costumes
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Skink Magazine: The Victorian BDSM Catalogue Collection #6
And so we return to some gimp masks courtesy of everyone’s favourite BDSM Catalogue Skink! On a more serious note, as 2023 yawns its last wheezy breath we would like to thank all of our members, friends, staff, collaborators, donors, followers, likers, sharers, supporters, blog readers (especially our blog readers–you guys rock!), those who’ve been…
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The Festival of Grime Collection #4
We return to the festival which celebrates northern pride, grit and determination. This time we are archiving photographs of the carnival floats which took a huge amount of time to construct and involved numerous people in the communities coming together. These photographs were taken in and around the Lancashire towns circa 1880 several days before…
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The Chess People of Bishops’ Island Collection #3
Today we would like to share an assortment of photographs of the islanders in their habitat. We particularly like the gentleman wearing knight’s armour sitting at a table, gazing at a strange chess set and pieces. According to some notes written by the team who visited the island, he is the highest rank of the…
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Victorian Parents Using Their Children for Pranks Collection #2
Among the huge amount of photographs we have received this month, we have been lucky enough to find another rare example of Victorian parents using their children for pranks. This time the subject was toddlers. Our expert in this particular area tells us that back in the early to mid-nineteenth century, families tended to be…
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Dada Before Dada in Victorian Soho, London Collection #1
We’re thoroughly ashamed to have taken so long to digitally archive this art movement. Our research shows that this unconventional collective was a precursor to Dadaism. Its name was Inhumanism with a manifesto to boot. This collective was also born in Soho, London. The same place would see a postwar boom in bohemian art, theatre…
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The Chess People of Bishops’ Island Collection #2
Today we return to Bishops’ Island. You can see from these photographs that some members of the tribe are quite short (photographs #4 and #7). The summer of 1892 researchers first wondered if they were children as most islanders wore masks and helmets so weren’t immediately recognisable. However, as the visit went on, they met…
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The Most Popular Children’s Toy in 1899 Collection #2
Today we archive more ‘knights on hogback’. We discussed in the last post how this phenomenon became the hobby of the parents. If you were to visit rural communities in the north on any given Sunday, you would find children bashing each other and adults doing the same but much more vehemently. Before long the…
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Godbert Lawley and the Original Victorian B-movie Collection #4
We return to the fascinating universe of Godbert Lawley’s B-movies. This time we have included stills from what we believe to be the first zombie movie ever made. It’s called The Workhouse Dead and it played for 6 consecutive years every Halloween to an audience of around fifty viewers in a tent. These viewers would…
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The Cat Ladies of Camberwell Collection #2
Dear followers, After yesterday’s meltdown, we have possibly found a solution to our tech problems. We will keep trialing it to see if it is viable. We definitely don’t want to scrap archiving the stories and images here. Many thanks and we hope you enjoy the eccentric ladies in these photographs. Hopefully this blog will…
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The Cat Ladies of Camberwell Collection #1
The last several posts have predominantly focused on the occult. We have decided on a temporary pause to cheer the place up and what better way to do it than photographs of cats and their parents. Specifically these are adorable Sphynx cats which were first bred in Canada and first recorded in England in the…
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