Today is "Mardi Gras" (Fat Tuesday) and Carnival is a great excuse for fashion since it offers the opportunity to get dressed in fancy costumes. Unfortunately, some events and parades all over the world (Venice included) were cancelled after the Coronavirus alerts.
Yet nobody stops you from dreaming a bit about Carnival costumes and you can do so by picking your disguise from classics such as Fancy Dresses Described; or, What to Wear at Fancy Balls by Ardern Holt (1887), a book that, as you may remember from a previous post, inspired Undercover's A/W 17 collection.
Leaf through the 300-page volume to discover (in alphabetical order) suggestions for costume ideas for masquerade balls.
Skip the politically and culturally incorrect costumes, enjoy reading about the accessories for the various queens, princesses, dames and witches, but check out some of the most original costumes such as the ones for "Air" and "Hours".
And if you don't have time to create a proper costume, well, imagine it with an illustration or a drawing, maybe getting inspired by the floats and costume designs created in the 19th century (the "Golden Age" of Carnival design, from the 1870s through the 1940s) by New Orleans artists. The latter often designed for various Krewes (groups organising a Carnival event) elaborate costumes and sketches for wood and papier-mâché floats that were inspired by specific themes.
Among the artists Krewes collaborated with there were a few women, such as Jennie Wilde and Carlotta Bonnecaze. Their work is part of the online Carnival Collection, the Louisiana Research Collection at Tulane University.
This archive preserves the largest collection of New Orleans Carnival paper items and includes more than 5.500 artworks from Carnival’s "Golden Age" and three hundred designs from 1950 to 1970. The great majority of the designs are from the Carnival krewes of Comus and Proteus, with Rex and Momus also represented.
The archive includes several watercolours of exotic scenes by Wilde like the one for the float design for the Krewe of Comus' parade (1907) inspired by Alfred Tennyson and dedicated to his poem, "The Voyage of Maeldune". Wilde mainly worked with the Krewes of Comus and Momus and her illustrations were characterised by a delicate yet grand Art Nouveau style.
There's more to discover among Bonnecaze's images, from the Ahtola-water castle, a float design for the Krewe of Proteus' 1893 parade (Theme: Kalevala) to the costumes for the conch shells, fruit and inhabitants of Saturn for the same Krewe's 1886 parade that had a fantastic theme, "Visions of Other Worlds", or the flower girls and damsels from Proteus' 1887 parade (Theme: Anderson's Fairy Tales).
Underwater and fantasy scenes often showed the main characters wearing extravagant attires and being surrounded by marine creatures or fantastic beasts in grand settings.
When the sketches of the floats and costumes were turned into reality, they had to be adapted and simplified, but the detailed designs are a testament to the skills of the creative minds specialised in the production of Carnival art.
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