Historical Fancy Dress

A Masquerade Dance Card, 1900

Here's an interesting bit of fancy dress ephemera: an actual dance card from a masquerade ball given in Wisconsin on February 10, 1900.  Scans of the cover and inside are at left; click to enlarge.

This is a lady's card, with men's names filled in for the first half of the ball.  The ball -- their Third Annual Masquerade -- was sposnored by the Y.M.P.S. in a town whose name is unreadable due to damage to the card but which I would guess to be Westboro.  The red cord attached at the top was to hold a pencil for filling in names.

The dance mix on the card is a typical late Victorian mix, primarily couple dances (waltz, polka, schottische, two-step) and quadrilles.  Interestingly, the Grand March, typically the first dance (perhaps after a series of tableaux vivants), is placed ninth instead.  I place the Grand March in the middle of the ball at my own Fancy Dress Ball because I do it as a costume-announcing parade, so I want to wait until everyone is there, but don't want to delay the start of the ball.  Perhaps this group did it for similar reasons.

The opening dance is a quadrille, which might have been or followed a special Fancy Quadrille, in which a group of dancers with costumes matching a particular theme would perform.

I discussed this card from a dance perspective a while back at my companion dance history blog, Capering & KIckery.

 

 

School Boy

(Back to school time with an Edwardian schoolboy costume, which was probably an easy fancy dress choice for a young boy who could simply use his own school clothes or uniform.  Yes, despite the long hair, that's a boy.)

Straw hat; blue and white or red and white striped blouse; white or blue flannel trousers with stockings to match; laced shoes.

Source:
Masquerades, Tableaux and Drills.  New York: The Butterick Publishing Company, 1906.

Suez Canal

(A marvel of Victorian engineering, the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and affected both trade patterns and politics, with the resultant ease of access for Europeans to parts of Africa enabling a new wave of colonization efforts during the 1880s.  Apparently its impact was such that even a decade after its opening it inspired a fancy dress costume design!)

The description is identical across three editions of the same manual:

Long flowing robe of cloth-of-gold, with waves of blue satin bordered with pearls, underskirt of red satin embroidered in Egyptian designs.  A gold key at the girdle; Egyptian head-dress of pearls, turquoise, and diamonds; girdle of roses and lilies.

Sources:
Holt, Ardern.  Fancy Dresses Described, 2nd Edition, Illustrated.  London: Debenham & Freebody, 1880.
Holt, Ardern.  Fancy Dresses Described, 5th Edition.  London: Debenham & Freebody, 1887.
Holt, Ardern.  Fancy Dresses Described, Sixth Edition.  London: Debenham & Freebody, 1896.

The 1896 edition of Holt may be found online at the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections.