Wibbly-Wobbly Ramblings

Robe à l'Anglaise

1780s

Collection Galleria del Costume di Palazzo Pitti

I’m empress Theodora of Byzantium!

Robe à la Polonaise

1780s

The Kyoto Costume Institute

Sooooo ummmmmmm this is something that's probably going to piss a lot of people off, but I feel like I really need to say it.

If you get a message from an account claiming to be a Palestinian fundraiser, it is a bot. It is a scam. You need to report & delete the message and encourage others to do the same.

I know because I get messages on this account DAILY. I have a very high follower count and I'm pretty active and I interact with my followers a lot, and apparently that all adds up to one big bot magnet.

Bots following and messaging this account was a MASSIVE problem before Tumblr fixed its new account policies. I used to spend literally hours blocking and reporting the hundreds of bots that I would get following me each day.

I learned a lot about bots and how to identify them. The easiest way is with no avatar, "untitled" in the blog description (BTW if your avatar is still set to default PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD change it because you run a substantial risk of being accidentally blocked & reported as a bot).

One of the dead give aways of a bot was what I call "word salad" names. Three seemingly random words strung together making no sense, always adjective, adjective or noun, noun. If you reported a lot of these bots, you'd notice the same words kept showing up.

Nowadays, I am bombarded with fundraiser requests and sometimes, they don't even bother to hide the fact that they're a bot. The avatar is default, the blog title is "untitled," and the blog name is a classic randomly-generated word salad.

However MOST of the requests I get come from at least semi-legit looking accounts. There are pictures, a name, a story. Never mind that I've gotten that message three times from different accounts.

Sometimes, they claim to be vetted, but the whole vetting system essentially adds up to "trust me bro." There is no way of guaranteeing that this account isn't just lying about being vetted, claiming to be vetted by a false person, or are using the identity of a real Palestinian to scam people.

Previously, I've seen a lot of people getting attacked for raising questions about these fundraisers and getting attacked for being racist or for harming Palestinian families in danger, like Tumblr isn't a website famous for its scams and the words "The Arkh Project" "All or Nothing" or "Miss Officer and Mr. Truffles" mean nothing to you.

I personally have been scammed by people claiming to be charities on Tumblr before, specifically, The Leelah Project which used the name of a trans teenager who died by suicide to swindle people out of their money.

Luckily, there are actual, respected charities out there you can give money to if you want to help the cause:

Palestinian Children's Relief Fund

Palestine Red Crescent Society

United Nations Relief Works Agency

Islamic Relief

World Central Kitchen

Médecins Sans Frontièrs

One of the hardest things to accept about the situation in Palestine is that realistically, there is very little that your average outsider can do to change it. However, these large, well-respected and trustworthy charities are out there doing the hard work to keep people alive, and should be where the donation money is going

These scam bots feed on people's naïvety and need to believe that they are making a difference, and even worse, feed on the fear that by ignoring them, it somehow makes you a racist doing direct harm to a refugee family, when in fact they are using the suffering of Palestinians to take away money from those in need.

As far as fundraisers that don't send out random asks for donations, I honestly don't know. You'll have to do the work yourself and approach with much caution.

Be careful out there.

another really heartbreaking aspect of this is if you give money to a homeless guy who lied to you, that dude still gets some money which he probably needs anyway. with these scambots the money is probably going to bot farms, which are nontrivially reliant on human trafficking.

it's not just a waste of your money, it's a payment to actual literal criminal organizations. donate to vetted charities.

Tea Gown

Liberty & Co., 1906

The Philadelphia Museum of Art

The industrial revolution brought in a sharp drop in the prices of consumer goods. Americans were buying their clothes rather than making them on their own. Advances in shipping also meant that goods could travel farther and faster.

In 1894, watch seller Richard Warren Sears began peddling the Sears catalogue. He'd previously been successful with a mail-order watch business, and he had a real knack for writing advertising copy. The Sears catalogue sold EVERYTHING, from farm equipment to clothes to furniture and guns, creating a single source for Americans to buy anything they might need. Most importantly, rural farmers who had previously had to travel miles to the nearest town to buy anything now were able to have the catalogue and its goods mailed to their house.

While the Sears catalogue drastically changed the way of doing business in rural America, is was revolutionary in the Jim Crow South.

Previously, Black citizens were dependent on general stores where they would be forced to wait for White patrons to be served first. Often, their only option was to buy goods on credit, which perpetuated a cycle of debt that they couldn't escape. As scholar Louis Hyman said, "You would say, “I want to buy this,” and the storekeeper could say yes or no — and it would be different, what white people and black people were allowed to buy. That kind of system was part of the everyday reinforcement of difference, which was intended to create racial hierarchy and remind people of that basic power differential, whether it was political or economic."

The Sears catalogue, which completely cut the shopkeeper out of the question, gave Black consumers quality products at a fair price, delivered straight to their door.

While Richard Warren Sears wasn't a great social reformer, he was a businessman who saw an opportunity. Shopkeepers, land owners, and various racists burned Sears catalogues in giant bonfires. Sears and Roebuck both had to publish pictures of themselves to prove they weren't Black. In spite of the protests, the free market won out, fully bringing quality goods to Black consumers.

Half-Mourning Dress

1910-1912

The Victoria & Albert Museum

What’s a “half-mourning” dress?  Mourning in the front, party in the back?

Half-Mourning was the third stage of mourning for a widow. She would be expected to mourn her husband for at least two years, the stages being Full Mourning, Second Mourning and Half-Mourning. The different stages regulated what they would be wearing, with Full Mourning being all black and with no ornamentation, including the wodow’s veil, and the stages after that introducing some jewellery and modest ornamentation. When in Half-Mourning you would gradually include fabrics in other colors and sort of ease your way out of mourning. 

Wow, I am happy you made that joke so I could interpert it as a serious question and have an excuse to ramble on about clothing customs of the past, I am a historical fashion nerd.

That’s very informative, but I’m going to stick with my original head canon:

I love both the informed fashion history and the hilariously off-the-wall halves of this post.