Bridgerton? Outstanding Period Costumes? Maybe From the Front

There is nothing wrong with a period drama taking a few historical liberties—particularly in the case of a show like Bridgerton, which attempts to reimagine an era that has been done so often and so faithfully as to have become a bit rote, making conditions ideal for some enterprising television program to swoop in and add a whole bunch of gratuitous cunnilingus.

In fact, despite Jane Austen never having mentioned it, people absolutely did plenty of cunnilingus during this time period—because mouth stuff was not invented in the 1970s the way most Americans seem to believe. But what Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy definitively did not have were fucking zippers, and it’s inexcusable that an awards committee supposedly comprised of experts would overlook that fact when handing out the nominations for “Outstanding Period Costumes.”

Look at this zipper, just brazen as it can be, in a scene meant to be set sometime between the years of 1811 and 1820, when the patent for the actual zipper wouldn’t be filed until 1851.

Look at this one.

And the thing that kept me up at night—texting my co-workers in horror as they pled with me to stop bothering them at midnight and perhaps consider a less pathetic hill to die on—is that these costume designers knew. They knew how these costumes should be fastened, and they cared not for my poor eyeballs nor my broken heart.

Observe, above, how the costume on the left is fastened by flat, cloth ties of the kind Regency-era dresses actually used, according to every easily googleable resource on the matter. Meanwhile, the dress on the right simply says, “No, thank you” to history when it very easily could have said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing right.”

For the love of the Prince Regent, just tie up the backs for season two. It’s a bodice ripper, not a fucking bodice unzipper.