CHAM'S PLACE!

#2 - Maids

open this image of a maid...!

tell me what's the most defining about a modern maid! you might say her apron or her duster but... a maid is not a maid without her headdress !!!!!! surely, everyone has seen a maid headdress.. especially around these parts! in old web communities, maids have become increasingly popular with the resurgence of the nijiura maids so more and more i see maids around the web...! today, we are gonna talk about their accessory! even looking at a picture like this, its easy to identify this girl.. is a MAID because of her headdress but maids have not always looks this way!

lets talk old fashion maids. I've seen maids in shoujo animanga and other things, but I didn't have that much of an impression of the headress because there were many maids with hats.... such as in The Rose of Versailles, The Elegant Life of Mr. Basil, and "Little Princess Sailor" from the World Masterpiece Theater.

but that doesnt mean the headdress wasnt present at all in depictions of old meidos... for example, in the same "Princess Sarah", sarah's exclusive maid was wearing a Katyusha-styled headress, not a hat nor a cap like the previous maids shown. For the sake of this article, I will occasionally shorten the style of this maid to simply Katyusha.

moving on, anyways! I found it very interesting that Becky, who was in charge of miscellaneous tasks, wore a hat, and Mariette, who was in charge of personal care, wore a Katyusha headdress, probably in line with the actual maids in London -- during the time.

now onto talking about Yosuke Takahashi's {Bun in the Evening Darkness}. This issue, which appears in the September 1980 issue of マンガ少年, features the main character working part-time as a maid. It is amazing that there is a so-called "maid episode" in a work from 40 years ago LOL, and in addition to that, the apron dress is made into a gull wing, which is an amazing modification of the maid outfit. It was a work of genius that anticipated the "maid moe" of future generations -- However, she still uses a hat for her head instead of a Katyusha. EH......

80s...~! A mix of maid hats and maid Katyushas... In the 80's, "maids" were not a major attribute, but they did appear in erotic anime and manga EH.... (It was usually about a maid who worked in a rich mansion and was forced to do erotic things for her master.. lol) For example, the 1986 ero-anime "Cream Lemon Part 11: Black Cat Manor".

It's clearly aimed at otaku who masturbate to 2D gurls exclusively, but anyways, the maid is in a hat here too. HM. This is not to say that the "royal road" was dared to be removed. At that time, there was still no notion that a headpiece was the basis of a maid but the Katyusha theme is subtly there still within the frills. HOWEVER, yet again, that doesnt mean I didnt see the Katyusha at all within ero-animanga. Some of the maids were wearing Katyusha-like things.

"性奴人形": Yayoi Umino. Included in a 1988 doujin / "メイド物語": Dr. Mizuki Morinaga. 1989 "ハーフリータ" first appeared.

That's how hats and Katyusha were mixed in the two-dimensional erotic maid world..!

The Maid (Apron Dress) Anthology, released in 1990, is a valuable historical document of the time -- on this topic, REALLY..! now now i have to censor the.. YOU CAN SEE -- because this is neocities and i'm about 99.9% ill die if i let those show on my website! we're not here for bad things, we are here for MAID HISTORY.

we're gonna be taking a look at EVERY maid to appear in this book and we're going to be sorting them through our semi-established system.. hat, or katyusha.. or RIBBON?

There are many maids in Katyusha, but they make up less than half from the total of maids in this book.

But the most important part of this anthology is "Frill Frill Heaven" by Kei Masuyama-sensei. Through the dialogue of the characters who yearn to dress up as maids, the author's view of maid uniforms is told, giving us a glimpse of the recogniton of maid-loving erotic manga artists in 1990.

Here, the "basic type" is recognized as a cap. On Wikipedia...

>OG: "現在、一般に「メイド服」と呼ばれているものは、黒または濃紺のワンピース、フリルの付いた白いエプロンを組み合わせたエプロンドレスに、同じく白いフリルの付いたカチューシャの組み合わせが基本である."

Compare the images to the modern description of a maid uniform and you can see the change in perception over time.

Anyways, after this, they try on various maid outfits...

this is a clear homage and respect to {Bun in the Evening Darkness} -- which we covered earlier..! AND~~

The Katyusha-type uniforms were introduced as "waitress-like" and "hotel maid-like." This is how we have reached the modern definition of the "Katyusha" maid -- now known as the hotel, barista, or waitress maid ( most commonly seen in maid cafes or other commercial areas ).

In the first half of the 90s, the eroge era dawned upon us and the Katyusha maid became a staple of maid fetishism as opposed to the classic hat-maid who usually has a longer dress.. here is a table categorizing popular eroges from the early 90s by whether they feature a single or more than one katyusha maid or not.

Katyusha		Non-Katyusha
CAL II Sweet Emotion	1991
PREMIUM 同級生	1992	MISCHIF 狂った果実イーリス亭小夜曲
GR JYB てぃんくる河原崎家の一族	1993	黒猫館極楽まんだら奈緒美禁断の血族
アラベスクまじかるぼーど機械じかけのマリアンマスカレード雑音領域闘神都市II	1994	LIKE
31 夢幻夜想曲夢幻泡影拘束 PERFECT BLUE FRONTIER 隷嬢セーラ JACK 背徳の女神 BLACK BIRD	1995	晴れのち胸さわぎツーショットDiary2

sorry for the ugly table... i dont know how else to make one! i forgot how to... oops~ pichuun. anyways! You can see here by this table, the majority of maids were Katyusha this time around! The Katyusha has become a staple of moe maids and maid fetishism as opposed to other styles of maids.

ANYWAYS! By 1996, the Katyusha had become overwhelmingly dominant. If you look at a maid manga anthology called "素敵なメイドさん" published by Sakuratomo Shobo in 1996, almost all the maids are equipped with Katyusha.If you compare it to the 1990 anthology we covered earlier, you can see how much the world of maids has changed in six years!

anyways... lets end this section off with something screenwriter Hideyuki Kurata wrote in the Feb. 1996 issue of PC Angel:

something something.. this is a man's dream! pretty much.

to summarize this (since i am getting tired of writing!) : From the late 1980's to the early 1990's, Katyusha gradually became more and more popular, and from around 1994 to 1995, they became more and more popular. Since then, the number of maids in eroge has been increasing, and the wave of maids has spread to general works as well. From the end of the 90's to the present, the image of maids has changed a lot, but the association of "maid =headress" that was formed around 1995 has been inherited to the modern maid without much change.

END~!

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