Pick up the fall issue of any fashion magazine and you’ll see photos and screaming headlines that the choker necklace is back. The stylish will don chokers, just like those worn for centuries by women from Egypt to Renaissance Italy to England and America. It’s one of those fashions that comes and goes, […]
Reader Charles Padgett asked what sort of pets Americans owned during Victorian times. Short answer—birds, dogs and cats—in that order. Settlers arrived in America with dogs, cats and a penchant for caging songbirds. The first two served useful purposes on the farm. Caged birds provided entertainment indoors. By the second half of the 19th century, […]
It’s no secret Cleopatra wore green eye shadow and blackened her brows and eyelashes with kohl, a mix of lead, copper, ash and burnt almonds. The Greeks and Romans favored white lead paint on their faces with rouge of crushed mulberries. In England in the 1700s, the fashionable outdid themselves with powdered wigs, powdered faces, […]
