Tutu Dresses

Ballet began many centuries ago and developed from an amalgam of quality dancing methods throughout Europe. Its principal roots lay in “Court Dancing”, an elite exclusive form of dance presented in the castles of the kings for the entertainment of the nobility

I bet you didn’t know that knickers as we know them today were not invented until late 1800’s. With short dresses and powerful legwork, the mob in the pits below the stage tended to see more, whilst the genteel folk upstairs did not. In order to disguise the under-dress area, the costume makers designed a multi-layered drooping dress with frills that were joined across the bottom. The pit mob called this area of anatomy the “tutu”, and over time the special dress took on the name for the area it was meant to cover. That is the origin of the tutu!

Nowadays you will occasionally see the remnants of the true tutu dress, in the form of frills or ruffles below hip level of the leotard that dancers wear, or perhaps a short soft bell-shaped drooping multi-layered dress. Most tutu’s now have degenerated or evolved (depending on your historical perspective) into a disc of several frilly layers that sticks out horizontally from the dancer’s hips, and has nothing to do with the original reason for which it was designed.

In today’s fashion terms the tutu has been used many times as a more extravagant expression to emphasise the torso and legs. Patrice Catanzaro has taken this style of dress and combined it into a fetish fashion accessory, making the skirt from Laque and Tulle. This is a very feminine and erotic use of the design which is great on the eye, and allows wonderful access if desired.