Eye Candy - Wonderful dress

Gorgeous pink gown on a gorgeous Southern Belle

This image was recently featured as part of this post, but it wasn't given anywhere near the attention it deserves.

Southern Belles are a bit of a thing for me.  It's a combination of some of the most beautiful gowns in the history of western fashion and some of the most inhumane periods of racial cruelty.  Obviously it appeals to me.

The dress, in itself, is exceptionally feminine and beautiful.  In some ways, dresses like this are the direct inspiration for the frills and flounces of sissies and sissy maids.  It's this kind of heightened femininity that can only be achieved in the context of bygone patriarchy and the excesses of wealth and leisure that are afforded by the systematic oppression of millions.  The effort it must have taken to look after such a gown, even just to put it on.  You'd need several servants or slaves just to manage that, let alone take care of everything else for you while you're dressed essentially like a porcelain doll. It's conspicuous leisure on the grandest scale, and while this sort of inequality is by no means unique to this period in history, it's the fashions of this period in particular that seem to have fossilised into our cultural notion of what it means to look beautiful, to act feminine, to be a Princess.

As for myself, I'm torn between two fantasies.  I want to wear the dress myself and relish in the indulged leisure that it signifies, lounging in comfort with similarly dressed ladies while others that we barely notice pamper us.  It's an appealing lack of responsibility, but one that involves several enormous leaps of imagination in order to be plausible.  Easier to imagine would be serving this woman, and the point of view in the picture is rather conducive to this.  She stands up there, behind the railing of her mansion, inaccessible and at ease, in the shade, while I am down here, toiling away under her watchful eye.  I'm either a maid or a slave, maybe working on her family's plantation, being bought and sold at auction, &c. &c..  Perhaps she's the daughter or the young wife of my master, or perhaps she's out on her balcony to watch with pleasure as I'm whipped for something she's falsely accused me of.  Maybe there's an alternative history thing going on, whereby the South won the war and slavery was never abolished, or maybe the future of wealth inequality has recreated a situation where millions of people are once again owned and oppressed by the super-rich.

Whatever the fantasy is, all these things are conjured up by this quite wonderful image of a gorgeous Southern Belle in a gorgeous pink gown.  It's worthy of attention, certainly more than it got when I posted it the other day.  So here it is, the first in the Eye Candy series.  Long may it continue.

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