Naw she spittin

Comic #294: - Modest Dreams - Website links: Here! The gap between the have's and have not's has grown so wide now that I feel like the people who have mansions & 4 cars are like a different species right now. I am firmly on the side of the 'have nots' & I don't know if I'll ever have a little house to call my own 😔🏡

isn't it funny how "artistic mending" got cool as soon as it showed you could buy clothes worth the effort and had time to do it

The Victorian Era is a little terrifying to me because Keeping Up with the Joneses was considered a moral imperative. Conspicuous consumption galore.

In a way, yes. And in a way, no.

Yes, as I've said, keeping one's clothes roughly up to date in silhouette and composition at least was considered part of Respectability. But I'm not sure I'd call it quite the same as Keeping Up With The Joneses- outdated furniture, for example, was not quite as looked down upon if it was in good repair and well cared-for. And certainly plenty of people (aristocrats, even) lived in old houses for the time. Plus, clothing that was TOO modish could often get a middle-class person looked down upon almost as much as being too outdated.

They also reused things a lot more, at least in terms of clothing- cutting garments down or taking them apart to recycle the fabric, etc.

So yes, there was conspicuous consumption- one could not look at the 1% of the Gilded Age and think otherwise -but it was perhaps not as simple as one might often think.

And, of course, nowadays conspicuous consumption is an enforced physical necessity thanks to planned obsolescence. So we haven't entirely gotten better about that, and in some ways we've gotten worse.

Although the industrial revolution employed the labor of working-class women in factories and mills, it also produced the middle-class lady of leisure with her staff of household servants and her strictly defined feminine sphere, a sphere whose parameters were motherhood, social and moral refinement, and gracious adornment of her husband’s life and home. Throughout the nineteenth century, hoops, crinolines, bustles and trains might come and go, taste in color might veer and shift, the width of the skirt, the swell of the sleeve, the location of the waist and the shape of the bust might vary with considerable imagination from season to season, but the woman of fashion remained a perishable confection, a wedding-cake vision of conspicuous consumption whose impractical clothes reflected the aristocratic values of centuries past. And she had no followers more attentive or more eager to become the Perfect Lady than the idle wives and daughters of the newly moneyed bourgeoisie with their newly acquired aspirations and pretensions, and their newly acquired laundresses and lady’s maids.

In material terms—ill-paid laborers in the mills, including children, worked day and night to spin out the yardage; sewing machines were introduced to automate the stitching—this meant the piling on of ruffles, ribbons, flounces, piping, fringes, tassels, lace, beads and bows, and numerous starched petticoats to bedeck and adorn a sedate and artificially molded figure. Perhaps one season a crinoline cage might replace the petticoats, or perhaps a hobble skirt might replace the hoop, to be replaced in turn by a bustle or train. Whatever the innovation, the latest feminine mode was usually expressed through the fashion language of a period revival.

-Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

I don't get people who are impressed by someone owning a fancy car. Like wow you purchased an object, big deal. Do a backflip or something

Friendly reminder that the term "conspicuous consumption" was coined by Thorstein Veblen, not Karl Marx. <3 Although they obviously had some similar ideas.

This is in response to a video that's going around right now that I don't care enough about to reblog, lol.

Pretty sure within this decade we're going to see crApple remove the physical charging port and/or onboard speaker from their phones.

"Why would anyone ever want to use wired charging when you could use our overpriced dock?"

"Why would anyone ever be without wireless earphones or our 'watch' that can be bricked at any time?"

"Surely vibrations alone are enough to alert you to a call."

Instagram: johnp.shanley

thorstein veblen |1899|

me: I'll put this on in the background, for background viewing hwile I do responsibilities

(watches five seasons in rapt fascination)

me: ohhgod. my Responsibilities

Levi Strauss bought a pair of Steve Jobs’s signature 501 jeans for their archives. Those jeans and a black mock turtleneck were Jobs's uniform in the last decades of his life.

Levi’s delivered a free, annual supply of 501 pants to Jobs—but why? How many pairs of jeans do you need, anyway? Half-dozen will do you for decades.

I've never been a fan of the 501 jeans. They have button-fly. I don't understand how anybody can voluntarily wear button-fly pants. I drink a lot of coffee—I need fast access to the equipment.

Levi's also acquired Albert Einstein’s Levi’s "Cossack" leather jacket, which still smelled like his pipe tobacco.

You can buy a reproduction of that jacket for a mere $1,200. It comes with a Christie’s auction paddle replica numbered “97,” which was the paddle Levi’s used at the auction, along with “a fragrance developed by Brooklyn-based perfume house, D.S & Durga. It's a warm blend of burley pipe tobacco, papyrus manuscripts and vintage leather.”

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Slice #105