Gearing Up

Your odds of finding the perfect pilot’s goggles at your local thrift store may be thin, but the chance of coming across a perfect bomber jacket for your pilot persona is surprisingly good. The trick to a good thrift experience is knowing what to look for, so here are some tips.

• Look And You Will Find
  You may not come across the perfect jacket the first time you go out. In fact, odds are good you won’t. The trick is persistance. Try a couple stores. Try them again in a week or two. Keep trying.
• Wait For the Perfect Price
  Some thrift stores, seeking to capitalize on the hipsters who waste too much money thrifting, have started pricing up things they think such shoppers will like. Sometimes those are also the things you like. Wait, and they will go on sale - or maybe you won’t get them. Don’t worry. If you wanted to pay more than you could afford, you’d be shopping at the mall, after all.
• Don’t Settle
  Don’t buy the first leather jacket you spot on the rack. Check out the color and the shape the leather is in. Is it cracking? Are there mysterious stains? Try it on. Don’t just ask yourself if you can pull it over your shoulders, make sure it fits well and is comfortable.
• Appreciate Character
  At the same time, you’re probably not going to find a pristine, vintage leather bomber jacket. The bomber jacket style is fairly timeless, however, and a little modding at home will take you a long way. You want your jacket to look like it’s lived through a few zeppelin explosions.

Hopefully these tips will help you to find the perfect bomber jacket for your next mission. If you have any other tips, feel free to share them in the comments.

It’s Wednesday, so let’s have a costume post, shall we?

I happened across a page on Stalinist fashion on The Costumer’s Manifesto, and this men’s jacket caught my eye. The book it’s from is dated 1956 but I don’t think it would be too out of place on a Russian a decade earlier. It’s a very simple style and is described as a very common style, particularly the front of the jacket.

In fact, it looks quite a bit like the uniform that was popularized in Communist China as well. It’s very utilitarian and doesn’t require a great deal of tailoring, so that doesn’t surprise me. A Russian overseas might very well wear one of these, particularly if he’s escaping the early stages of the Stalinist regime with his brilliant-but-mad scientific ideas. Communist activists might wear them as well, though if you’re supposed to be under cover, I wouldn’t recommend it for obvious reasons.

For an idea what they looked like in practice, take a look at this jacket, an actual piece from the 1930s. The high collar is very similar. It features two breast pockets rather than the lower pockets shown in the sketch, but is still very utilitarian. The Communist style can’t be beat if you’re the kind of person who has to carry lots of little things on your person.

Ladies will want to check out the jackets near the top of the page. They’re not the most stylish things in the world, but particularly the one on the left has some definite potential. With a bit of tailoring, it would look absolutely smashing on a femme fatale.

Speaking of femme fatales, don’t worry too much about tailoring your Communist clothes. Shots of Cate Blanchett on the set of the new Indiana Jones movie make it clear that even the apparently unappealing Communist uniform can be quite smashing if you wear it with the right attitude.

I think it’s a shame we don’t see more Russian-inspired costumes, especially in steampunk. The country has a very dark fantasy feel in the imaginations of many despite its scientific progress in the last century. Perhaps the popularity of the Night Watch series will attract more attention to the character and storytelling possibilities of Russia both now and then.

Of course, defining steampunk is all well and good, but this blog is not at steampunk.net, we’re at dieselpunk.net! So you may be asking what dieselpunk is.

Dieselpunk is a subgenre derived from steampunk. Instead of a Victorian aesthetic and setting with steam-based technology, dieselpunk is set in the pulp era and powered, as you may have guessed from the name, by diesel engines.

Long before I knew there was a name for this genre, I was captivated by The Rocketeer, Indiana Jones, and various pulp-era stories of brave heroes confronting Nazis. (I hate those guys too, Indy!) Pulp adventure stories may seem dated now, but I still find them exciting in a way modern adventure doesn’t seem to capture any more. Instead of battling shadowy government conspiracies and evil corporations, pulp heroes battled real, obvious bad guys. It was a simpler time, and it’s easy to feel a certain nostalgia for that.

Aesthetically, dieselpunk is even less defined than steampunk is. Pilots with bomber jackets and soldiers are the most obvious inspiration, but adventurers come in all sorts of snappy clothing. Hopefully this blog will help draw attention to various elements that can be used in dieselpunk clothing and storytelling.

Ultimately dieselpunk is about confronting a rapidly-changing world with faith in science, a can-do attitude, and an uppercut for the next Nazi or Commie you meet.

Shanghaied is the working title of one of my two ongoing steampunk/dieselpunk projects. It’s primarily the story of one Allen Ravenscoft, an associate of Edward VII, and his personal assistant Elizabeth Bell as they travel through Asia in service of the crown. It’s an adventure story (or quite likely, several stories) with a few fantastic elements and some alternate history in addition to as much steampunk tech as I can shoe-horn in. I’d like to think it’s in the vein of Indiana Jones insofar as a few mythic elements live side-by-side with science.

I’ve done a fair amount of  research on the time period in Asia, especially in China, and I’ll be sharing a lot of that with you as I build on it. In addition, this project has caused me to think at length about Asian steampunk clothing designs. A lot of my costume design efforts thus far have been in this realm. With any luck, I’ll be sharing this as well.

Hopefully my research will prove interesting and useful to a number of people besides myself.

I suppose it’s only fitting to start this blog with a brief discussion of the definition of steampunk. Mind you, steampunk, like most subcultures, resists most attempts to be defined. This is my opinion alone.

Steampunk began as a literary genre derived from the name cyberpunk and the use of steam power in the Victorian era that was used as the setting for those novels. While not the first in the genre, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s Difference Engine is considered one of the seminal works. I hope to include reviews and recommendations for various steampunk works in this blog.

The literary genre, the neo-Victorian aesthetic (coming largely from the goth subculture) and the fans of works such as the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen eventually converged as people who had a common interest in this thing called steampunk: the philosophy, the visual aesthetic, and the social commentary.

Speaking of aesthetic, you may wonder what you can expect to find in steampunk fashion or design. Most steampunk fashion is built from Victorian or Edwardian styles, with various alterations for the mad science that tends to characterize steampunk. Gears, goggles, keys and chains ideally combine with top hats and bustles to create clothing that looks practical, stylized, and steamy. In practice, steampunk has very few “rules”.

So what is steampunk? In my opinion, it is the art of combining the best elements of the Victorian era (the fashion, the sense of wonder, and the belief that pluck and hard work will get you where you want to go) with retro-futuristic technology and a hard look at the sociopolitical underpinnings of Victorian era and its reflection in our own societies.

Steampunk is not purely about the past. It’s about appreciating what’s come before, taking the best it had to offer, and building a better future from it.

Oh, and goggles. Can’t forget the goggles.