Carnival to Catwalk

Global Reflections on Fancy Dress Costume

Benjamin Linley Wild

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350015012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Shortlisted for the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award, 2021 From West African masquerades to Venetian carnivals and New York society galas, fancy dress has long been used to convey important social and political messages. The only form of clothing that all people, regardless of gender, race, class or sexuality are likely to wear at some point in their lives, fancy dress is a symbol of both escapism and protest; it stands for a vision of fantasy and fun, while also confronting the reality of cultural stereotypes. Exploring all the allure, playfulness and daring of dressing up, Carnival to Catwalk takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the global history of fancy dress. Drawing on a treasure-trove of textual and visual resources, the book encompasses Halloween festivities and transvestite clubs, Mardi Gras parades and gatherings at Versailles, revealing how fancy dress has long been used to celebrate as well as to disguise individual identity. Vividly chronicling evidence from the Middle Ages to the modern day, cultural historian Benjamin Wild throws open the historical dressing-up box and demonstrates the enduring appeal of fancy dress, as it becomes an increasingly central part of modern couture and clothing design. Meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated, Carnival to Catwalk is a remarkable resource for scholars, students and costume enthusiasts alike.

1

To Cohere

Fancy dress entertainments that bring people together in celebration or recognition of an individual or institution are long-standing. Within pre-industrial societies, the edifying and galvanizing roles of costumed events is recognized. Their place within modern and contemporary societies is viewed critically, even sceptically. The case for meaningful fancy dress costume appears to have weakened in correlation to its global prevalence and connection with popular culture. It would seem that fancy dress parties, parades and pranks have become too common to warrant sustained academic reflection. Familiarity has bred contempt. Mikhail Bakhtin has been a forceful voice in suggesting that modern costumed events are essentially nihilistic and culturally trivial, reflecting only ‘vulgar bohemian individualism’.¹ Superficially, his censorious assessment is compelling. In 2011, Teen Vogue’s ‘My Culture Is Not A Costume’ campaign highlighted the ‘dehumanizing’ effect of fancy dress that is worn without reflection and consideration of people’s feelings. A powerful video explained how costumes that appear ‘funny and harmless’ cause offence by perpetuating racial stereotypes through cultural appropriation.² Plentiful evidence exists to support Bakhtin’s implicit critique that contemporary costumed and carnivalesque events frustrate serious scholarly enquiry. In 2017, New York’s Annual Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade included canines costumed as Barbie, a barbeque and a Wall Street banker. Some of the dogs’ owners wore corresponding outfits.³ Confronted with these two examples, and many more like them, it is convenient to follow Bakhtin and denigrate acts of dressing up that involve cultural appropriation and costumed animals as ‘culturally trivial’, but however unusual, offensive and ‘socially peripheral’ these performances appear, they are not, to refer to Barbara Babcock, ‘symbolically flat’. Teen Vogue’s campaign highlighted the affective and long-term impact of poorly chosen costumes. The Tompkins Square Parade, which included a ‘Woof of Wall Street’ costume, a parody inspired by the 2014-movie The Wolf of Wall Street, shows how fancy dress is rarely as trivial as Bakhtin suggests, even when it is worn chiefly for fun. In fact, the opposite is very likely to be the case. Fancy dress that is worn for merriment and the amusement of others has the potential to be more revealing about a community’s ideas and ideals. Kiera Vaclavik has shown how dressing up for World Book Day, an event that appears thoroughly innocuous, has become important for the reinforcement of community norms.⁴ As Victor Turner opines, ‘nothing underlines regularity so well as absurdity or paradox’.⁵

Surviving fancy dress costumes can also make clamorous, if not always eloquent, cases for their cultural importance. By way of one example, the John Bright Collection, London, includes a white cotton knee-length dress with a low-waisted and pleated shirt (Figure 11). The silhouette is similar to an evening gown with a high rounded neckline of the 1920s, which is probably when the dress was made. The costume is entirely handmade and decorated with a random pattern of duplicated symbols conventionally associated with good fortune: a cat with an arched back, a horse shoe, a frog, a four-leaf clover and a swastika. The symbols have been applied with black paint, probably by stencil because the outlines of some are blurred. Details have been added with a fine black pen. The rear of the dress is decorated with the in-filled silhouette of a large sitting black cat, its tail fashioned from a length of black tassel. This conceptual costume is a hesitant adaptation of a popular ‘Good Luck’ outfit from the early twentieth century (Figure 10). A more sophisticated interpretation appears in a catalogue from London fancy dress supplier Weldon’s, which features a repeat design of swastikas hanging from the skirt’s hem.⁶ At some point, the swastikas caused the dress to be altered. The rise of National Socialism in Germany during the 1930s limited the meaning of this polyvalent symbol, which became socially repugnant. Consequently, two roughly cut white cotton panels were stitched across the problematic devices that appear on the front of the dress, at the upper right side, and the rear, along the hem. The cotton is thin and the panels are translucent. Across the centre of the front panel, ‘Good Luck’ has been written in thin black marker. Four rough shapes, ostensibly two horseshoes and two four-leaf clovers, have been drawn near to the corners. The rudimentary sewing of the dress, the faltering application of the symbols and its small size, suggest it was the work of a girl or young woman who lacked experience in clothes making.⁷ This may explain why the costume was retained and revised. This decision demonstrates how an unexceptional costume, most likely worn for a parochial entertainment, acquired new meanings as the circumstances in which it was worn changed. Furthermore, the woman was not unreflective whilst wearing it. The impulse to censor was presumably governed by her desire to make another wearing of the costume socially acceptable and possible. The need to amend the dress was perhaps all the greater because the political charging of one of its motifs would have been untenable within the convivial environment where it was probably worn. The alterations are also suggestive of the owner’s pride in their handiwork. In sum, the outfit demonstrates that fancy dress costume can be an expressive communicator of people’s ideas and behaviour even when it conformed to popular trends and existed for delight alone.

FIGURE 11 Photograph of ‘Good Fortune’ costume, c.1920s. Photographed by Jon Stokes with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Courtesy of Cosprop Limited.

The three examples in this chapter – the Devonshire Ball, the Co-operative Wholesale Society and West African fancy dress – pursue this argument and consider the meaningfulness of costumed entertainments whose avowed purpose was pleasure and playfulness. The episodes are culturally diverse but they are comparable in as much as they focus on events where fancy dress costume was conceived to demonstrate the cohesion of social networks. The chronological distance between the episodes is smaller. I intentionally begin my study in the modern period because this is when analytic comments about the unresponsiveness of festive participants emerge. I think it is important to challenge this view in the book’s first chapter because subsequent arguments are predicated on the responsiveness of costumed participants and the affectiveness of what they wear. In each scenario, the temporary effacement of social hierarchies through costume, and the simultaneous desire to convey belonging, created unique opportunities for people to construct personal narratives about their place and role among their peers.

Demonstrating social order - The Devonshire House Ball London, UK, 2 July 1897

On the evening of 2 July 1897 Devonshire House, in London’s Piccadilly, was the setting for one of the most opulent costumed entertainments of the nineteenth century. Hosted by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, the event brought together approximately 700 guests, chiefly members of England’s social and political elite, to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. The queen did not attend because of illness, although she did enjoy fancy dress festivities, according to the evidence of her loquacious journals, and had hosted three costume balls at Buckingham Palace in 1842, 1845 and 1851. The monarch was represented by the family of her eldest son, the Prince of Wales. The ball is unique among nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fancy dress entertainments because of the amount of associated evidence that survives, including letters, memoirs, newspaper reports and twelve costumes, two from the Parisian house of Charles Worth.⁸ The material considered here shows the intentions and actions of participants were more complicated than may be supposed for a fancy dress event whose ostensible purpose was to bring people together in merriment around a unifying theme. If the ball did achieve cohesion, it was through the demonstration of gendered and dynastic hierarchies and, paradoxically, by facilitating rivalry between the participants, who used character, conceptual and synecdochic costumes to display their status. Some spectators, viewing the event from a different social tier, found these performances distasteful. Their response crystallized prevailing social attitudes by emphasizing inequalities of birth and income.

The format of the ball was similar to contemporary festivities of this type. Guests arrived for half past ten in the evening and lined a route on the ground floor of Devonshire House to greet the royal party, who appeared at quarter past eleven, accompanied by the national anthem.⁹ The royals were welcomed by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, who accompanied them to a dais in the ball room. From this position the royal party reviewed the guests as they processed before them, making bows and curtsies. Hosts generally received this honour, but it would have been lèse-majesté to have done otherwise on this occasion.¹⁰ The guests were organized into different costume groups, which was then fashionable. The invitation stipulated that dress should be ‘allegorical or historical’ before 1815. Guests were recommended to arrange themselves into historical and mythical courts.¹¹ The emphasis on historic characters was edifying as participants learned about their nations and ancestors. It also provided opportunities to demonstrate family associations with historical figures, or to claim them if the guests were cunning.¹² The procession that filed past the royal party included the English court of Elizabeth I, the Austrian court of Empress Maria Theresa, the Russian Court of Catherine the Great, ‘Orientals’ led by the Duchess, Egyptians, the French courts of Louis XV and Louis XVI, and a group of allegorical figures.¹³ Fittingly for an occasion that celebrated Britain’s monarchy, the procession commenced with Queen Elizabeth I and concluded with Britannia.¹⁴ Quadrilles and dancing followed a champagne interlude. A three-course supper was served in two sittings after midnight, with the royal party eating first.¹⁵ There was no determined departure time and guests left in early hours of the following morning.¹⁶

The conventional structure of the event, punctuated by jubilant displays of obeisance to Britain’s monarchy, established an overarching unity. The impression of choreographed festivity is furthered by newspaper reports, which were a major source for disseminating information about the ball to contemporary audiences. Accounts of the event, which included costume descriptions, circulated around the world for at least nine weeks, until September.¹⁷ To obtain information about the costumes some journalists made notes as guests alighted from their carriages; others relied on attendees to send descriptions of what they had worn after the event.¹⁸ Whatever the process of compilation, reporters generally did not seek detail for accuracy or insight. First, lack of expert knowledge meant they were often unable to verify historical verisimilitude. Second, contemporaries expected guests to conform to the prevailing taste for historic dress rather than to innovate. Journalists wanted detail to astound their readers with the extraordinary. The garrulous, occasionally hyperbolic, always superficial descriptions of what was worn reveals that commentators recognized a need to conjure through words a world their readers could only temporarily inhabitant. This means the ball – like other occasions of its type – tended to be portrayed as a sophisticated gesamtkunstwerk, where costumed revellers blend seamlessly, certainly beautifully, into an overarching aesthetic spectacle. This was especially the case with foreign correspondents, who generally synthesized several reports to produce their own.

An example of the content and tone of contemporary newspaper accounts is provided by The Boston Evening Transcript, which describes the costume of Princess Daisy of Pless, who was one of three Queens of Sheba:

No one could describe at all adequately the barbaric splendour of it, with turquoise, emerald, amethyst, and ruby, caught in a web of finest gold and spread thickly upon the dress and train of diaphanous gauze in purple and gold, its shifting light seeming to mingle with that of the jewels. Black attendants bore her train along, and among her girl attendants was her pretty sister, Miss Cornwallis West, in an Ethiopian dress of snowy crepe, gilded with jewels under a flowing robe of gold tissue.¹⁹

The tenor and structure of this commentary facilitates the convenient conclusion that costumed participants were typically unquestioning. This response is perhaps strengthened by the sepia photogravure taken of approximately two hundred guests by Lafayette from their tent pitched within the grounds of Devonshire House.²⁰ The guests in these images look resplendent and aloof as they pose in historical garments to be immortalized by the latest technology. If we consider the exposure time, it may be that their expressions convey tedium. The discordance between fiction and reality was not lost on participants. The expectation to base costumes on historical characters may have been enjoyable, but for members of the social elite it was an opportunity to appear as ancestors or legitimating luminaries to convey messages about their personal and dynastic positions in the present. This point can be explored by analysing some costumes in detail, those which survive and those that were described or photographed by Lafayette.

The women of the royal party represented the sixteenth-century court of Henri IV of France and appear to have devised a visual strategy to portray familial and gendered cohesion. Alexandra Princess of Wales dressed as Marguerite de Valois, wife of Henri IV, in a floor-length white satin gown embellished with sequins, spangles and long chains of pearls. Her costume may have cost £501 8d., or approximately £41,000 in twenty-first-century sums.²¹ Alexandra’s three daughters, Louise, Victoria and Maud, and daughter-in-law Mary, appeared as Marguerite’s ladies-in-waiting. The choice of characters neatly suited the women’s different ages and status, but they reinforced family identity and their individual roles within it. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction - From Carnival …
• Chapter 1 To Cohere
• Chapter 2 To Challenge
• Chapter 3 To Clarify
• Chapter 4 To Champion
• Epilogue - … To Catwalk
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint