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chitoryu12 posted:I'd probably argue that the race of the victims in the Zoot Suit Riots was secretly the predominant factor and "They're wasting fabric!" was an excuse to downplay the racism. From what I can remember, wearing a zoot suit basically meant you were flashing your wealth. It was commonly worn by criminals. It's basically like criminals who wear a lot of jewellery and have expensive cars. so basically yes attacks on them were basically based on the same things that get people ranting about "urban youth" and "thugs" these days, because they have the audacity to flash wealth while not being white
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Dec 5, 2016 18:38
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 Those are pretty terrible fits and easily deserve at least a punching.
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Dec 5, 2016 19:01
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mobby_6kl posted:
Excessively baggy clothes has gone in and out of style throughout history, despite the racist tendency to rag on "ghetto saggy jeans" today.  Don John of Austria in 1572.  The boy in this portrait from 1665 is wearing petticoat breeches. That's not a skirt, just excessively wide-legged shorts. Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary in 1661 of such ridiculous clothes: quote:And among other things, met with Mr. Townsend, who told of his mistake the other day to put both his legs through one of his Knees of his breeches, and so went all day. In more recent history, "Oxford bags" were very baggy pants popular with Oxford students from the 1920s to the 1950s, supposedly due to a ban on kickerbocker pants being gotten around by wearing them under baggy trousers. They made a resurgence in the 1970s among fans of Northern Soul music.  Zoot suits are infamous in the US primarily because a lot of non-white people got the poo poo beaten out of them for wearing them. You may notice that any time baggy clothes have been mocked, there's usually a black or Hispanic guy in the picture.
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Dec 5, 2016 19:12
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Fellow in the front middle feels Oxford bags are a bit too deviant for his liking, but does not want to be left out, so has compromised by wearing his cricket whites.
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Dec 5, 2016 20:27
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chitoryu12 posted:
These are the trousers that defeated the Turkish fleet at Lepanto.  Fun fact about the Battle of Lepanto: it wasn't primarily disastrous for the Ottomans because they'd lost so many ships, because those could be replaced (and were replaced) fairly readily; it was mainly a disaster because they lost so many of their best sailors and marines with those ships.
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Dec 6, 2016 02:29
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If clothing and socioeconomics interests you read the chapter (actually read the whole book because it's incredible) on clothing in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. If you didn't know it was about 1930s American sharecroppers it could almost be centuries older. The sanctity of a pair of overalls or whatever floursack one managed to coerce into a shirt is unbelievable. And Agee writes it so well you'll be crying reading about a goddamn hat
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Dec 6, 2016 03:00
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I feel dumb for just now realizing that all those ridiculous clothing styles were worn by the nobility in centuries past because the fabric itself was so valuable that just wearing excess fabric was a social signifier that you were rich, and anyone with money to spare copied that style as best they could afford. I don't know why I never quite figured that one out on my own.
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Dec 6, 2016 03:54
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Sucrose posted:I feel dumb for just now realizing that all those ridiculous clothing styles were worn by the nobility in centuries past because the fabric itself was so valuable that just wearing excess fabric was a social signifier that you were rich, and anyone with money to spare copied that style as best they could afford. I don't know why I never quite figured that one out on my own. Totally different frames of reference are hard to wrap your head around. It's easy to get the logic and conclusions, but only if you understand the underlying assumptions.
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Dec 6, 2016 04:21
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Wheat Loaf posted:These are the trousers that defeated the Turkish fleet at Lepanto. Another fun fact: if you're Catholic and observe the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, then you're liturgically commemorating the Christian victory at the Battle of Lepanto, as the feast was instituted by the Pope to celebrate just that. The only trace left of it in the prayer texts of the day is that in the intercessions God is asked to “spare the peoples of war“, though. When you see a church titled “Our Lady of Victory“ (there's one in NYC, for example), then it still preserves the original name of the feast. Members of those noble families who were involved at the battle come together at the Vatican each year to celebrate “their“ victory as well.
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Dec 6, 2016 08:29
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Slime posted:From what I can remember, wearing a zoot suit basically meant you were flashing your wealth. It was commonly worn by criminals. It's basically like criminals who wear a lot of jewellery and have expensive cars. It was less "flashing your wealth" and more "flaunting rationing". Those are two related but distinct concepts. It just so happens that latinos working in the garment industry were more able to skirt cloth rationing because they were forced and limited to working in that industry. Then white people freaked out and beat them. Same old story.
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Dec 6, 2016 08:44
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I'm still working my way through the thread (I got sidetracked with the insanely intriguing bicarmel mind) but I got to the discussion of ancient Chinese and I'm wondering: is there a reason other than cultural dominance that English is the most widely spoken second language in the world other than that? I know Spanish and other latin based languages have abreviations and stuff so it's not like you need to spell the whole word right to get the point across. But do Mandarin and Japanese have similar abreviations or leway for spelling, and is that one of the reasons learning the characters is viewed as more difficult?
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Dec 6, 2016 08:47
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Probably not, imo the popularity of a language is very much driven by economics, but the modern era has it's quirks. The relative simplicity of English could also be a factor, as well as it's cultural prominence as the language of celebrities. IDK about shortcuts for the spoken language but Japanese has the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries for those who struggle with the venerable clusterfuck that is Kanji. This language nerd explains things better than I can.
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Dec 6, 2016 10:05
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chitoryu12 posted:
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Dec 6, 2016 10:30
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chitoryu12 posted:
There's a reason those look like that, and it's even more complex than conspicuous consumption. When Louis XIV took the reins of government, France was an economic mess. They had the resources, and millions of people who needed to be put to work. Working with his top finance minister Colbert, Louis came up with the program of putting people to work making fabric for clothes. But not just any clothes. No, these were to be extravagant clothes that ate miles of fabric in their construction, so that more fabric would be needed to make them, and soon the cycle would feed itself. I've made petticoat britches, and they take some 100 yards of ribbon. French court fashions took off across Europe, and pretty soon they were publishing 'seasonal' pictures of the latest fashions, along with sending fully-dressed fashion dolls out so that people knew what they had to order. Up until this time, the concept of seasonal fashions didn't exist; you wore warmer clothes in winter, cooler in summer. Now you needed specific styles and ensembles for spring, fall, etc. Naturally the French was considered the best stuff, because the constant production had refined and upgraded the quality of the cloth. Shops with the latest fashions sprung up in Paris, and even if you couldn't afford a new suit, you could get the latest tie, or hat, or ribbons for your shoes. Cresting these fashions and accessories required a huge workforce, so tailors' and seamstresses' work was in high demand. Men did the best work, but there were plenty of women designers too. Women made underskirts, kids' clothes, shorts, smocks, camisoles. Since this was their work and not men's, they petitioned Louis for the right to form their own guild, separate from the tailors. This was granted, despite the outcry from some men that this would be the downfall of women, men and society in general. Paris has been Ground Zero for fashion ever since.
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Dec 6, 2016 10:47
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System Metternich posted:When you see a church titled “Our Lady of Victory“ (there's one in NYC, for example), then it still preserves the original name of the feast.
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Dec 6, 2016 10:49
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HEY GAL posted:Do you see those little eyelets in his jacket, all in a row at the waist? You hold your pants up by lacing or hooking them to your jacket and his pants aren't attached. So for the period this is also deliberately disheveled. The wild mess of ribbons at the wait represent those ties. It's just like how the ribbon bow at the center front of a bra represents the place where girls tied in their busks for their corsets.
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Dec 6, 2016 10:49
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Khazar-khum posted:The wild mess of ribbons at the wait represent those ties. It's just like how the ribbon bow at the center front of a bra represents the place where girls tied in their busks for their corsets. Thirty years earlier having the laces/ribbons that held your pants up was also popular,  (1630s) but this isn't that. https://thepragmaticcostumer.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/unique-embellishments-and-passementerie-through-the-centuries-17th-century-swag/
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Dec 6, 2016 11:06
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HEY GAL posted:They do not; that's ribbon trim/ribbon loop trim. It's also on his pants, hat, sleeves, and cloak. And considering the size of those eyelets his pants are probably kept up with little hooks anyway. Yes, it is trim. But it's a representation of the little bows that used to hold pants up. It's just like how the row of buttons on a man's suit sleeve is a representation of when those buttons were used to hold the cuff in place. They're vestigial.
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Dec 6, 2016 11:12
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HEY GAL posted:not necessarily, Maria Vom Siege in vienna is about the Battle of White Mountain Huh, you're right. It's a Coptic church now anyway, and I doubt that they bothered with retaining the old name and keeping alive the memory of the Thirty Years War 
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Dec 6, 2016 12:00
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System Metternich posted:Huh, you're right. It's a Coptic church now anyway, and I doubt that they bothered with retaining the old name and keeping alive the memory of the Thirty Years War HEY GUNS has a new favorite as of 12:15 on Dec 6, 2016 |
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Dec 6, 2016 12:05
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The Sausages posted:Probably not, imo the popularity of a language is very much driven by economics, but the modern era has it's quirks. The relative simplicity of English could also be a factor, as well as it's cultural prominence as the language of celebrities. This is sort of true and sort of not. English is a loving horror show of a language in most respects - its grammar is wildly inconsistent and its spelling in many cases has almost nothing to do with how a word sounds. Loads of weird stuff that is the result of a few hundred years of mushing a Germanic language together with Old French (think of stuff like pork/pig or beef/cow- the equivalent in Spanish is "cerdo" and "vaca/carne de vaca" which covers both meat and animal, or literally "meat of cow" in the second example) and then attempting to Latinise the grammar, and tons of loan words from all over the globe thanks to empire. It also completely lacks features like gender and case marking - about the only place it still exists is in pronouns. The theory I've heard though is that English is relatively simple to make yourself understood in even if you don't speak it well. Basically English is simplistic but complicated (i.e. there's not much to it, but what there is has tons of exceptions and "well, actually" type rules) whereas many other languages are simple but complex (they're consistent once you know the rules, but the rules take more time to learn properly). Living Image has a new favorite as of 12:23 on Dec 6, 2016 |
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Dec 6, 2016 12:21
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Eh, you're exaggerating a bit. Not having case or dozens of conjugations, etc, is pretty simple. About 85% of English words have regular pronunciation. And basic English grammar isn't that complex. MoreoverCorrode posted:(think of stuff like pork/pig or beef/cow- the equivalent in Spanish is "cerdo" and "vaca/carne de vaca" which covers both meat and animal, or literally "meat of cow" in the second example) I don't think these are great examples because the first is very ambiguous and Spanish violates the example of the second. What's "tree" and "wood", for instance? Aesop Poprock posted:But do Mandarin and Japanese have similar abreviations or leway for spelling, and is that one of the reasons learning the characters is viewed as more difficult? I don't know about Japanese, but Chinese has tons of abbreviations, formed by not using all the characters in the word. For instance, the capital of 台灣 (Taiwan) is 台北 (Taipei) - you can see it borrows the 台 to roughly mean "north Taiwan city". Just outside 台北 is 新北 (Xinbei), short for 新台北 (Xintaibei), meaning New Taipei. The p/b thing is due to fun with Romanisation, not a typo. This doesn't make learning characters any different, obviously, but it can make learning words harder at first and then easier as you get used to it, speaking from experience. There are also places in Taiwan called 台南 Tainan, 台中 Taichung, 台東 Taidong and 台西 Taixi - South Taiwan, Central Taiwan, East Taiwan, and West Taiwan. Speaking of Romanisation, the Engish letters c, q and x turn up fairly commonly because they're essentially disposable in English - c is pronounced /k/ or /s/, qu /kw/, and x /ks/. So different languages use them for very different things. In isiZulu they're clicks.
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Dec 6, 2016 13:51
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Safety Biscuits posted:Eh, you're exaggerating a bit. Not having case or dozens of conjugations, etc, is pretty simple. About 85% of English words have regular pronunciation. And basic English grammar isn't that complex. Moreover I just picked stuff off the top of my head, I'm in no way a comparative linguist - happy to be wrong. It's just the theory I've heard described, I don't make any claim to how accurate it is 
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Dec 6, 2016 14:21
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Corrode posted:It also completely lacks features like gender That seems like a major point for English, though.
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Dec 6, 2016 15:13
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Byzantine posted:That seems like a major point for English, though. It absolutely is. Spanish at least has a mostly-reliable -o and -a noun ending cue, but with e.g. German or French I'm at risk of of offending a drat stove if I use the wrong pronoun for the gender with which it identifies. Stoves do not have genitals, people, there is no reason for this poo poo.
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Dec 6, 2016 15:27
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Corrode posted:This is sort of true and sort of not. English is a loving horror show of a language in most respects - its grammar is wildly inconsistent and its spelling in many cases has almost nothing to do with how a word sounds. Loads of weird stuff that is the result of a few hundred years of mushing a Germanic language together with Old French (think of stuff like pork/pig or beef/cow- the equivalent in Spanish is "cerdo" and "vaca/carne de vaca" which covers both meat and animal, or literally "meat of cow" in the second example) and then attempting to Latinise the grammar, and tons of loan words from all over the globe thanks to empire. It also completely lacks features like gender and case marking - about the only place it still exists is in pronouns. The theory I've heard though is that English is relatively simple to make yourself understood in even if you don't speak it well. Basically English is simplistic but complicated (i.e. there's not much to it, but what there is has tons of exceptions and "well, actually" type rules) whereas many other languages are simple but complex (they're consistent once you know the rules, but the rules take more time to learn properly). English is extremely easy to pick up on a basic functional level because all you need is the present tense and there's no declension bullshit or anything to worry about (compare to German), however it's really hard to get the same level of proficiency as a native speaker because it seems to be much less well-defined in its nuances than, again, German for example.
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Dec 6, 2016 15:37
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I once said to a german lad "du bist einen shlampa" (whore too dirty to be acceptable in legal brothels) and he got all pissy and said "but shlampa is a feminine word!!!" "I know, that was the point" then followed half an hour of this kid giving a grammar lecture while all the British kids pissed themselves laughing.
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Dec 6, 2016 15:39
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Wow, you sure owned him with your terrible grammar?  (It would be "ein" instead of "einen" when you want to make it masculine. It's "Schlampe", not "shlampa", and it basically means "slut" and has nothing to do with legal brothels. Finally "ein Schlampe" sounds really close to "ein Schlamper" anyway, which is a (male) slob and nothing more.) e: now I remember the old wordplay "Duschlampe/Du Schlampe", which can both mean "shower light" and "you slut!"
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Dec 6, 2016 15:51
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Sucrose posted:I feel dumb for just now realizing that all those ridiculous clothing styles were worn by the nobility in centuries past because the fabric itself was so valuable that just wearing excess fabric was a social signifier that you were rich, and anyone with money to spare copied that style as best they could afford. I don't know why I never quite figured that one out on my own. For a centuries, clothing was such a signifier of your wealth and status that sumptuary laws were put in place to prevent people from trying to dress "above their station" and get mistaken for the real people in charge. A big part of this in Europe was the rise of a middle class such as wealthy merchants, which threatened the established power of royalty. Things like ribbons, low necklines, fur, and other aspects of upper class clothes started being restricted to people in certain positions. The turn of the 19th century was a huge change for fashion, as the early facets of the Industrial Revolution began to make clothing less expensive. It would still take until the next century before most people started owning multiple complete outfits, but fashion was starting to become accessible to the common European and American. Along with the French Revolution making the extravagant clothing of the aristocrats something you didn't really want to be caught wearing, this finally marked the end of using clothing to signify your position in society. And it didn't just go one way. The stigma against someone dressing "too rich" also meant there was a stigma against the wealthy and royal trying to dress like commoners. I mentioned this before, but Marie Antoinette caused a scandal in her youth when she got so tired of the complex and heavy royal court clothing that she ran off to a private villa with her friends to dress in clothing more similar to that of the French citizens. It was seen as improper and embarrassing, especially when she had a portrait painted of her wearing those clothes. But when clothes stopped being the way you identified people's status, it also meant that kings and queens could dress basically however they wanted. King Edward VII here looks less like one of the most powerful monarchs on Earth at the time and more like your cheerful grandpa. 
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Dec 6, 2016 16:04
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chitoryu12 posted:
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Dec 6, 2016 16:29
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Alhazred posted:What caused the biggest resentment was that it was seen as really loving tonedeaf to cosplay as a poor peasant while the real peasants were starving.  Is this really what dirt-poor pre-Revolutionary peasants looked like? Pretty fancy schmancy if you ask me, maybe they should have just sucked it up and eaten cake like she suggested.
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Dec 6, 2016 17:00
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chitoryu12 posted:King Edward VII here looks less like one of the most powerful monarchs on Earth at the time and more like your cheerful grandpa. Sure, that's what Edward VII effectively was, more or less; Europe's jolly uncle. In contrast to his mother, he got on very well with William Gladstone, who used him to entertain visiting heads of state when the Queen was feeling disagreeable.One story about the royal family and fashion trends I enjoy is that it was standard amongst the British upper classes for men to wear top hats in the early 20th century (most MPs wore them, for instance, even those who weren't in the aristocracy - Keir Hardie, who was the first leader of the Labour Party and one of its first MPs, caused a bit of controversy by wearing a flat cloth cap when he attended meetings in parliament) until the reign of George V, who preferred flat hats, and when he started wearing them everyone copied him. George V also liked to wear trousers with creases down the sides rather than the front and back (which I understand stemmed from his navy career), although for whatever these didn't catch on. 
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Dec 6, 2016 17:06
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Alhazred posted:What caused the biggest resentment was that it was seen as really loving tonedeaf to cosplay as a poor peasant while the real peasants were starving. The peasants hated her, but it also caused a lot of flurry among her own court as well because she was seen as degrading herself and her position by publicizing that she dressed below her station. Wheat Loaf posted:Sure, that's what Edward VII effectively was, more or less; Europe's jolly uncle. Edward was recorded as getting along with pretty much every European monarch (almost all of whom were related to him) except for one particular nephew: Kaiser Wilhelm II.
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Dec 6, 2016 17:36
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Another fun fact about George V is that he was an avid stamp collector and was president of the official stamp collecting society when he was Duke of York; he once received a telephone call from a friend who remarked, "Did you hear some damned fool has just paid £1,500 for a single stamp?" and he's meant to have angrily replied, "I am that damned fool."
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Dec 6, 2016 17:40
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The most bizarre fashion trend that the royals inspired were probably the Alexandra limp. Alexandra of Denmark suffered rheumatic fever which gave her a pronounced limp, and pretty soon every fashionable woman in Britain started to limp too.
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Dec 6, 2016 17:40
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System Metternich posted:Wow, you sure owned him with your terrible grammar? and this right here is in my opinion the reason English is used as a global language. Not having masculine/feminine/neutral frees us to play with language. We don't give a flying fig if a non-English speaker gets a word or the grammar wrong, it's the spirit of the thing. Or in the case of swearing just making up words or joining two completely unrelated words together is perfectly acceptable*. You knew what I meant, he knew what I meant, my friends knew what I meant, no dull fun sucking lecture was needed. *examples: You chuffing hoopwoggle!!. Oh go boil your bananas. Snaff off.
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Dec 6, 2016 18:02
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learnincurve posted:and this right here is in my opinion the reason English is used as a global language. Not having masculine/feminine/neutral frees us to play with language. We don't give a flying fig if a non-English speaker gets a word or the grammar wrong, it's the spirit of the thing. Or in the case of swearing just making up words or joining two completely unrelated words together is perfectly acceptable*. You knew what I meant, he knew what I meant, my friends knew what I meant, no dull fun sucking lecture was needed. For all of its myriad irregularities and peculiarities, if you were pitching me languages to learn in the abstract, and you explained to me that English was an alphabet based language without noun declensions or explicit gendering, I'd be sold immediately.
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Dec 6, 2016 18:26
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learnincurve posted:and this right here is in my opinion the reason English is used as a global language. Not having masculine/feminine/neutral frees us to play with language. We don't give a flying fig if a non-English speaker gets a word or the grammar wrong, it's the spirit of the thing. Or in the case of swearing just making up words or joining two completely unrelated words together is perfectly acceptable*. You knew what I meant, he knew what I meant, my friends knew what I meant, no dull fun sucking lecture was needed. English is a global language because of the superiority of English steam ships and English Maxim guns. Not English grammar.
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Dec 6, 2016 18:36
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Some other curious facts about some of the crowned head aof Europe in the early 20th century: King Frederick VIII of Denmark suddenly took ill and died when he was out for a walk incognito in Hamburg and the first his family heard of it was when they got a call from the German police saying they had a body in the morgue and thought it might be their king; and King Alexander of Greece died of a monkey bite after he tried to fight them off after they attacked his favourite dog.
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Dec 6, 2016 18:53
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I heard somewhere that the English language, as a lingua franca in Europe at least, owes a lot to the King James Bible. Not sure how true that is though.
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