Carnival Collection (Video)
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- [Music]
- Hi, I’m Leon Miller, a curator with Tulane University Special Collections, a division
- of Tulane University Libraries, and I’d like to share with you this carnival costume
- design from the 1892 Proteus parade.
- It’s not only a lovely little work of art but also a working design, because you can
- see holes where the costumier in Paris tacked it to a wall so the shop could refer to it
- while creating the costume.
- Most costume designs from this period are full of life and color, but this design is
- monochromatic, he’s just green with green arms and legs, green face paint, and even
- green hair, and he looks kinda worried.
- What is this little green guy, and what’s he upset about?
- It turns out he’s one of five green peas in a pea pod, being attacked by giant caterpillars.
- There’s our little guy right in front, recoiling from a caterpillar that is lunging straight
- at him.
- Here are the four other costume designs from that 1892 Proteus float.
- People talk about things being “as alike as peas in a peapod,” but note how each
- pea is completely different.
- Each costume was custom-designed for the wearer and has its own body type, color scheme, different
- materials, different wings, different faces and facial expressions; so the designer was
- making each costume a unique character.
- This parade had 98 riders, so the designer created not only 18 floats and 98 costumes,
- but 98 individual, unique characters for each rider to perform.
- That’s a level of creativity we can hardly imagine today.
- Special Collections preserves more than 5,600 original Carnival float and costume designs
- from before WWII, comprising the largest collection in the world of designs from the Golden Age
- of Carnival, and all 5,600 of them are freely available to everyone online via the Tulane
- University Digital Library, at digital library dot tulane dot edu.
- [Music]