Gowns, balls and underlying racism

May 17, 2021 11:38 AM

USC Annenberg journalism student Camila Thur de Koos presents Gowns, balls and underlying racism, a story about how "historical costumers of color navigate a hobby centered on a history that excludes them."
posted by jedicus (9 comments total)

Thank you for this! What a really nuanced look at a lot of the different parts of reenactment/costuming culture explaining both why people are drawn to it along with some of the more problematic aspects that can be... tough to ferret out beforehand. I have a friend who is a musician and played with a Civil War group in traditional outfits (he's in MA so this was a Union-themed group) and still he found that the values that the other people he interacted with were sufficiently far enough from his social-justice oriented values that he eventually felt unwelcome there. I love learning about some of the designers of color who were behind-the-scenes behind a lot of traditional looks but who you didn't hear about until people started setting the stories straight --Ann Lowe is the one I am thinking of, but I am sure there are others.
posted by jessamyn at 12:24 PM on May 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

Oooh, this covers a lot of ground, between the worlds of costuming, reenactment, and living history.

Some related things -- artist Dread Scott organized a massive reenactment of a US slave revolt, with definite emphasis on costuming.

Dickens Faire, mentioned in the article, is going through a reckoning around racism (and some other -isms) right now.
posted by feckless at 12:47 PM on May 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

topic also approached in a more lighthearted and less scholarly way in the youtube series Black Girl in a Big Dress (mentioned in the thread of this previously).
posted by bl1nk at 1:17 PM on May 17, 2021 [8 favorites]

This was interesting, thanks for posting it.
posted by medusa at 9:05 PM on May 17, 2021

I really liked the "Bridgerton" in Real Life section with the photos and paintings of people of color and the brief audio descriptions that cropped up about midway through the piece!
posted by sigmagalator at 10:13 PM on May 17, 2021

Previously on mefi (kind of), and the comments thread that drew a distinction between historical recreationism and costume recreaters. I found this fascinating then and find it fascinating now, since some of it is so specific to the United States—and its war—and some of it is such a universal experience of interacting with society's pasts. And because there's so little distance between the world of make-believe, of adults dressing as Austen characters, and the world of politics, where adults adopt real political symbols and uniforms that mean something: the difference between putting on a Red coat, a shako, and shouldering a musket, and putting on an armband and marching in a torchlight parade.

I've always liked the notion that a person can be a 'living historian' in an era's costume, who provides context and myth-busting, but the work that goes on in costume isn't quite history, the study of past and present, rather heritage, an active process of society having custody of specific elements of its past, and making choices about what it identifies with, and what it chooses to reject. It's notable how drawn every society is to specific episodes in its history which provide context to current, contemporary concerns, which is to say, which wars recreationists re-fight.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:33 PM on May 17, 2021 [5 favorites]

i've been low-key noting/observing this slice of nerdery ever since youtube algorithms kept recommending me Bernadette Banner et al (i was looking for handsewing refresher vids), and the social patterns observed in the TFA. Led to me being recommended to their virtual costuming convention last year, and while some of the panels meant to tackle this issue head-on was generally interesting (and basic, but if the white hobbyists are as sensitive and fragile per TFA then it does explain a lot), when it's part of the subtext the conditioned privilege of the presenters was clear (in that they don't recognise their own racist understanding)-- i guess i'm still not over this presentation of chintz which tried as much as possible to remove the culpability of the dutch in the appropriation of the textile.

more intellectual and psychological work in the reckoning is needed, and fwiw as an example, I'm going to recommend Cathy Hay's ongoing series of recreating the Peacock Dress (another algorithm find) for her own frank assessment of her privilege both general (what the dress stood for) and personal (her family heritage counts weavers who were set up with the English capture of the Indian cotton industry), and active attempts to put a face to the various Indian craftspeople who contributed to the original peacock dress. So far the numbered videos are the ones tracking the historical side of it all, while the monthly progress videos are strictly on the recreation process.
posted by cendawanita at 4:25 AM on May 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'm going to recommend Cathy Hay's ongoing series of recreating the Peacock Dress

I have only followed that series tangentially, but the last I read:

Although Hay would like to ensure that the craftspeople she’s working with are treated and paid well, she’s wary of trying to be the “white savior” of the operation, telling her collaborators how to do their jobs, she says.

(that article has a bit about costumer of color Shasta Schatz but is mostly about Banner and Hay). From my perspective, not wanting to be the "white savior" is a hell of an excuse for not insisting on fair wages, especially given the fraught history of the original garment ("a great, big, shiny symbol of white supremacy", as Hay herself describes it).
posted by jedicus at 7:49 AM on May 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

In today's Washington Post:

Colonial Williamsburg Gets Real
Some of the most progressive and insightful theater in America is happening at one of the nation's premier sites for experiencing US history. Really.

[...] Colonial Williamsburg — a place where theater lives, too — has been grappling with more determination than ever with the harsher realities of its past. And particularly with the lives of its Black inhabitants, most of whom were enslaved and formed the majority of its population in the 1700s.

It is through performance of various kinds that this bastion of history is seeking to raise awareness of Williamsburg’s legacy, one far more diverse than visitors heard about in the early days of the historic restoration, opened in 1937. The instruction has gone out lately to all of Colonial Williamsburg’s dozens of actor-interpreters that the city’s slaveholding past is to figure in every tour and talk.

An encouraging sign, I think-- though the article also quotes Black actor-interpreters weary of constantly having to enact historical trauma:

In an interview, Lewis spoke to a spiritual unease that afflicts Black actor-interpreters, always consigned to playing some manifestation of oppression.

“It is physical,” she said. “I can feel the heaviness of what happened. As Black artists in 2021, we reserve a space to create art that is not about our trauma, that is not a perpetuation of the images of white supremacy. But at Colonial Williamsburg, that is the story to tell.”

posted by Pallas Athena at 3:59 PM on May 25, 2021 [1 favorite]