In the Bay Area, which drives the world's latest inventions in futuristic technology, San Francisco's recent Edwardian Ball, where thousands of people gathered to celebrate all things circa 1900, seemed a curious turn to the past.
The ball, held Jan. 21, was themed the Iron Tonic, after a Gorey poetry collection about a melancholy hotel for ill and elderly guests, and was the capper to a weekend's worth of fun that began on Thursday with a burlesque show at DNA Lounge. On Friday, guests partook of afternoon tea before a nighttime Edwardian World's Faire at the Regency ballroom. There revelers danced to Edwardian-tinged rock music.
On the building's top floor, guests wandered a Museum of Wonders with taxidermied animals, living statues, fortune-telling and sideshows. And throughout the weekend, there was a vendors' fair in the basement with dozens of shopkeepers selling clothing for the event.
One of the newer trends at the fair is the emergence of a steam-punk aesthetic - a look that combines elements of the steam-powered era (top hats adorned with goggles and temperature or humidity gauges) and hand-crafted clothing for the "punk" element.
Jim Siegel of Distractions, a Haight Street clothing shop, said that in the 36 years he has owned the store, "I've never made more money than I have since I've switched to Victorian steam-punk and Wild West clothing. It's a huge counterculture trend."
Whatever one calls it - ModVic, steam-punk, or Edwardian - Siegel believes it started in the 1960s, when San Francisco hippies began scavenging attics of Western Addition homes torn down to make way for urban renewal. "They were finding all these boxes of old clothes, and girls began wearing granny dresses," he said.
Killbuck Killbuck, a purveyor of steam-punk fashions in Reno, said the Edwardian Ball and dress-up fairs are "a wonderful rebellion against mass-produced industrial design and the conformity we live in. It's a good way to bring style back into people's lives."
Said Bernardo Montoto, a director of commercial sales operations in Oakland: "You can be yourself, or not yourself. Nobody judges you."
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