Okay, so finding the time to post is a lot harder than it looks. Not only are we playing dress up right and left, there’s all that relaxing to get to! So instead, here’s a few pics, with more content coming later:
Plus des Shenanigans!
Shenanigans at the Chateau!
(Yes, I am shamelessly stealing that post title from the talented Cathy Hay!)
Aiee, we’re here! In France! In an ancient chateau, originally 16th century but restored in the 19th century, and very appropriately eighteenth-century themed inside!
Here is the lovely Chateau de Pys, in the southeast of France near Toulouse:
And we’re having a blast. So far there have been sewing circles, cocktails, Eurovision final watching parties, yummy dinners…. and costumes! Most of us are here for two weeks, so we’re spacing out the costume events to basically every other day, so nobody hits the wall. It’s so lovely to BE in the place you’re going to be playing dress up — no hassle to get dressed and pop over — plus to then be able to put your pj’s on and have a late night, post-corset snack in the kitchen with everyone else! I could SO get used to this…
Our first costume event was a picnic lunch on the terrace/outside. It’s been drizzling on and off, so we set up the lunch buffet-style on an outdoor table. After food, we took TONS of photos, rambled about the grounds to see the nearby pond, woods, and lawns, played some ninepins, and lounged about on the steps. As I keep repeating, This Does Not Suck.
Tomorrow: details on my redingote and wig!
Lumieres Russian Dinner
On Saturday, Lumieres (our 18th century role-playing group, for lack of a better description) held a dinner at the court of Catherine the Great of Russia… or Babushka restaurant in Concord! It’s a small restaurant out in the burbs, but perfect because the food was great, the staff were super accomodating (they even dressed up in loaner costumes!), and the decor (if you ignored the disco elements) was oldey-timey enough to look great by candlelight!
It was an absolute blast — everyone was literally resplendent in gorgeous gowns, fabulous wigs, and sparkling jewels. There was lots of in-character banter (my favorite), nice champagne, and flirting. Francis and I got together ahead of time and practiced the minuet, which we learned a few months back, and we performed it for the guests with only one false start!
I wore my this-old-thing black francaise. I was itching to do a c. 1780 super powdered wig like one of these Roslin portraits, so I set to work with a blond wig I had bought a while back, hoping powdering over blond would maintain some warmth and work better on my skin tone. Well, I can report that powdered blond hair is still blond — duller, yes, but still blond — which totally doesn’t work on me. So that wig will get finished and sold on Etsy! Instead I pulled out the 1760s tete de mouton wig I styled for the Vampire Ball, which actually fits the era of the dress better, and powdered that. So nothing new, just a slight tweak. In the candlelight, it ended up looking like this:
Although here’s a flash photo that shows the warts & all — I’m posing with Trystan’s fabulous husband Thomas:
We were welcomed by Catherine the Great herself:
And there was a LOT of scrummy scrummy costumes:
You can see the rest of my photos on Flickr!
Historical Hair Did-You-Know?
In doing research for my 18th century hair/wig-styling book, I’m coming across a lot of weird and/or hilarious bits of info that aren’t going to fit into the book. So this is just a random accumulation of bits and bobs that are making me laugh!
Did you know…
- “Dildo” was a 17th century term for the sausage corkscrew curl of a man’s wig
- In the 1860s there was an attempt to scare women off of wearing their hair in chignons by claiming there was a particular “chignon fungus” you could catch by wearing that hairstyle
- There was a Russian hairdresser working in London in the 18th century named Ivan Peter Alexis Knoutscheffschlerwitz
- There were dog wigs marketed in the 1960s
- Mono-brows were fashionable in classical Roman times as well as in the Arab world (not sure exactly which periods, but I know it was fashionable in the Ottoman Empire in the 17th-18th century)
Vampire Ball!
Last night was the annual PEERS Vampire Ball, which is one the few balls I still get excited about! It’s in a great venue (an Elks lodge that has a beautiful look) that’s about 3 blocks from my house, plus people really go all out with the costumes — over the top historical, vampire/goth, scifi, fantasy, and hybrids of all of these. There’s so much eye candy, and that’s the best part! Plus there’s not only historical dancing but also a goth club with a DJ, so you can get the best of both worlds. Okay, and 2 bars.
For the past three years, Bella Donna has performed two 30 min. song sets at the ball, which is always lots of fun. We’ve rewritten all of our English songs so that they’re vampire focused (so, for example, “Sweet nymph come to thy lover” becomes “Sweet prey come to thy vampire”), and it’s fun to get to do something different than our usual Renaissance show… and we get to wear whatever costume we’re in the mood to wear!
This year I was thinking about wearing the Marie Antoinette dress, but it’s so huge that it would be hard to get into singing formation with the group and I certainly couldn’t do any historical dancing. So I decided to wear the Maja fancy dress costume, but I wanted to do something different with it. I came up with the idea of doing a Pierrot makeup, in line with the whole black and white theme.
To do the makeup, I used Kryolan Supracolor again, and made my illustrator husband do the black/detail work. Everything went swimmingly until I went to power the makeup, which you need to do to set it — I was using a brush and all the black smeared! So I had to do a bunch of repair work, which was super annoying… I’m not positive what the best way would be to powder when you’ve got more than one color going on, does anyone know? I ended up using a power puff and just pressing it, but it still smeared a bit.
I wanted to do a new wig, and decided to try a 1760s tete-de-mouton just to do something different — something along the lines of this. I used a pretty ratty wig that I’d cut to be a hedgehog, so the hair in front/top/sides wasn’t quite as long as it should be to do full justice to the curls across the top of the head… and I ended up doing things a bit backwards, in styling the front before the back, so had to do some curls at the side/back top to pull things together. But it was interesting to try something new, and now I know what to do differently next time!
I ended up recovering a mini-tricorn form and trimming it the vintage b&w ribbon I bought at Hyman Hendler in NYC.
The ball was fun and I had a great time seeing new and old friends, although I didn’t do ANY historic dancing — bad me! Instead after our singing sets were over, I pretended to be goth with some of my Bella Donna friends in the club room and had fun doing swoopy dances and “catch the bat, release the bat.”
