How long has it been?
Originally published at Historical Personality Disorder. Please leave any comments there.
When I stop and think about it, I’ve been maintaining a costuming website for a freaking long time. How long has been a matter of some internal debate, however… I have been ball-park estimating for a few years that I’ve had some version of this website online for about a decade, but this morning I discovered that the earliest version was captured by the Way Back Machine in 1999. That means I’ve been around for 13 years. THIRTEEN YEARS, PEOPLE. CRAZY!
By 2001, I was adding Dress Diaries to the mix. By 2002, I had moved the site to its first personal domain, The Elizabethan Lady. One year later, I switched to this domain, ModeHistorique.com, initially because I was branching out of Elizabethan into Victorian stuff and I felt weird mixing the two eras under the name “The Elizabethan Lady”. Around 2005, I abandoned ElizabethanLady.com entirely and switched everything to Mode Historique, because it was a generic enough name to apply to any era of costuming that appealed to me.
It’s one of those funny little things, when people I know casually in costuming circles mention that they had no idea I had a website and here I’ve been here the whole time. I try not to look mortally offended, of course. I mean, I may think the entire universe revolves around me, but I am well aware that not everyone subscribes to this notion. ;)
Anyway, the number one focus of this website has, and always will be, to educate. I’m not trying to make a buck off the site, or my costumes… I’m trying to teach by example. I just want everyone to look fabulous, and lord knows, I’ve made all the mistakes known to costumerkind at one point or another, just so you don’t have to.