Vesta Tilley, impersonating a foppish young man. Originally named Matilda Alice Powles (1864 – 1952), she was the most famous and well paid music hall male impersonator of her day. She was a star in both Britain and the United States for over thirty years. Her father was a comedy actor and sometimes theatre manager, and Tilley first appeared on stage at the age of three and a half. At the age of six she did her first role in male clothing under the name Pocket Sims Reeves, a parody of then-famous opera singer Sims Reeves. She would come to prefer doing male roles exclusively, saying that “I felt that I could express myself better if I were dressed as a boy”.
Excuse me while i fantasize about having these clothes.
Anybody know the designer’s name? Company? Country? Anything? Please. Tumblr won’t let me enable replies.
I would wear all of this all the time.
all my want ;w;
Have I reblogged this already? Yes.
Am I reblogging it again? Obviously.
Do I care? Hellfuckingno.
ALL THE CLOTHESPORN
Did I just picture Tom Hiddleston wearing one of these?.. Yes. Yes, I did, and it was wonderful.
Clothes porn.
When Joseph-Nicephore Niepce took the first photograph in 1828, his photographic plate required an exposure of eight hours. That exposure time was drastically reduced across the course of the nineteenth century, so that by the 1890s the Collodion process had cut exposure times to two or three seconds.
Nevertheless, a three second exposure meant that subjects had to stand very still to avoid being blurred, and holding a smile for that period was tricky. As a result, we have a tendency to see our Victorian ancestors as even more formal and stern than they might have been.
These pictures are drawn from the Flickr group “The Smiling Victorian” and show a perhaps surprising side to the people who’s “now” was a hundred years before our own.
This reminds me of a B.A. thesis a friend of mine is currently writing on the “Invention” of Victorianism by Modernist writers in the early 20th century.
the other gate (by Sunnyvaledave)
Fanfiction visual reference, St. Rose of Lima Retreat Center, ‘the shrine.’
