Meiji period fashion was some of the best in the world, speaking purely from an aesthetic standpoint you can really see the collision of European and Japanese standards of beauty and how their broad agreement even in particulars (the similarity between Japanese and Gibson girl bouffants, the obi vs the corset, the obi knot vs the bustle, the mutual covetousness for exotic textiles, the feverish swapping of both art styles and subjects) combined and produced some of the most interesting cultural exchange we have this level of documentation for. Europeans were wearing kimono or adapting them into tea gowns, japanese were pairing lacy Edwardian blouses with skirt hakama and little button up boots. haori jackets with bowler hats and European style lapels. if steampunk was any good as an aesthetic it would steal wholesale from the copious records we have in both graphic arts and photography of how people were dressing in this milieu.
«The botany professor,» from Kkokei Shimbun, October 20, 1908. she’s wearing a kimono blouse or haori, edwardian skirt or hakama, gibson girl bouffant, a lacy high-collar blouse with cravat and brooch, and a pocket watch with chain
1910-1930 (Taishō era, right after Meiji, which I should have included in my OP) men’s haori with western lapels
I have a love for both kimonos and bustle dresses, so I love seeing how the two fashions influenced each other over this period. And thanks to Pinterest, I have pictures!
Victorian tea gown that clearly started as a kimono. It still has the long furisode sleeves, but now they’re gathered at the shoulder and turned around so that the long open side is facing the front instead of the back. Similarly the back is taken in with curved seams to fit the torso and pleated below that for the skirt.
Woodblock of a woman in a a bustle dress made with colorful patterned fabrics and examples of how a woman could style her hair with it.
More prints to showcase hairstyles, two women wearing western wear and two women wearing kimonos.
This next one’s modern, but it involves hoopskirts so I’ll add it in because it makes me so happy. There’s been different styles of wedding fashion that take kimonos and give them a more modern look. Often this involves taking a kimono and then cutting and resewing it into a new dress. Very pretty, but it can’t ever be worn like a traditional kimono again. But now there’s another trend where the bride wears a hoopskirt with a white skirt, then you take the kimono and drape it on. The back of the kimono covers the front of the dress, the long sleeves fall across the sides or the back, and you still wear an obi with it. The result is pretty and the kimono itself doesn’t have to be altered at all.
And because you mentioned steampunk, I have to add in these two:
Personally I’m a big fan of Taisho Meisen kimono, which are what happen when the Japanese textile industry abruptly gets access to aniline dyes, new spinning and weaving technology, and the concept of Art Deco:
I love desire paths. There’s something so wonderous about seeing an echo of humanity. Depending on it’s location, a desire path can mean so many different things.
In a city, like the pic above, they represent rebellion, and efficiency. The messiness of humanity. We like to imagine we’re oh so logical and neat so we design our cities to be logical and neat an then real humans literally trample on that idea. The ego required to think you can design something perfect that checks every box. Life is all about compromise and patching stuff when some new problem arises. Though people have certainly tried! Ohio state univeristy let students carve their desire paths, and then paved them over. It looks pretty artsy.
Some people will try to discourage desire paths, but this is almost always going to fail.
Eventually, people just have to accept them. Humans are too dang stubborn.
Certain desire paths are just adorable. A 0.5 second time saver. You just can’t design for maximum efficiency, humans will always find shortcuts!
Though on occasion a desire path can actually be the least efficient way…especially if you’re superstitious.
In a wilder area, such as below, they show us the curiosity of humans. A desire path somewhere natural often tells you there’s something interesting just ahead. (Though remember some ecosystems are fragile and will suffer if trampled! Stick to paths in these sorts of areas)
And how about desire stairs? I always think these look so cool. We get see humans determination to climb, to traverse every kind of terrain.
And for something really crazy…a desire path used for centuries will create a ‘holloway’
All of these pics are off the Desirepath subreddit, check them out for more examples! And many thanks to the users who submitted these photos.
If giraffes were predators they would look both hilarious and terrifying while sneaking up on their prey
I’m afraid you’ve missed the predatory giraffes by about 66 million years mate.
These guys are Azhdarchid pterosaurs, and they were some of the strangest reptiles to ever exist. They were perfectly capable of flight, but their physiology suggests that they may have spent a significant portion of their lives hunting on the ground.
The largest of them could reach over 5 metres tall while standing, and had a 10-metre wingspan. They varied greatly in body type, from the tall, spindly forms of Quetzalcoatlus and Arambourgiania (images 4 and 1-2 respectively) to the heavy brute strength of Hatzegopteryz, a species that may have used its head to bludgeon its prey (images 2 and 3).
There has never been another flying animal before or since to have reached such incredible sizes, nor any predator so intimidatingly tall. Well, not any that we know of yet.
All of these illustrations are by Mark Witton, a palaeontologist and artist who specialises in pterosaurs. This is his blog about palaeontology and the science of reconstructing extinct species. You can find out more about each of these images here, here and here.
(Oh, and by the way … these are NOT dinosaurs)
What the hell these are so intimidating, why aren’t these in any dinosaur movies
Just imagine it …
The protagonists and a few disposable minor characters are walking carefully through a forest at night, covered by a thick fog. They know there are dinosaurs everywhere, but they can’t see more than three metres in front of their own faces.
Eventually they stop near a small cluster of trees to rest. As they sit there, exhausted, one of the trees begins to move. Everyone freezes, terrified. They have no idea what this thing is.
Then a massive beak slams down, longer than a person is tall, and plucks one of the minor characters off his feet and into the air.
The small group erupts into movement, frantically running away from whatever those things are. There’s two of them now, and as the fog begins to clear the group are able to make out more of their shape. They are huge, with long, spindly necks topped with a massive, daggerlike head. The long legs that they once mistook for trees have an almost mechanical movement as the giant creatures stalk towards them. And then comes the next terrible surprise.
These things can run.
It’s a short film.
How could those things possibly fly? Could they take off from the ground or did they need a cliff like bats do?
(The pterosaur in the video I linked isn’t an azhdarchid, but it gets the general picture across)
because it wasn’t terrifying enough already….
How does something that big have hollow bones though? Wouldn’t they break under the pressure of pole vaulting themselves?
Basically, azhdarchid bones aren’t just “hollow”. They’re actually full of an incredibly complex network of spongy strands of bone that functions almost like scaffolding to support the bones and make them a lot stronger than they would initially appear. A lot of dinosaurs, including very large ones, had this same sort of bone structure as well.
It’s a delicate balance between being light enough to fly and strong enough to take off and staying in the air, but they certainly weren’t skinny, lightweight pushovers like they’re often portrayed.
Ah, they’re probably coming up next! I don’t recognise the performance off the top of my head, but doing ballet is HELLISHLY INTENSE and doing it without your muscles througly warmed up is just asking for injured tendrons. In between scenes the dancers literally can’t sit still for too long or their muscles will cool down, or worse, cramp up, and if they’re not changing costumes they’re usually stretching, vigorously massaging their legs and, like here, bouncing around to the tune.
So this is a perfectly natural ballerina behavior. They’re just keeping warm and bonding. 👍
obsessed with characters being saved against their will. being knocked unconscious and carried away from a danger they won’t stop trying to fight. being shoved through a portal somewhere far away and safe right before it closes. trying to self-sacrifice only to have the exact person they’re trying to save swap their places at the last second. getting the only cure to the disease or curse bc the person administering it loves them too much to give it to anyone else, including themselves. being thrown to safety right as they had accepted dying. someone else they thought had gotten to safety running back to drag them out of danger. it’s so fucking tasty
