For all your 18thc needs!

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

http://jas-townsend.com/index.php?cPath=46&osCsid=905b9b3f02700cf45e68b7520e5b860a
Hmm, if I took them to my opticians to have lenses fitted they'd just laugh...Dunno if you know of the Jas Townsend site, but they do repro stuff for American War of Independence and other 18th/early 19thc re-enactors: it's interesting just looking through their site, though, at the writing accessories, cooking stuff etc. Some re-enactors try to live the whole 18thc lifestyle. I've also come across Europe-based Revolutionary/Napoleonic war re-enactors' sites that give you the sort of detail of, say, the full contents of a soldier's backpack, that you don't find in regular history books. I love enormous hats, btw, which is how I've come across these things...

Comments

[misatheredpanda.livejournal.com]

Ooh. That's where I got my stays, I love them. &hearts Though I still need to get, you know, clothing to wear over them...

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

The clothes on that site are quite expensive compared to the accessories - I'd have thought it would be the other way around, though they're still much cheaper than a similar site I found in the UK. I once went to an auction of BBC costume, but sadly the repro Napoleon's Coronation cloak was rather over my student budget!

[citoyenneclark.livejournal.com]

arn't they great? I'm doing the costuming for Les Miz at my school, and really want those glasses for Combeferre.

[trf-chan.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I've seen that website before. Very nifty. :D

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

Hmm, if I took them to my opticians to have lenses fitted they'd just laugh...
I definitely did that. I made them my sunglasses, in fact, so I could have green lenses. XD:

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

That's neat! I was thinking of getting some at some point because I wear a lot of vintage/costume clothes and I hate wearing contact lenses. Do they make them a bit bigger than the 18thc ones they model them from? I have some Victorian tinted glasses but they're tiny (like most 18th/19thc clothes and furniture, too!).
(These historians who say, 'actually, people weren't much smaller then than they are now' are talking utter bollocks! I defy them to find a Victorian top hat that fits or an 18thc chair they can sit on comfortably!)

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

They make them slightly larger, but still small compared to modern glasses. Nevertheless, they fit fine.

I actually have a dual theory of why we're taller than 18th/19th century people. The first part is relatively uncontroversial: people were shorter in the past due to malnutrition. The other part is more my personal theory, which is that people now grow up eating food with all kinds of hormones in it, the effects of which are not exactly known, and which could well be making people taller.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

I watched a repeat of 'the World at War' on TV recently - it was really striking how 'modern' the American soldiers looked - just physically bigger all round - compared to 1940's Europeans. They even seemed to move differently! Better fed, growing up in more space in modern clean housing - everyone here lived in 18th/19thc, smog-filled, disease-ridden cramped housing with crap food and little of it. My Mum recalls coming home after living for a few years in California in the 60's and being horrified by what now seemed to her Dickensian filth and poverty.

Ironically, the postwar generation were the most healthy in decades if not centuries - food rationing from wartime through to 1953 meant everyone had a nutritionally balanced diet: pre-war, most were undernourished. Now the British vie with the Russians for highest obesity levels in Europe. There are a lot of hormones in drinking water here, too, because urban water supplies are recycled sewage water...yummy!