A story is the place to share photos, memories, inspiration, or anything else about a costume or burlesque act. This can be your own or someone else’s. It’s whatever you want to share with the community.

A story on this site isn’t like a regular story, we’ve created some features to help you get started with the Fabulous Femininities collection.

They’ll help you structure your stories quickly, connect them with other stories (written by yourself or other Fabulous Femininities storytellers), as well as add interesting details to provide depth and context.

The main features of building a story are:

• Scenes
• Things
• Wardrobe
• Tags
• Comments

To be a contributor you have to register with the site. The sign-up is very simple and just allows us to monitor Fabulous Femininities for any unreasonable behaviour. Please read our Terms and Conditions before you start your first story.

Go to the top menu and click Sign Up. You will be asked to create a username and password and to give your email address to register. Your username is what you will be known as on the site but you can change it at any time.

After you register you can add more details to your profile, if you wish, including a profile image.

Step 2: Add a Scene

Every story is made up of a series of different scenes comprising images, videos, bits of writing, music. Each scene can be as long or as short as you like and begins with some text. The website will help you put multiple scenes together into a sequence that tells your story.

If you write each scene so that it makes sense when read on its own, other members of the community will be able to borrow it and weave it into their own stories.

You can add things like videos, photos and sounds from other websites and also other Fabulous Femininities users.

You can upload images to Fabulous Femininities or add the image URL. Images can be up to 5MB in size. You can make these available for others to use (public) or keep them for your own image Wardrobe (private).

Things you’ve uploaded to other sites, such as videos, can be added to a personal Wardrobe, so you can add the links to your stories too.

Currently, you can add:

• Images - any URL ending with JPG, PNG or GIF, or photos from Flickr.
• Videos - URLs for videos hosted on Youtube, TikTok or Vimeo.
• Sound - URLs for music, sounds and other audio hosted on SoundCloud.

We’re working on adding new file types and services, but we thought we’d start with the most common formats and the most likely places where people are sharing their photos and videos.

Some social media channels do block their images from being used elsewhere, so bear that in mind.

(Fabulous Femininities also supports less common image formats, with URLs ending in JPEG, JPE, TIF, and TIFF).

You can add tags such as people, places and times to enrich and describe a scene as well as help others to find your stories and quote them in their own stories.

There are three kinds of tag:

• Person - you can add a name and a picture of anyone who features in your stories.
• Place - you can add places to your stories (venues, cities, festivals), along with a name and a picture. Places don’t have to be real, they can be fictional (“Narnia”).
• Time - the period in which the scene takes place - this can be a date, a year or even something less exact like “my childhood”.

Every scene in every story has a "Borrow this scene" link next to it.

This allows you to include that scene in your own stories. You can use this to link stories from other users as well as make connections between your own stories. Perhaps you were at the same event, or you were inspired by a particular bit of costume.

Now you’re ready to publish. How many of these labels and objects you add is up to you. Then you can just publish and your story will be available on the Fabulous Femininities website.

Themes are a headings under which several stories can be grouped. These might be stories all written by a collective of people (such as a burlesque house) or stories that have a shared theme such as stories about the same place or event. The Fabulous Femininities Team can also curate particular themes that are important to the project.

You can create your own theme and add stories to it by clicking on Themes in the top menu. Click Add A New Theme. Give it a title and add some details and click Save and Add Stories.

Only the owner of a Theme can add stories to it.

Every time you add a thing to a story, it is also added to your Wardrobe. The Wardrobe is a collection of all the things you and others have added to Fabulous Femininities. These can be made public for others to use or private.

You can add things to the wardrobe while you’re writing scenes for your story. Or you can add some things directly to your wardrobe before you’ve even starting writing stories.

This is a great way of collecting material together before you know how you want to organise it into a story.

Comments allow other users to leave comments on a particular scene of your story. You can also use comments as “footnotes” to add context or references to your stories.

You can turn the Comments feature on or off for every story, from the Story Settings page.

Whilst we have added a feature to the site that allows you to use your own photos, the main purpose of the site is collect and reuse the photos, videos and sounds you’ve already uploaded elsewhere and get stuck into telling stories with Fabulous Femininities.

We also wanted to encourage storytellers to use what’s openly available on the web and arrange them into compelling and interesting stories.

By taking those small pieces of the web and orchestrating them into stories, you can use the best of what’s out there, your own things, as well as ensuring you don’t fall afoul of copyright laws.

A URL a way to know where something is on the web and most commonly referred to as a “web address” or “link”. Here are some examples of URLs:

• A Youtube video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1ZB_rGFyeU
• A JPEG image - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e0/Weaving-Bhutan-03_(detail).JPG/1200px-Weaving-Bhutan-03_(detail).JPG

You have a number of options are available from the Story Settings page; every story you write can be set to be either:

• Visible only to you.
• Visible only to other Fabulous Femininities storytellers with whom you share the story’s URL but will not appear in search results.
• Visible to everyone that uses Fabulous Femininities, and will also appear in search results.

We take the safety of our community of users very seriously. Any item that does not abide by our terms and conditions or which might be considered abusive or offensive towards people with protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010 can be removed. This includes, but is not limited to, subjects such as race, gender, disability, and sexuality. Please see our Terms and Conditions for further information.

Every Scene and Thing includes a Report link, which you can click to report any abusive content. When you report an offensive Scene or Thing, we’ll ask you to briefly describe the issue before submitting the report.

We’ll investigate your concerns and, if necessary, remove the offending thing or scene.

Users found to be breaking the Terms and Conditions will have their accounts closed.

Please take every attempt to indicate where material comes from - if you are using something that is taken from another website please provide a link in your story.

If you upload an image you agree to a non-commercial Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 4.0. This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms. Get in touch if you have any questions or concerns.

Except where otherwise stated (such as uploaded images), copyright of all materials resides with Fabulous Femininities.