A Most Beguiling Accomplishment

 I should have posted this here a while back - this blog has moved! A Most Beguiling Accomplishment At first, I was trying out Substack, but very quickly the whole "Substack promotes Nazis" thing happened and I didn't want to make that a home. A lot of people there moved to Ghost or ButtonDown, but I'd already signed up for WordPress at one time or another, so I shifted there. This blog has been imported there, but because of Reasons the imported images are terrible, so this site will remain as an archive of my work in sewing, research, and translation. But if you want to see what I'm posting these days, head over there - and please paste the URL into your feed reader to keep up-to-date!

It looks like I made a Twitter thread on this back in February of 2020, and while I always intended to turn it into a blog post, I suppose it's not surprising that I, er, forgot about it. But I've been thinking about the basic late Georgian hairstyle for a long time, ever since a long-ago Facebook thread on the subject. Most people were of the opinion that a bun would have been the default, but I'd been translating my fashion plates for quite a while by that point, and had noticed that the fashionable 1770s-1780s styles never incorporated a bun. Instead, they were mostly a mass of curls, and the part of the hair that was longer was simply pulled up the back of the head (sometimes braided, sometimes not) into what was referred to as a chignon . (Respectively, the plates can be found with their descriptions on this blog: here and here .) Obviously these hairstyles are exaggerated for the purpose of showing their details to the subscribers who wanted to imitate them, and then...