This past weekend I traveled to Toronto. I went there for two reasons: to see the exhibit called “Fashion Victims: The Pleasures and Perils of Dress in the 19th Century” at the Bata Shoe Museum, and to meet my friend Y.S. Lee.I first heard about Ying’s books on Twitter several years ago, and after reading them, loved them so much I fan-girl friended her on Facebook. We’ve been e-friends ever since, but had never met in person. We toured the exhibit together, and then had lunch, and then Ying, who is from Canada and knows Toronto well, showed me around the city. It was a fantastic day–we talked nonstop, all the way to the last seconds as she was running to catch her train. We did manage to stop talking long enough to take this selfie:It was really fun to tour the exhibit together, because we’re both huge fans of nineteenth century fashions. (Ying has a PhD in Victorian literature, and all her books are set in 19^th century London. Here’s my review of her third one. Her fourth installment is due out in February, published by Candlewick. Here’s the cover:I loved this pair of shoes dyed with arsenic-based green. They match exactly some arsenical green gloves I bought on ebay. You can’t see the beautiful shade of green in this photo, but trust me:And they had some William Morris arsenical-green wallpaper. It’s not a great picture, because I wasn’t allowed to use flash:It was cool to see these purple shoes, which were dyed with William Perkin’s brand-new invention, the first chemically-made (C₂₆H₂₃N₄⁺X⁻), aniline dye. He called it mauveine. I thought it would be much pinker, but it’s a lovely purple. Note that the shoes are “straights,” and not made for right or left feet. And they’re all so narrow. Corns and bunions were a terrible problem. These pink baby shoes are for a boy. Ying informed me that the traditional gender-assigned colors were reversed in the nineteenth century: pink was for boys and blue was for girls.The exhibition runs through June of next year. Toronto is a lovely city with lots of funky neighborhoods and terrific restaurants. Well worth a visit!