traditional expectations that girls shouldn't go to school, by offering  Special Occasion Dresses universal primary education.The religious landscape has also changed dramatically, with Pentacostalism eclipsing Anglicanism as the country's primary faith, though there is far more diversity now.said Moses Mukasa, 30, who was born in Uganda and now lives in Victoria, B.and works for Watoto, an NGO that focuses on helping children.Despite the many steps forward, there remain challenges in almost every area.The Uganda AIDS Indicator Survey released this spring suggests Uganda is one of only two African countries the other being Chad that are seeing a rise in AIDS rates.the average number of children per woman is around 6.the fourth highest rate in the world.The longer lifespan coinciding with still-high fertility rates has put pressure on healthcare system.representative bodies, says Derek Peterson, professor of history and director of the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan.stability has come also at a cost, he said.There are representative bodies that are increasingly now restive in relation to the ruling party, but the full expression of democratic politics hasn't come to Uganda in a way one might've hoped.There are concerns about an anti-gay law the government is trying to pass, which would make homosexuality illegal.Watoto has also been working to help rehabilitate child soldiers captured and trained by the Lord's Resistance Army, said Mr.Mukasa, who still has four of five sisters in Uganda as well as his mother.They also help babies orphaned by their mothers, many of whom die from complications during childbirth.Despite the rocky path, Ugandans are proud to be independent, taking successes like the country's gold medal win in men's marathon at the London Olympics this summer as a symbol of successful autonomy.We see this is good, this is something that happens as a result of what we went through.Viewers in England have fallen into swoons over Parade's End, a new five-part television adaptation by Tom Stoppard set in the decade of 1908 through to the  Evening Dresses For Women end of the Great War.That Benedict Cumberbatch stars as the tortured Tory husband of Ford Madox Ford's novels doesn't hurt, but beyond the day dresses and military costumes, it's the central themes of sex, suffragettes and duty that have been of interest to viewers, and writers such as Julian Barnes, who recently praised Ford's modern novel in an essay for the Guardian.In the absence of a new season of Downton Abbey or access to Parade's End, my recent costume melodramas have instead included The Forsyte Saga, available on Netflix Canada.it stars Rupert Graves, Ioan Griffudd, Damian Lewis (who just won an Emmy for Homeland), Gina McKee and a whole lot of crushed velvet.In lieu of a Pemberley or Downton's Downton there is Robin Hill, their classic Arts and Crafts pile, and an exploration of the moral codes of the Edwardian, then early modern era.Some of its original popularity surely had to do with the fact that it aired during the last frenzy of property obsession and materialism before the economic downtown, which are also Galsworthy's themes in the books.Glossing over the Boer War and the death of Queen Victoria, The Forsyte Saga seems an uncanny parallel of the Manolos and martini obsession of Sex and the City-era Manhattan.But Downton Abbey's new season recently began airing in the U.and in an exclusive Grazia magazine interview this week costumer Caroline McCall (spoiler ahead!more than any other single costume in the series so far.Judging by the retweeted links to the article alone, fans can't get enough of this sort of tidbit, thanks to the current craze for lavish period dramas that fetishize the past (and lately, the Edwardian and early Jazz Age in particular).Rebecca Sullivan, a professor in the University of Calgary's faculty of communications who specializes in feminist film, media and cultural studies.poque, and then cycles of Edwardian culture.Sullivan cracks sarcastically.Oh man, wouldn't it be great  Cheap Evening Dresses if I could be sexually harassed at work while I wear a girdle and a bullet bra!In these serial aesthetic entertainments, the viewer stand-in is generally a plucky heroine who bristles at the societal restrictions of the era.Sullivan explains of not only historical television but film and novels.One that is prettier, easier and one without consequences.It imprints contemporary values onto an imagined past to suggest that problems are easily solved.usually from a bourgeois, if not elite, privileged perspective.That escapism treats the past as uncomplicated.it ain't gonna happen.a disconnected otherworldliness that allows you not to feel grounded in social, political, economic conflicts and inequalities.Another theory is that as we inch into the teens, the late Edwardian era is long enough ago to be exotic, but still near enough so as to be recognizably modern.speaks to another era of technology and communication that's unfolding now.There are parallels to concerns of identity, not unlike the spate of American Westerns set in the late 1800s, which were enormously popular in the 1950s and capitalized on righteous patriotic sentiment.And in the wake of the fairytale Charles and Diana wedding, Britain was primed to be swept up in the fictional aristocratic life between the wars of Brideshead Revisited, which aired in 1981.So it's zeitgeist, then?For every argument of cultural relevance, you could argue budgetary considerations: Those Westerns were cheap and easy to make (just head to the middle of nowhere with a bagful of 10-gallon hats, some chaps and a few horses).all those footmen and parlour maids!Although the latter is admittedly still cheaper to costume than Elizabeth I's Tudor England milieu.When I spoke with Downton-loving designer Anna Sui last fall, we digressed into a conversation about why that period, along with Sui's beloved 1930s, continues to have such appeal.she said of the high-society screwball comedies and backstage musicals