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Ciel’s notorious Robin Dress™ REDESIGNED

As the Kuroshitsuji series continues, historic accuracy has gone way up thanks to Yana’s consulting of a Victorian Era expert. In the earliest chapters however, it seemed like Yana didn’t even have a clue what English people wore in the 1880s, and just googled some lolita dresses and slapped them onto her characters.

Costume-wise, the most iconic one of the series is definitely O!Ciel’s notorious Robin Dress (I mean, which other costume has an actual name that’s googleable?) This dress however, is really a historical amalgamation of all sorts, and knowing Yana, she probably would not have gone for this design today.

Let us break this costume down from top to bottom wherein I examine the historic inaccuracies, and how I propose to “correct” these while trying to keep as much of the original design intact as possible.

Head wear and hair

First of all, Victorians had clear distinctions between day wear and evening wear. Women were supposed to wear long sleeves and high necklines during day, and the opposite during night time events. Hats were rarely paired with short sleeved low-necklines, because the idea of the hat was to protect the wearer from the sun.

Wearing a hat indoors at night was not unlike wearing sunglasses indoors at night in present time. The hat is not salvageable. YEET.

I do understand Yana’s problem though; O!Ciel could not very much wear an eye patch as a proper lady, so what to do to conceal the contract sign? You think Victorian, and you think HATS👒🎩

I threw myself into a research hole to try find an alternative solution, but the results were rather disappointing. Victorians were not supposed to have anything dangling before their faces (Frances is right), because that was considered poor grooming. Veils ended up being my only option, though people usually did not wear veils unless for wedding or religious ceremonies.

But one poor option is better than no option at all, so veil it was. Paired with a few curls in front of his right eye and some lace, the contract seal can be covered up rather well (as long as he wouldn’t move too much).

Needless to say, Victorians would not have worn twin tails. 1880s Victorian women would wear their hair up, and having two curled tails dangling below became fashionable since the mid-Victorian Era.

Choker ribbon necklaces were worn by people in the 1880s, but they were not standard for fancy night time events. However, as it was technically not historically ‘inaccurate’, it can stay.

Neckline

The neckline is more accurate and I have left it mostly the same. The only major problem is the silhouette, namely that in the 1880s, women would wear more streamlined shapes to make the shoulders seem smaller. Often they would have the shoulders/sleeves flare out at the bottom to make the waist seem smaller through contrast.

For the sake of streamlining I have made the top ruffles smaller and added more panels to the middle part according to the trend of pleated bertha collar.

Waistline

The hat and the boots are technically 19th century accurate, but just not for the occasion. The waistline of the Robin Dress however, is the by far the biggest culprit in making this dress a historical abomination.

The mid-section of this dress seems to be made from one single piece of cloth. In the Victorian Era when waist reduction was top priority, the Robin Dress would have failed miserably in gaining the approval of high society.

The unstructured type of dress made from one continued panel of cloth was a thing of the 10th century before people figured out how to make proper waist seams. So yes, the Robin Dress is basically 900 years outdated.

Fashion is something that always gets revisited (see all the neo-XXX trends), so 900 years outdated does not necessarily have to be a problem. However, since the moment people discovered the technique to make a proper waist seam, they ditched the unstructured way of tailoring, and it would not really come back until the 1900s.

An unstructured waist-line was considered the height of sloppy appearance in O!Ciel’s time, and would make the tailor look like a complete amateur whose skills fell literal centuries behind.

Hence, for the sake of correction, I simply gave the dress a pointed waist and proper structure to avoid the fold in the original dress that would have been unacceptable in a proper evening gown.

Skirt

The silhouette of the skirt is also somewhat outdated as the bell-shaped dress was something that fell out of fashion around the 1860s. Essentially O!Ciel was wearing a silhouette that was 30 years out of fashion.

(Imagine going to an official event in 2020 and looking like this.)

By O!Ciel’s time, the largest part of the skirt was the bustle that was a ‘MUST’ of the time, and the front was slimmed down. The hem of the skirt was worn shorter for younger girls, but for formal events like the party of the Viscount, the etiquette was floor length.

A wide skirt like that of the original design combined with the swagged design was something that was only briefly popular in the Rococo Era, which was approximately 150 years old by O!Ciel’s time.

The swagged skirt for decoration was not unacceptable in the 1880s, but the gather points would either have been hidden underneath the bustle, or gathered using something quite elaborate, like ruffles or flowers. One black ribbon would have been rather inadequate.

If not hidden or gathered with fancy ornaments, then the swagged fabric would have been heaved much higher, coming together near the waist.

So in my attempt to correct the skirt part, I both gathered the fabric higher and used the same roses to cover the gather points. Instead of the original black ribbon bows, I used the striped bow like the one at the chest for completion’s sake.

Shoes

Technically the shoes are rather Victorian Era accurate, but boots were outdoor shoes, and generally not THAT high heeled because they were essentially made for a bit of walking. For formal events people would not have worn boots (we don’t do that either in 2020). Instead, the proper shoes for under a gown were pumps.

As the dress is floor length however, they would not be visible anyway, so I did not bother redesign them.

【Related post: Redesign: O!Ciel and Sebastian in different eras】

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Bleeeh 👅

We sail today

Tears will drown in the wake of delight

There's nothing like this built today

You'll never see a finer ship in your life

A little Ciel Phantomhive redesign! Doing a kinda sorta historically accurate version of his dress disguise 

“I’ll give you the ✨ D ✨”  “I wish you would” “I wish you would, too” “Well, I'm giving it to you now”

After seeing the new merch I had to draw this

2D loves his bf so much omg (THEY DID NOT HAVE TO MAKE HIM WEAR A MURDOC SHIRT… BUT THEY DID!!!)

And Russ is just so tired of him 😂

@elderyautjavegeta COME GET YOUR JUICE ‼️‼️🧃

Og below

yours is the light by which my spirit’s born: yours is the darkness of my soul's return —you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars

Happy 16th anniversary, Merlin! (timelapse available here ✨)

It’s so crazy that John was the gay one

Freddie Mercury was bisexual though

Nope, this is false! 🏳️‍🌈 Freddie was gay, there’s a lot of misinformation out there about his non-existent affairs with women, and much of it can be chalked up to a shit biographer named Lesley Ann Jones (aka my arch nemesis).

I've been deeply fascinated by Freddie Mercury and studying his personal life for years and years so excuse the following infodump (or jump in for a queer history lesson!)

Contrary to popular belief, Freddie was an out gay man. “Gay as a daffodil, my dear!” He’s clearly stated his sexuality in a handful of interviews; “I’ve done all that but I’m gay. Mary was my last woman.” (This interview was removed from youtube but you can find it mentioned in Freddie Mercury: A Life, in His Own Words which is a compilation of his actual quotes from interviews over the years.) Those statements got buried from the media in favor of promoting his more promiscuous quotes like "Darling, I'm doing everything with everybody." (Journalists LOVE to include this quote when talking about his AIDS...) He did purposely retain an aura of mystique around his sexuality, especially because it was much safer (trendy, even) for musicians to flirt with bisexuality than to be homosexual back then.

Here's a quote from Peter "Phoebe" Freestone, Freddie's personal assistant of twelve years, close friend, and "agony aunt" in his memoir, Freddie Mercury: An Intimate Memoir by the Man Who Knew Him Best:

"When the interview appeared, it was half the length that he imagined it would be. When confronted, Judy Wade said that it would have been impossible to have printed the whole text. She said she was holding back for his benefit, not for hers. Admissions such as, "I'm just going for a line and I'll be back in half-a-minute," would not have done anyone any good. However, she was fully prepared to underline in her second sentence that admission of being a fully 'out' gay man, although this does not lay the later myth which was popular which claimed that Freddie had never admitted his gayness."

Freddie's close friend Thor Arnold, a gay man and member of the "New York Daughters" (Freddie's gay friend group in NYC, of course Freddie was "mother!") corrected misinformation when fans on the Queenzone forum argued that Freddie was bi:

"Freddie NEVER tried to hide to his friends that he was TOTALLY gay. In his industry, he had to hide it to some extent although as I have said before, he certainly gave clues. This is the same man who came up with the name QUEEN for his band. This is the man who dressed very sexually, ambiguously 'glam' up until 1980. This is the man who threw an Easter bonnet party and had us all create Easter hats. This is the man who used the term darling (or Dahling) more than he used proper names, and renamed his friends with old actresses names. These things are doubtful for a straight or bi man. Many gays don't even act like this... I've never seen Freddie look twice at a woman but I have seen him look 3 or 4 times at an attractive man and say, 'Thor, Thor... Oh just look at him... Just gorgeous. I'd love some of THAT' We were genuine friends of Freddie and he would never hide that he was really bi. FREDDIE WAS A GAY MAN through and through...everyone...please get used to it."

LAJ, the biographer I previously mentioned, worked VERY hard to straight-wash Freddie in her book by erasing his gay relationships. She was obsessed with his relationship with Mary Austin and is the main reason modern journalists consider Freddie to have been in profound, romantic love with her his whole life. In reality, they dated for a few years in the 70s and remained close friends after they split up (because Freddie was having affairs with his boyfriend). However, he did rely on her as his "beard" to keep up with appearances for the press.

LAJ completely skipped over Freddie's first official boyfriend, saying it was "a covert fling with a young theatre." His name was David Minns. Freddie loved him so much he left Mary to be with him. They were in a serious relationship for three years.

If you're a Freddie fan, you're familiar with Mary's story of him coming out to her, saying "I think I'm bisexual," and her response, "I think you're gay." This story is probably not the truth. Mary has been very inconsistent with her story of how Freddie came out to her.

Another version she told for BBC Radio:

"I don’t know what sparked the conversation. But I remember standing in the kitchen and he was trying desperately to articulate how he was feeling, and his lifestyle and I just said, 'so you are telling me you're gay?' And he just smiled and 'we'll take it as a yes, you know, we'll leave it at that.' And that was it, it has been a long road getting to that point."

Honestly, I am a bit mistrustful of Mary Austin's intentions in general. If you're curious as to why, this post is a good primer on the ways she might have betrayed Freddie's wishes, namely being cruel to his chosen family after his passing.

Freddie only had one other girlfriend before Mary in college, Rosemary Pearson. When asked about Freddie on ITV's This Morning show, she said that he was more interested in her male friends than in her, and she suspected then that he was gay. This was in the 60s.

LAJ refers to his relationships with women throughout her book, but she doesn't list any names. That's because they don't exist. I could name at least seven of Freddie's boyfriends off of the top of my head. Minnsy. Joe Fanelli. Tony Bastin. Vince the Barman. Bill Reid. Winnie Kirchberger. And of course, his husband Jim Hutton, whom he spent the last six years of his life with.

There is one name that LAJ has chosen to platform and exaggerate her importance, and that's German pornstar Barbara Valentin. If you've heard of her, you might think she had a relationship with Freddie in the 80s, you might have heard the story where he had wild threesomes with her, that they lived together, that he even proposed to her. Not one word of it is true. Freddie hung around Barbara during his time in Munich because she was his 'in' to gay clubs and cocaine dealers. She also served as his English translator and conveniently, another beard for the press.

Not a single person in Freddie’s life has ever corroborated that Freddie and Barbara were anything but friends. As for the claim they lived together, according to Peter Freestone:

In the event, Freddie never actually lived there although Barbara fulfilled a huge role in Freddie’s life at that time… Freddie became very disillusioned when with more and more frequency articles were appearing in the German press’s gossip columns… about the relationship between him and Barbara… After one article claiming to have knowledge of him and Barbara getting married, Freddie concluded that it could only be Barbara who was providing the information.

(He was actually living with his Bavarian boyfriend of the time, Winnie Kirchberger.) Freddie stopped seeing Barbara after he found out she was gossiping about being his lover and these stories started appearing in the newspapers. Barbara continued these lies after Freddie's death, making up ludicrous lies like how Freddie tried to kill her by smothering her with a pillow?? She also claimed that he put her at risk of contracting AIDS by having sex with her after his diagnosis in 1987, which is the lie that burns the most. Freddie stopped having sex altogether before his diagnosis because he was terrified of contracting it. Before there was any information of how it was transferred, he showered compulsively. There is such a fucked up narrative that Freddie threw caution to the wind and wasn't careful during the epidemic, that it somehow fits this twisted narrative that his death was a result of his immoral lifestyle. That's the pervasive homophobia that stained the Bohemian Rhapsody biopic.

LAJ is one of those biographers who publishes their books after the celebrity has died, so they wouldn’t be able to deny the information being written in the book. So if there's anything to learn here, is that you can't always trust a biography!

Anyway, Freddie was gay as a daffodil my dears, and he deserved better.