Go look at some pictures of high society in the 1920’s. Being skinny was all the rage. And yes, corsets and breast binding were used as necessary to get the look, even though they’d then cover their bodies in shapeless gowns because the ‘look’ was somewhat androgynous. Dieting was a huge fad in the 1920’s.
The trend towards skinniness started even earlier among the royalty. Wasp waists were all the rage for decades before, with Victorian women being bound into corsets so tight that fainting or physical collapse was not uncommon.
Except he already has a wife in England; Edith was able to find that out with a simple phone call, and the only reason parents still don’t know is because it hasn’t occurred to either of them to check him out.
It’s still nowhere nearly as bad as Upstairs, Downstairs.
In addition it would cause huge problems if they did that and Edith were to have a boy.
That was the fashion in the '20s, and Rose is the most into flapper fashion. I predict she’ll be in full bright young thing mode by next series and in to all the latest fads (like Egyptology or cocaine).
Before the Switzerland idea came up, where was Edith planning to have the baby? I guess she could have it in Mrs. Hughes’ room where all secrets reside. Since the upstairs people rarely come down, it could be raised by the household staff and none of the Crawleys would be the wiser.
I think the baby should take its place in the nursery with Sybbie and George. If she lets the pig man raise it (is he even married?) it will drive her and the rest of us crazy to see him turn into a farmboy when he could grow up and wear nice clothes and go to Oxford or Eton or one of those fancy-schmancy places. I for one do not want to see that. He would grow up not knowing what fork to use, for fuck’s sake!
I want Daisy to hook up with her father-in-law. He is the nicest man she knows. He’s prolly only mid-40’s. That’s not very old, even then.
This is minor, but I was surprised by the scene where Mary’s godfather somewhat clumsily asks Isobel if her son stopped practicing law when she uses the past tense to describe him. Even if he doesn’t know her from Adam, pretty much EVERYONE VAGUELY HIS AGE would have had sons who served in the war, and his immediate assumption should have been that her son died in the war. It would have made so much more sense for him to go with that, and then have Isobel need to explain that Matthew survived the war only to be killed by artistic differences.
Okay, that touches upon a larger issue that never seems to come up in the plot – at this point, the characters should still be seeing a lot of impact from the war years. Men who served being disabled or still suffering shell shock (and stigmatized for it), a surfeit of widows across all social classes, or (there’s a term for this that I can’t remember), women who were not married but lost their fiancés and are now locked into spinsterhood at a young age, either through sentiment or because there’s a lack of unattached men (and I guess those unattached men that remain are chasing after Mary).
Oh the recent unpleasantness? Let’s don’t talk about that.
Someone remind me: why is Rose hanging around, being their problem? She was going wild in London, I remember — was she the one that some cab driver waited all day on while she boinked some dude?
I know she’s kin to them, that’s why she they’ve taken her in, but why is the presumably odious mother off the hook with her? Why don’t they ship her back home if she’s just going to keep hooking up with suave black men and whatnot.
By the way, they uniformly referred to him as “black” throughout the episodes, which someone thought was pejorative, instead of a more polite-for-the-time “negro.”
I think Daisy’s FIL (Mr. Marsh is it?) ends up with Ms. Patmore. They’ve already been set up as Father and Mother figures to Daisy, and Ms. P is too old to have a child who’d contend with daisy for the inheritance. “And what does Ms. Patmore say?”
Anyone notice how Cora, being disadvantaged by delaying tea and chit chat, obliviously did the bazaar volunteers a “favor” by sending them home and allowing them to come back the next day? I’d be all like “Bitch, there’s only ten tables and a couple of poles left to take down, and you want us all to hike back up here again in the morning and spend another day not getting paid?” God forbid she have to burden herself with laborers being present while she lounges.
Nah, not seein’ it. She’d turn to you, give her one expression of a crooked little smile with her head tilted forward and slightly to the side and you will just melt.
Really, Julian? A random visitor to Munich in 1923 gets done in by brownshirts? Only a week after pulling Cousin Harold from the clutches of the Teapot Dome scandal? Are you just paging through Front Pages of the Twentieth Century to come up with plot ideas?
