The Tudor Revolution

Today I wanted to share my recent trip to the Denver Art Museum to look at all the beautiful vintage fashion in their From Paris to Hollywood exhibit which will be up until July, 18th, 2020. As a small aside, the museum did give me permission to record while I was in the exhibit, but asks me to remind everyone that I am not associated with the Denver Art Museum in any way. I'm just a lover of historical fashions and all of my views expressed here are my own. This is not sponsored content. I have also done my best not to include anyone else in my footage to respect their privacy. This exhibit is framed to narrate the love story between Veronique and Gregory Peck using fashion, family photos, letters, etc. The exhibit starts in the 1950s when they met in Paris while Gregory was traveling for the film Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn. As a fun aside, Roman Holiday is one of my favorite films. The exhibit continues on showing items from the 1950's through the late 1980s and r...

  Welcome back to my follow up project about keeping your hair clean in the middle ages. My research for this project was based in trying to dig deeper into medieval hair care. I was pointed to a book called The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine , translated by Monica H Green through a Society for Creative Anachronism web conference and set off to reading. This is a popular medieval treatise on for women's health, and includes a range of medical advice from cosmetics to assistance with child birth. Obviously I can't promise that all of this information dating back the the 11th or 12th century is still thought to be sound, but it is fascinating. While reading through the section on women's cosmetics I found some hair care recipes and had to pause. Were they asking me to put powder in my hair to make it smell good? This sounded suspiciously like a home made dry shampoo I had used on and off at camping events and during the pand...

Today I have a vlog for you that I filmed in August and September of 2020. Pandemic Chic for the last year and change has included sweatpants, fewer showers, and the messy up-do. This had me passively wondering about how 16th century people handled hygiene more. One one likes being stinky after all, but they did not believe it was necessarily healthy to shower as often as we do in the United States in 2020. Please note I am not going to perpetuate the myth about medieval people being dirty and unclean, it was just a different time period with different methods. Around this time I started reading How to be a Tudo r by Ruth Goodman. When the book was published in 2015 I added it to my to be read pile immediately because I respect her work as a historian and in living history. Like many, the pandemic has helped me put a dent in my "to be read" pile. She has a section where she discusses the clothing and the hygiene of the Tudor period and I became inspired. One of the major wa...