Turtle Island; people have projected real and imagined freedoms and powers onto the members and first nations found there. That Pandora distills down the dream of a pre-contact, non agrarian and anti-industrial, spiritually rich but materially limited culture and that this distillation just looks like blue Powhatans, well that probably means something.

meckamecha

I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence

Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.

Switch to linux, it's free and it's good.

kuromi-hoemie

u r absolutely right I have SO many complaints about Windows omg.

For anyone who'd like to follow along, I'm gonna share how to get around those things with group policies bc they're more user friendly and descriptive than registry editor imo :3 I'll also show how to get around needing a Microsoft account to get setup.

For the Device Setup

"OOBE" stands for Out Of Box Experience which is what that setup workflow is. But it also happens to be a folder with a little program in it that'll let you skip connecting to the internet; this makes it so you don't have to sign up with a Microsoft account and can just use a normal local one instead. And it already comes preinstalled! Here's how you get to it:

Hold Shift + F10, or Shift + Fn + F10 depending on your keyboard.

Click inside the window that pops up, type the following and press enter afterwards to run it: OOBE\BypassNRO

I believe it should restart your computer automatically, but if not then restart your computer or type: shutdown /r /t 0 /f

Now when you're brought back to the setup workflow, the page where you connect to the internet will have a new button on it that lets you say you don't have internet. Clicking that and proceeding through the rest of the setup lets you get around the Microsoft account thing.

Group Policies

You don't have to know much about them, these are just a bunch of specific settings for what your computer can or can't do that lets you decide how it works in different ways.

I'm gonna show you how to turn off the recommendations and internet stuff basically. For now bring up search and type gpedit, pick this

It'll open up to Local Group Policy Editor and we can get started :3c

Start Recommendations

In the side menu, go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar. Click on Settings to sort them with all the "Turn off" ones bumped to the top.

Here's what you should set:

Turn off user tracking: enabled

Turn off feature advertisement balloon notifications: enabled

Remove Recommended section from Start Menu: enabled

Remove Personalized Website Recommendations from the Recommended section in the Start Menu: enabled

Do not search Internet: enabled

Windows Spotlight

Back in the side menu, go down to Windows Components > Cloud Content

Turn off all Windows spotlight features: enabled

Do not use diagnostic data for tailored experiences: enabled

Cortana

In the side menu, this one's back at the top under Computer Configuration. You're gonna want to go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search

Allow Cortana: disabled

Don't search the web or display web results in Search: enabled

News and Interests

In the side menu go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > News and interests.

Enable news and interests on the taskbar: disabled

Microsoft Account Login Nudges

When you don't use a Microsoft account they'll nudge you repeatedly to sign in so you can "get the most out of your experience" *gag*. The group policy for turning that off has a note that suggests it might not work with Windows 11 though (implicitly), so you can close the group policy editor window now and for this last one let's just open up the regular settings.

Go to System > Notifications > Additional settings, then uncheck all the boxes. And there ya go! (✿◠‿◠)ﾉ u are done.

Group policies are kind of a rabbit hole so while there is a lot more you could change or read into, for your own sanity's sake I would advise against it and say call it a day lol

meckamecha

This is all extremely good information, thank you very much for the addition!

shrimpblaster

I endorse this as an IT technician. I do this to every new Win11 device I set up.

As a bonus, run Chris Titus Tech's debloat tool on it.

Having Fun with Technology

It allows you to add tools, remove/disable shitty parts of windows, and easily change some settings. My default is running the preset for a desktop/laptop and applying security update settings, but there are so many options to customize. I used it on my personal laptop.

aquiescentmoon

Something fresh out of my diary

blackbackedjackal

We failed as a society when everyone stopped wearing headphones.

blackbackedjackal

At my parents place with 2 children watching YT on tablets and 2 adults watching tiktoks and reels on their phones and trying not to summon a comically sized Loony Toons hammer out of my back pocket to smash them all.

gigilefache

I'm rebloging this twice im tired of people not wearing headphones when watching videos in public. It's basic etiquette to wear headphones in public when you listen to things.

official-catboy-deactivated2021

do you BELIEVE IN LIFE AFTER LOVE

(after love after love after love)

i can feel something inside me saying

bebsi-cola

if your neuro diversity activism doesn't include people with psychosis then it's worthless I'm not sorry to say

lunetheweird

if your neuro diversity activism doesn't include people with NPD, ASPD, BPD, HPD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, delusions, drug use disorder, OCD and other stigmatized mental disorders (yes, even those ones), 👏🏼 it's worthless👏🏼

thegrimeonline

ily harm reduction ily sharps disposal containers in public restrooms ily those safe drug use places to help you not od ily planned parenthood ily aftercare guides ily harm reduction

rorbison

Comedians in the '70s and cartoons in the '90s: weird how your kids can watch violence and murder on TV but the FCC wants us dead if we say the word nipple.

Internet users in 2025: you didn't warn me that there would be erotic themes in the game you just mentioned which is fucked up because I thought it was going to be a normal "morally struggle with killing people" game but now it's gone too far :-/

rorbison

A lot of you are playing into a lot more reactionary of hands than I think you would like when you act like tits are more shocking than gun violence.

rorbison

We need to call people posers again. We gotta. We just gotta. No you aren't a countercultural weirdo because you made a battle jacket, you get tangibly viscerally uncomfortable if someone is breast feeding in public and that is incredibly square of you.

elwenyere

-- Ted Chiang, from "Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art"

oldshrewsburyian

I'm so glad they got Ted Chiang -- a wonderful writer of science fiction and thinker about technology, in my opinion -- to write this essay. My favorite line was this:

Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium.

keplercryptids

“wow you blocked me just cuz i disagreed with you???”

yes. yes, exactly. this is a social media site. i come here to look at pictures of birds and shitpost with my friends. this is not a town hall meeting; i am not your elected official. i do not owe you my energy, my space, or my time. you and i are strangers that use the same website. i can block you for literally any reason and that’s okay. take a deep breath. block me too. you’ll feel better.

taiey

normalise low blocking thresholds… blocking someone arguing with you is not weak or over-reacting or whatever.

anarchistmemedistro

don’t feed the trolls

odinsblog

Istg, if I ever get rabies because some dumb ass antivaxxer refused to vaccinate their dog, I’ll probably be doing the rest of my blogging from prison because I promise you, Imma curbstomp the shit out of the owner

doberbutts

Fun fact: if your dog is unvaccinated and bites someone, in most states it's not only perfectly legal but SUGGESTED COURSE OF ACTION for animal control to seize your dog, euthanize it, and cut its head off for rabies testing. This process costs 300-500 USD and is the responsibility of the owner to pay.

This happened to someone on tumblr, and happens with regularity at my job, so it is not a far-flung worst case scenario.

Rabies shots cost 20 USD at your local pet store or farm supply and if your dog bites someone while vaccinated, all you have to do is quarantine for 10 days.

bisquid

Once again:

Rabies is one of the most lethal diseases in the world

If you get bitten by a rabid dog - or even slobbered on by a rabid dog and happen to have an open wound - and don't get medical treatment until you develop symptoms; congratulations! You're dead.

Vaccinate your fucking pets

isuggestlandback

I also suggest vaccination

dragon-in-a-fez

something you don't learn until you get really far into the making and tinkering life is that there's no such thing as "glue" really. there are so many kinds of substances that stick other substances together and they are all very different and if you just go look at the adhesives aisle in the hardware store the packaging never actually tells you anything useful. it's like "this is SUPER T-REX POWER GLUE" and the fine print says "good for use on wood metal and plastic". okay. but WHICH PLASTICS MY GOOD BITCH,

because SURPRISE, there's no such thing as "plastic" either. every kind of wood is basically the same on a chemical level, but the only thing every plastic has in common is "some of its molecules are long" and that is NOT a quality that determines how things stick together.

I just ordered some stuff I hope will permanently stick a circuit board to a steel sheet and withstand temperatures up to 150 degrees. by the way circuit boards are made of epoxy-bound woven glass cloth which is cool as hell but what the fuck do you glue that with? can any of the 12 kinds of adhesives I currently own do that? no of course not. if I want to stick two pieces of acrylic together so hard they become watertight to a depth of 3000 metres I have some shit that does that, but it does literally nothing else.

anyway. once you start learning how many kinds of sticking things together there are, the people at 3M start to seem like witches and I don't know if they're the kind we can trust with that level of arcane knowledge

once-a-polecat

Can I introduce you to one of the most useful sites from the early web? It’s thistothat.com and it tells you what kind of adhesives work to stick different types of substances together. It looks like it was designed in 1999 with some ads slapped over the top, because it was designed in 1999…. But like most things from the early web, it does what’s on the label: tells you how to stick this to that.

Arcane knowledge my ass, the internet used to be useful about shit.