Has it really been... 50 months since I posted on this blog? It has.
I look back on the photos from the last post and there's a certain amount of dismay - those six months in England were the last departing glimmers of a person who I once was, and of a way of life I loved.
(As a side note, the last several years have been pretty full of personal tragedy, movement, change, and yes thankfully also growth.)
Gentle readers, whoever you are, let me tell you that I came here to explain why I'm quitting costuming events, for at least a time. Not because I want to - I know myself well enough to know that my draw to costuming is both from the beautiful images created, and the pleasure of experiencing how people in generations past would have felt, moved, lived. I would love to continue going to costume events to learn more about their history, about how the garments were actually constructed, about how they were worn. But that's not what these events tend to be anymore, and it's with increasing frustration that I've seen the parts I enjoy dwindle down to nothing. But let me explain the frog boil...
A brief history of online costuming
I'll start back in the day - once upon a time there was a mailing list called h-costume - for "historic costume" or hcost for short, which was run on a Linux mailman server by an early nerdy type in the SCA. Regardless of the original intent, the list attracted a large number and wide-ranging variety of folks from all around the costume interest: we had folks just starting out, professional and academic researchers and curators, theatrical and film costumers, Rennies, Larpers, art historians, spinners, weavers, knitters, embroiderers, and everything in between. The list is still around, and as far as I can tell the archives are hosted somewhere now and pretty epic, but regrettably the list died down a lot around 2014 (partly due to a couple of long-lived trolls who took such delight in shouting down people sharing academic resources for "copyright theft").
A lovely gent on the old hcost list would post updates from time to time on his period embroidery projects, and it inspired others to write longer form posts about their sewing and costume creations. This was back in the early 2000s, when Livejournal was a huge thing - an early social network and one of the gold standards for a content platform. I thought, "Why shouldn't we have something like a Livejournal community for costumes?" and thus DressDiaries was born. It was slow at first, and I spent a lot of time trawling through the "friends list" of folks who'd already joined, finding people's everyday updates on their projects, and asking them to post. In bits and bobs, people began to contribute, and share, and talk about sharing, and bring friends. Those friends brought other friends.
Eventually, we had a community, which led to the need for rules. And as I developed the rules, I realized that one of the things I wanted to avoid was the commercial junk posts that cluttered up other sewing forums - I wasn't here to be advertised to, I was here to make human connections. And we did that, and then some. There were meetups. There were parties, there were fitting help days exchanged. We invaded Costume College and Costume Con and met up at Renaissance Faires and other places.
All that went on merrily for a number of years, despite stability issues on the platform-side, until some time in 2007 when the free lunch ran out... Russia bought Livejournal as a way to shut down its political critics, and the rest is history. By 2009, Livejournal had begun it's first major decline.
All the while I'd been fending off one after another approach by advertisers - It turns out, when you have a community of 3000 passionate costumers, that counts as what we'd now call in internet-marketing-terms, an "audience". I made one of the first exceptions for a well-known costumer who, after spending months constructing a dress, decided to sell the result on eBay. For the first time in the history of online social costuming, someone was making money. (And quite a bit if I recall - it was a very successful auction.) It was the start of the end, though we didn't quite know it yet.
As readership declined on LJ, many people moved on to other platforms and the majority of people moved to Facebook, which, alas, lacked a lot of the community features that made DD great, or even in some cases possible. At that point I was desperately struggling to make ends meet, and shortly after that I joined a startup, and let me tell you, I had zero time to spend rebuilding my carefully-curated community on a platform famous for changing beloved features without warning, and making a profit selling people's personal details. There was an abortive attempt at a DD clone on Dreamwidth, an LJ-clone platform which struggles on in poorly-named obscurity.
By this time, a number of small for-profit costuming sites had started up, and I'd even contributed to them from time to time. Hustle, you know? The economy had tanked and I needed whatever funds I could scrounge, even if I was writing full time for a startup.
So I let it go, instead following blogs and Tumblrs about costuming from Google Reader, so I could get a bit of vicarious costume content even if I wasn't able to participate (due to working my ass off). A few brave souls started groups similar in structure on FB anyway, and have met with mixed success. One notable one, very similar in guidelines to the old DD is Elizabethan Costuming, which far FAR exceeds DD's old bounds, with greater focus and much wider-ranging results.
Oh, and, um, Google Reader... yeah about that. And Tumblr? Yeah... This post is as much about the death of "free ride" platforms and technology as it is about my disenchantment with the costuming "community".
No free lunch
One of the things about "free ride" software, is that if you're not paying for it, then that makes you the "product" and someone else is paying for you. Your eyeballs are reading a thing and somewhere on that page, you're going to see an advertisement. (Unless you're like me and a small but vocal group of AdBlocker proponents, but I digress.) It's really only a matter of time until someone comes for Blogger, you know, but until then here I write.
Facebook has done a few things: it's given everyone the firehose of content with some pretty shit features around privacy, consistency, and chronological order, it's made everyone much more aware of how things look and how others covet it, and... it's normalized everyone having a "side hustle". Suddenly there weren't two businesses, there were four. Then there were eight. Then they cabal and suddenly it's like there's nothing costume-related that exists out in the wild without a hashtag social media play-along component.
Heathers
I attended Costume College in 2016 and that's when I really started to feel it - in the six months I'd been gone, I'd been living in the "past" world in England, where Instagram/Facebook marketing hadn't become the cancer that it has now. When I returned, I suddenly found that it wasn't good enough to make a pretty dress using period materials, technique, style, accessories - now you had to have a group, a clique. There had always been some close friend groups who formed... lets be honest, pretty nasty cliques at costuming events. But now? Boy oh boy were there groups.Very exclusive! Where did they all come from? Why hadn't I heard of them? How could I get to be part of one of them? Social media, apparently?
I tried, briefly, while also holding down a(nother) startup job, to follow along - but I simply don't have the hours in the day to work, sleep, cook and eat food, do laundry, and also keep up with the volume of social media.
It turns out, the groups were nearly 100% formed on social media "influencer" feeds. And what makes it all the worse for me, having dodged over-commercializing my hobby all of those years, is that all of these influencers are selling something.
It started with the groups and cliques, and then the cliques doubled down forming a culture in which to have status, to participate, to keep your friends, you had to consume and cross-promote. It felt a little too... Heathers. Consume podcasts, read the right blogs, buy everyone's books, buy jewelry, buy shoes, buy hair products, buy styling services, buy the "right" fabric - regardless of if you found them either valuable or relevant.
Wants and Needs
I want a human connection, and I want to share the things I make. But I don't want it to be part of how a business manipulates me into buying more "stuff" even if this stuff is historical and small-business. How many pairs of Victorian boots does one person need? How many Georgian collet necklaces? How many tubes of "reproduction" WW2 colored lipstick? How many jars of homemade 19th century hair oil?
How many do you have to buy in order to be included in the community these days? It's never enough to have bought one - if your goal is to be seen by your friends, does this mean that now it must be mediated by a third party's hashtag campaign? There will always be more things for you to buy.
The commercial parasite has consumed the host. "Late-stage Capitalism" as in "late-stage cancer", indeed.
I'll be costuming for my own events and to my own taste for the forseeable future.
