hello! this is where i will put all of the things i write about the things i love: full length essays, mini essays, blog posts, notes, etc.
Ariadne's Thread: Untangling Identity in Claudia Durastanti's Strangers I Know Through the Conflation of Tenderness and Animality, Love and Violence, and Supernatural Beings as a Motif for Transformation
December 21st, 2023
Topics: renaissance, history, italy
At its core, Strangers I Know is a novel about the narrator's search for a sense of identity and belonging while she is constantly in the center of the divide between two parents, countries, cultures, languages, being suspended between conformity and nonconformity, and hearing and nonhearing society.
Claudia Durastanti establishes an overarching sense of cyclicality and interconnectivity throughout the novel which indicates that, even in the profound dichotomy that defines the narrator's life, there is a sense of continuity that can be traced through the map of her history.
Cupcake Couture: Comical British Court Dresses During the Regency Era
May 20th, 2023
Topics: fashion, regency, history, europe, court
Imagine this: it is 1800, you are a female member of British high society, and you are getting dressed to attend the royal court.
Everyone has abandoned the now archaic extensive ornamentation, layering, petticoats, and corsets that were in fashion about 20-30 years ago, and the natural, simple aesthetic is now in vogue. Women wear minimal under-layers and corsetry under slim silhouetted dresses, mimicking the ancient Greek peplos.
You are to appear at Court. And the Court Dress has strict rules you must follow. Of course, at this time, high society normally dictated the fashion trends of the time, and they trickled down to the lower classes. So, naturally, the Court Dress would also be most fashionably simple, slim, and natural. Right?
Wrong!
Laid Bare: The Historical Context of the Change in Women’s Fashion in England, France, and America Leading up to the Wider Regency Era (1795-1825)
April 11th, 2023
Topics: fashion, regency, history, europe
When looking at women’s fashion trends in the West from the 1400s to about the 1910s, there is a single era that sticks out from the rest because of its striking simplicity: the Regency era.
In between the extravagant art movements surrounding this era, women’s fashion became slimmer, less structured, and relatively subtle in the West, and the inception of this period of fashion reflects the rapidly changing society that these women were living in.