Mardi Gras, Best Dressed

Mardi Gras, Best Dressed

by Déja Jones

Only the experienced Mardi Gras participant may be familiar with the lavish, yet mysterious dualities of the carnival season. As a local, even I enlisted assistance from Mardi Gras Costume Museum Owner, Carl Mack, to help give us a deeper understanding. Traditions as old as two hundred years connect locals to their ancestors and to each other. Preservation of these traditions is vital to the state’s natives and economy.

Post-Emancipation, Mardi Gras Indians or “Masking Indians” began creating Native American style “suits” to pay homage to tribes who sheltered and taught Black people methods of healing and cultivating the land. Over time, suits began to tower seven feet tall including a feathered suit, headdress, and murallike motif beaded by the Chief himself. Chiefs go feather-to-feather to decide “who has the prettiest suit?” but on past, Mardi Gras mornings tribes sought to settle old scores. To rid bad spirits and contingencies, Creole women of voodoo would dress in white with tall headdresses, while skeleton suited men, known as the Skull and Bones Gang, prayed and chanted through Crescent city's historically Black neighborhoods.

PHOTO: ALEXIS JESTER

PHOTO: ALEXIS JESTER

Other traditions date back to Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Mack explained, the 1740s governor, Marquis de Vaudreuil constructed “social balls,” which is the same structure we use for Mardi Gras Balls today. Debutantes (female) are presented, in wedding-ready white gowns, to waltz with fellow male

debutants. The Royal Couple, would glide across the floor in what Mack calls, “wearable pieces of machinery”: an elaborate neckband coined a "mantis collar,” a long train depicting the year's theme, a harness to support all their bells and whistles, and glitter everywhere. The King acted as the facilitator, the Queen smiled, waved, and wore all white up until the 20th century. She symbolized the idealistic Southern bell as an example for all young Southern girls. The glamorous spectacle exalted the traditional values of a Southern aristocratic social ladder. Many know Mardi Gras (French for “Fat Tuesday”) as the last day of celebration before the spiritual commitments of Lent, which is a sacred time of fasting and repentance leading up to Easter. To some, it is only means forty days of fried fish on Fridays at local schools and churches.

PHOTO: ALEXIS JESTER

PHOTO: ALEXIS JESTER

No matter what your reason, or what you wear, Mardi Gras is a time where communities of Louisiana come together to the look and feel like the most brilliant version of themselves.