Karolina Żebrowska (born November 25, 1993), also known as the Meme Mom, is a Polish fashion historian and Web Video maker.
She creates comedic and educational (usually) English language YouTube videos and sketches and often reviews historical fashion in modern period pieces and costume dramas. She's also written and published several books on such subjects.
Her channel can be located at this link.
Filmography
- Lucys Typewriter (2014)
- Confusions Of A Wasted Youth (2017)
Compare Bernadette Banner and Vasi Birchwood.
Tropes used by Karolina Żebrowska:
- Bad Present: In "adventures of a dissatisfied Victorian time traveller", a lady from the Victorian era travels to 2020. She finds everything—from the architecture to the fact people seem to be in their underwear—disappointing.
- Bedsheet Ghost: Miss Tatternickle is disappointed to realize her mysterious follower is a plain bed sheet ghost.
- Caustic Critic: No amount of fashion Artistic License – History in modern media escapes her sight and comments (the latter often accompanied by snark).
- Character Name and the Noun Phrase: The Miss Tatternickle sketches have their names styled this way. For example "Miss Tatternickle And The Mysterious Box" and "Miss Tatternickle And The Graveyard Mystery".
- Costume Porn: While not the focus of every video Karolina has an extensive wardrobe of vintage clothing and homemade reproductions, and in some videos gets to show off multiple outfits as her characters interact with each other.
- Creepy Cemetery: Miss Tatternickle prefers to spend her time hanging out in cemeteries, keeps track of her local monsters (which are scared of her) and is friends with spiders.
- Crossover: Karolina has guest-appeared in a video by Vasi Birchwood on vintage vs historical fashion.
- Historical Domain Character:
- She acts as Marie Curie in her video titled "Marie Curie Answers The Web's Most Searched Questions And Gets Utterly Disappointed". Any time there's a legitimate question about her work her answer gets cut short.
- She acts as Marie-Antoinette in her video titled "Marie Antoinette Answers the Web's Most Searched Questions (And Gets Utterly Disappointed)". The first set of questions are about her death and she looks despairingly at the camera rather than answer. As the "interview" goes on she seems to slowly realize that her inaction was an issue.
- Hollywood Costuming: Discussed in several videos reviewing the costuming in historical dramas.
- Horrifying the Horror: Miss Tatternickle scares away the ghost that's been following her through the cemetery.
- Identical Stranger: Fans of the channel often send in pictures of people that they think look like Karolina, and in "FINE, I'll review my doppelgangers" she goes through them. Karolina has a long face, and she thinks that most of the pictures are just women with long faces. However, while they don't look like her, she thinks that she could look like them with a bit of work.
- Of Corset Hurts: Karolina detests Hollywood's obsession with this trope, pointing out that actresses who complain about corsets in their costumes were forced into poorly fitted corsets, often tight laced despite that being rare in history, without the proper undergarments. "curb your corset stereotypes" is an entire video on this, and while she doesn't blame the actresses she hates that they've been given a false impression of what corsets were like for women in the eras their films are set in. In "Climbing While Wearing An Edwardian Attire" Karolina goes climbing while wearing a corset to show that corsets do not prevent women from doing things.
- Progressive Era Montage: She has done three fashion timelapse videos about real women from the 1900s to the 1940s, a century of Polish history, and the evolution of catwalk poses from the 1920s to today.
- Reaction Video: Karolina has a pained response to the extremely poorly done alterations in Say Yes to the Dress in "Everything Wrong With Those „Old Wedding Dress Remakes”".
- The Roast: Karolina has roasted costumes in period dramas.
- Stylistic Suck: Content creators usually try to avoid the sound of wind roaring across the microphone. In "Beaches in Poland be like", the sound of the wind roaring is the whole point.
- That Came Out Wrong: In her "Breaking Down Tall Vampire Lady's Iconic Look" Karolina says "I did notice a lot of 1930s inspiration and if I was to date her—if I was to date her charact—if I was to assign the character to a particular time period".
- Time Travel:
- "the time travel agency seamstress" has an overworked seamstress trying to outfit time travelers with appropriate clothing for their destinations.
- In "adventures of a dissatisfied Victorian time traveler" a Victorian time traveler is quite unimpressed with the modern world.
- YouTuber Apology Parody: "a youtuber apology but it's a Salem witch trials accuser", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.