have been feeling listless and unmoored re: sims stuff lately, but i got a healthy dose of inspiration from @warwickroyals & @prydainroyals this past week, so i did a little succession / magazine-ish thing :^) obviously beatriz's 2023 death would be commemorated in uspanian vogue !!!!! obviously !!!!

transcribed text below:

Fashion is a Royal (and Family) Affair

That Crown Princess Barbie is a student of Uspanian style isn’t a surprise. For this issue, she recounts the historical episode at the heart of our memorial for the late Queen Beatriz. Pictured above in private photos are: Mother Desideria in 1860; Mother Zuriñe in 1885; Mother Rowena and then-Crown Prince Alfonso in 1926.

THE “BIRDIE” ISSUE OF VOGUE USPANA debuted in 1973. At the time, the magazine was in its infancy. An issue shaped by the queen—and it was, from cover to cover, driven by her desires and presence—ensured longevity. It proved to be a bestseller. Clothes, too, flew off the racks as Uspana’s designers received a boost among popular consumers. A textiles renaissance commenced among women of a certain class who had been looking elsewhere for quality fabric. Then and now, this was the mission of the magazine: loyalty to Uspanian fashion. The Birdie issue was a testament to this, from the sensibilities it imparted to the sourcing of its materials. The queen’s favorite designers, stylists, and photographers filled the issue; it made them iconic, and they would continue to set national trends for decades to come. More importantly, the Birdie issue fit into a larger project underway during Beatriz’s reign. Foreign fashion’s creep into the Uspanian mainstream had started two centuries before Beatriz obtained the Crown, but it reached its cultural apex under the sway of her mother. Uspana’s people had long reviled Queen Rowena’s taste in one breath and wished to emulate it in the second. The two women were not seemingly opposed in a diametric sense. They overlapped under the label of “extravagant,” namely, but Beatriz was forgiven her excess. The Birdie issue, in retrospect, shows why. In an initial meeting with the queen, she told then-editor Lluc Soler that she cared deeply about a “revival” of traditional fashion in the country. Soler replied that traditional fashion was alive and well—“in the mountains, with the grandmothers.” Some in the annals have suggested that this retort led to control of the issue being ceded informally to a team with whom the queen preferred to work. (By 1975, Papan Ibarra had risen from those ranks to become the magazine’s new editor-in-chief, a position she occupied until 1991.) Nonetheless, a certain truth in Soler’s statement formed the foundation of the issue. It did draw heavy inspiration from those grandmothers in the mountains. This included people such as the queen’s own grandmother, Mother Zuriñe, who readily embraced the aesthetics of Yaas and was a master weaver in her own right. The cover reflected the elevated homage orchestrated within. On it, Birdie herself posed in a wool rebozo hand-dyed with cochineal. This garment was a perfect duplicate of the so-called suncloths the queen’s great-grandmother, Mother Desideria, wore on a regular basis in the late nineteenth century. Fittingly, it was also topped with a replica inspired by the time. One of the many jewelry pieces destroyed during the 1880s had been the Shield Flower tiara with its red fire opal set in gold and symbolic allusions to the sacrifice and self-immolation of Uspana’s founding mothers. Queen Beatriz wore tiaras on many occasions, but it was widely known that she preferred to wear the true Uspanian symbol of elite regalia: the jade necklace. For that reason, jade

BIRDIE, 1973 Shield Flower tiara by Xiuhcozcatl for the House of Tecuani. Rebozo by Quilatzli Castañeda. Necklace creator unknown. Fashion editor: Papan Ibarra.

had german and barbie on the brain ... i love them

❧ 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐲  /  1926 - 2043

this isn't the valentine's day thing i have been planning, but i wanted to post something the day of & got this idea. it's probably fair to say these are four of the top five couples :^) thank you to @dreamstatesims & @armoricaroyalty & @funkyllama for sharing their beautiful gorgeous hot and sexy babies w/ me !

per request of @trentonsimblr — & as always, barbie looks like a goddess because @dreamstatesims made her that way ♥️

major wip but ....... mentally, i'm here :^) & shoutout to @funkyllama and @dreamstatesims 🧡💙

reminding myself & everyone else that they have many children and full-time jobs

♥️ @dreamstatesims

alexa, play the addams family theme song slash boyfriend by justin bieber mash-up / perpetual thanks to @funkyllama & @dreamstatesims for the extra cuties

TRANSCRIPT:

[Overlapping conversations.]

German: Silly ones next! Obligatory.

Julian: Can we talk—now, just … before everything starts?

Yesenia: [Sighs.] Two minutes.

Julian: Start the clock. I can sweep you off your feet in a minute and a half. Yesenia: Julian, please—

Julian: I’ve done it before. Yesenia: If this is what you want to talk about, forget it. Let’s go inside.

Julian: Marcos is here, isn’t he? Yesenia: I don’t think that matters.

Julian: Me either. He knows what he signed himself up for, with us. Yesenia: Us? Come on. Julian: [Doing a poor Beatriz impression] “When we have history, we share stitches.” Yesenia: It’s not happening again.

Yesenia: I’m in Nakawe until tomorrow, and I’m going abroad after that. I’m not getting stuck with you. Whatever is happening with Marcos is not your concern. I said two minutes, and I meant it. This is over.

Julian: I know it’s serious. Yesenia: Excuse me? Julian: I can’t even hate him. He’s the good cousin. He’s just, like, good. So are you. Yesenia: Are those tears…? Julian: It’s called desperation, Yesenia.

Beatriz: They’re doing this in front of everyone? Leonor: So it appears.

Beatriz: If we wanted drama, I would have hired someone with talent.

Leonor: Can we go inside now, Mother Beatriz? Beatriz: Speak to that photographer over there first. Make sure he gets all of it. Leonor: [Sighs.] No drama, huh?

i don’t know what to say other than that i downloaded this very hot boat & wanted to use it, in the hottest sims world, with these hot sims (say the word and i’ll stop tagging you in these thrice-weekly posts @dreamstatesims​​ sdsfdkjgds)

do your sims have their own personal social media accounts? are they private for only close friends or are they public?

this is such a fun question ! the short answer is that they do indeed have personal social media accounts. all of the working royals have public accounts, and they can have private ones unless otherwise prohibited. long answer is an essay entitled "Social Media, Celebrity Culture, and Royal Relevance in Contemporary Uspana" :^)

kidding, but it is a wall of text:

social media is not really a subset of public relations for the royal family—like, it is, but it's also its own entity. there are certainly public accounts that are maintained principally by employees of the crown, but my sense is that they would've had an entire strategic plan for Influencing™ in the early 2010s when it was solidifying as a concept. the crown, as a governmental institution, has had its own approach to social media since perhaps 2006-2008 primarily concerned with policy communication and public engagement. the royal family, as a sort of related cultural apparatus, attends to the popular interests of performance and spectacle—different kinds of persuasion.

this makes sense in the broader context of beatriz's personal vision of how their family remains relevant: she had already made the decision to lean hard into the wave of celebrity and entertainment journalism that came to shape, then define, the 1990s and 2000s. part of it was her willingness to engage with outlets less deferential to the crown—whether as an appreciator of tabloid gossip's function in society or as a private participant in the kind of combative exchanges that maintain popular public interest. part of it was having the foresight to exploit the adventures and popularity of her many grandchildren: there are ten of them, and they all came of age in the 1990s and 2000s; they all appealed to different swaths of the public; and they surrounded themselves with other interesting figures who'd be in the news with or without the royal association. entertainment becomes a public service, alongside but separate from the royal family's substantive patronage system.

in short, beatriz has been a real "all publicity is good publicity" kind of person, and that has shaped both the crown's official strategies and the family's approach to self-presentation. the latter has been thoroughly central to celebrity culture for some time and that has included appropriating social media for their own purposes. social media allows a new level of control for people who had previously been subject to processes controlled by newspaper and magazine editors, television producers, and a cadre of popular bloggers. with the advent and maturity of social media, the celebrity mystique seems to be a relic of the past, but parasocial interactions have taken on a new, powerful shape. the active use of social media by the family, then, is a way to compete with mediated press coverage and maintain their place in the broader national celebrity culture.

while beatriz herself does not maintain any private accounts or have much interest in participating in the management of her public one, it is essentially imperative that the family's working royals have public accounts with regular, personalized posts. they have staff for this who are separate from staff working on other forms of communications. the actual shape of these public accounts depends on the person. take barbie, for example: the social media mandate, for her, is fully a call to influence. her public account is personal the way lifestyle accounts tend to be; she's presenting her life, her marriage, and her children in a manner that is, not attainable, but unprecedentedly accessible. as another example, i imagine arnaut's social media presence is sort of like barack obama's has been. he and his team make statement posts about issues and current events, and he also releases reading lists and year-end playlists and things like that. leonor's posts tend to be polished, professional, and work-related, but she also posts videos of herself discussing events while she's getting ready for them.

the question of private personal accounts is interesting ... i imagine the younger members of the family do have them, although that raises the question of whether they're being monitored and moderated to prevent or manage leaks, etc. at the same time, they have such broad latitude with their public accounts that i don't imagine they'd need private accounts to post the kinds of content most people put on instagram and such. in theory, i feel like there's an approval process that means adults have to consent to having their accounts monitored and, for minors, puts the monitoring responsibility on their parents. julian, for example, has private personal accounts he uses exclusively to keep up with what his son is posting. obviously the teens would all have private snapchat accounts, but why would you make a finsta for fucking around if you're contractually obligated to have your dad follow it ksdjfhsg

i don't think i've really posted any social media content, except for the barbie and german ones that i decided to frame as instagram stories, but ... this is what's happening in the background. i mean, obviously, since the story proper is still in the 1930s when mass media is still in its infancy. i do want to depict the early roots of this in the leonor-centric spinoff which, as we know, is set in the 1990s. she's the test case for the type of attention that becomes trained on her younger cousins, and all of their children are the digital native zoomer generation grappling with what comes next for technology and celebrity in society. exciting stuff.

me, looking respectfully at someone’s parents—

fantasizing about when my story gets to this point ... in SEVENTY (70) years 😭

❧  ft. @dreamstatesims‘s actual goddess, miss barbie

nothing will convince me that they  don’t  have a joint finsta  !!!!!!    /   at this point, let’s call this a slow motion Birthday Beach Bash™️ countdown ???

♥️ @dreamstatesims

i remembered that i forgot to post the outtakes from the magazine cover i made 18479835 days ago :^)

me: [working on the birthday beach bash venue] them: [taking a break from yachting to have a dance party]

i made a whole ass scene but the screenshots are UNUSABLE for totally preventable reasons so ............................... here's the one (1) good one, while i summon the willpower to. you know. redo. everything 😭